The questions people ask before they ask us

There is no single number, but there are four questions that decide it: who pays, what happens after the payment, how many people share the same calendar, and whether something physical has to happen – a door opening, a heater switching on. A system that only accepts a time slot is a few weeks of work. One that takes payment, tracks memberships and lets a guest into a warm room is a different product, and that difference is what the price is about.

For most Norwegian online services the answer is both, and the real question is a different one: which system owns the truth about what the customer bought. Vipps MobilePay is how Norwegians actually want to pay and belongs at the checkout. Stripe is the toolkit for subscriptions, invoicing and payment methods beyond the Nordics, Klarna included. Decide who holds the truth before you pick a provider, and the rest becomes an integration instead of a rewrite.

Three layers, not one: the equipment that does the work, the connection that goes away sometimes, and the cloud that decides what should happen. The integration itself – getting a value out and a command in – is usually the smallest part. The work is deciding which logic has to run without a network, what the system does when the equipment does not answer, and how somebody sees it has stopped before the customer calls.

What works today is narrow jobs with an answer somebody can check: a draft a human approves, information pulled out of a mess and into a form, an enquiry routed to the right place, a question answered from your own documents. What does not work yet is the agent that “runs the business” unsupervised. And the most common failure is not the model being wrong – it is the system around it throwing away an answer that was right.