Connector Debt Ceiling

Connector Debt Ceiling treats every data source an agency wires into a client pipeline as a recurring liability, not a one-time win. Each connector carries schema drift, auth rotation, rate-limit changes, and vendor API deprecations that surface months after the kickoff invoice clears. The ceiling is the point where connector upkeep consumes more retainer hours than the analytics work the pipeline was built to enable. Peliqan ships 300+ connectors and Adverity advertises 600+ marketing sources, which sounds like coverage until you price the monitoring load across a 12-month retainer. Agencies that map connector count against maintenance hours per source before signing scope protect margin; those that quote on ingestion volume alone absorb the drift cost silently. The framework forces a deliberate cap: consolidate sources, retire unused feeds quarterly, and price connector sprawl into the statement of work rather than discovering it in month seven.