You may have been there before. Your team’s focus suddenly shifts to a new country or new on-ramp, a new payment method or UI improvement.

You look at the current product and think, “We just need one more feature, one more integration, and we’ll be done.” So you allocate resources from a dev team that has heard this one before, and push through.

But a few months later, the same conversation happens again. Maybe a new market needs a specific payment method. Compliance requirements shift. User expectations evolve. And suddenly, you’re back to square one, convincing yourself that just one more feature will finally complete the puzzle.

It never does. 

You end up in an endless cycle of incremental decisions, each one adding complexity, maintenance, and opportunity cost. 

Meanwhile, you are constantly fighting for resources internally, and as time passes you realise you are constantly falling behind on the latest developments. For your onramp stack, you’re lacking smart routing, low-KYC options, DCA, and whatever else the latest craze is.  

The sunk cost fallacy in product management

Why does this happen?

In the past, decisions have been made to build, rather than outsource. Time, money, and engineering effort has been spent into building something, and now it’s hard to stop. The logic goes:

"We’ve already integrated three, four, or even five on-ramps. We’ve done so much work—why not just add one more instead of rethinking our approach?"

This is the sunk cost fallacy in action.

Each new integration feels like a small step forward, but in reality, it’s a growing web of maintenance, dependencies, and technical debt. Every time you choose to build instead of leveraging an existing solution, you’re committing your team to ongoing upkeep, often at the cost of innovation elsewhere.

Meanwhile, your competitors, who aren't stuck in this cycle, are shipping faster and capturing more market share.

The true cost of “one more feature”

Saying yes to another feature or integration might seem like the logical choice, but it comes at a cost:

💸 Mounting maintenance – More integrations = more code to maintain, more bugs to fix, and more time spent on infrastructure instead of product innovation.

⏳ Opportunity costs – Every hour spent integrating another on-ramp is an hour not spent on features that actually differentiate your product.

🔄 Vicious cycle – The next request is always around the corner. Today it’s an on-ramp for Brazil. Tomorrow, it’s Venmo. Then a better KYC process. The cycle repeats indefinitely.

At some point you have to ask: Are we moving forward, or just running in circles while others pass us by?

Breaking the cycle with smart decision-making

The good news is you don’t have to keep making the same decision.

Instead of constantly adding one more integration, Onramper removes blockers and future-proofs your payments infrastructure.

And let’s clear up a few common misconceptions:

🚫 "But Onramper locks us in!" → No, you can still negotiate your own deals with on-ramps and stay in control of commercial terms.

🚫 "But we’d have to replace our existing stack!" → Nope. Onramper can complement your current setup, so you don’t have to rip anything out.

🚫 "But pricing will be worse!" → Nope. Onramper doesn’t add fees on onramps’ pricing. Your pricing will actually improve due to more competition and fee transparency, while your conversion skyrockets due to smarter routing.

Instead of adding one-off integrations every few months, Onramper gives you a scalable, adaptable solution that evolves with your needs—without the constant firefighting.

Taking the smarter path

Product management is about making trade-offs. But the best PMs don’t just optimize for today—they optimize for velocity, ensuring that every decision makes future decisions easier.

The next time you find yourself saying "just one more feature," take a step back.

Are you really solving the problem with another integration? Or are you adding onto the real problem?

The best PMs are those who are not afraid to learn from the past. Those who break free from it. In this light - It’s great to see more and more leading exchanges and wallets like Exodus, Gate.io and Bitget break the endless cycle with Onramper - so they never have to do 'one more integration'.

Join the movement - stop getting trapped in an endless cycle. Talk to us today.