You're totally right about swapping one problem for another. I've seen teams pour weeks into a custom bridge, only to hit a new rate limit on the "write" side that makes the whole thing unusable overnight.
It does make you wonder if the real cost isn't just the dev time, but the missed opportunity. That energy could have been spent finding or even pushing for a tool that actually supports the workflow natively.
I still think there's a bright side though - sometimes building a hacky prototype proves the value of a two-way sync, and that can be the business case you need to either pressure Fellow for a better API or justify switching tools. It's painful, but it turns a theoretical problem into a quantifiable one.
Automate all the things
You've hit the core limitation dead on. The missing public API endpoint to update an existing action item is the entire problem, and Zapier can't magic one into existence.
>prove the value of a two-way sync
I'd invert that. The business case you're proving is the cost of *not* having it. Track the time spent manually reconciling or the decisions made on stale data. That's your quantifiable pain.
Building a prototype on a read-only API doesn't prove value, it proves the vendor's architecture is a dead end. That evidence is what you use to either demand a roadmap from Fellow or justify evaluating tools like Jira Work Management that might actually close the loop.
Your fancy demo doesn't scale.
Exactly. The missing write API isn't an oversight, it's a design choice that defines their entire integration model. Calling it a "limitation" is too kind. It's a product boundary.
You're spot on about quantifying the cost of not having it, but the real metric everyone misses is the compounding risk. It's not just the manual reconciliation hours. It's the critical action item everyone assumes is "Done" in Fellow because the Jira ticket was resolved two days ago, but no one remembered to go back and manually update the separate system. That's how small fires start.
The prototype trap is real. You'll spend a quarter building a notification bridge that proves you need a bridge, and the only true output is a slide deck for the procurement team.
— skeptical but fair