(System Report: Munich, October 2025)
Munich was the right setting for a company like Make.com. The city itself runs on quiet precision—leafy, orderly, unhurried. The conference mirrored that temperament: compact, energetic, still forming its adult shape.
The City as Baseline
Arriving a day early gave space to notice how composed Munich is. Wide bike lanes, clean streets, and a culture of quiet discipline. Food was excellent—Middle Eastern, Bavarian, everything in between—and people were unpretentious. The fall air was crisp. Locals dressed practically; no one wore shorts. It’s a city that rewards calm observation rather than spectacle. That composure became a useful baseline once the noise of the conference began.
Make.com at a Turning Point
Make is a young platform operating in the gap between startup urgency and enterprise structure. It’s past the experimental stage but not yet institutional—fast, capable, and still defining its long-term shape. The leadership knows the competitive landscape, and CEO Fabian Veit’s tone—direct, approachable, rough-edged in a productive way—sets the cultural rhythm. It’s not slick; it’s functional. That lack of polish actually builds trust.
The event was well organized but straining at its seams. Rooms were full, schedules tight. The keynote space held about 400, yet more than 700 attended. A larger venue seems inevitable, but the compactness preserved a kind of honesty—conversations over coffee instead of brand theater.
Maturity Gap in the Ecosystem
The most striking pattern was the imbalance between excitement and readiness. Builders everywhere—hundreds of them—but only a handful with enterprise depth. The ratio felt closer to 5-95 than 80-20. Most of the ecosystem still lives in the build-and-ship phase, not the sustain-and-scale phase.
Corporate buyers sense this. They’re hungry for genuine professional partners—people who’ve done complex implementations before, not just creative builders. Enterprises want predictability, not experimentation. The market currently underserves that demand.
Governance: Mentioned, Not Practiced
Governance came up often and is taken seriously, but the structure is still uneven. Make has laid a strong foundation—role-based controls, permissions, and environment management—but higher-order governance remains fragmented. Start-ups and partners are beginning to fill those gaps with external tooling and frameworks. One emerging pattern is the idea that once AI is fully integrated into Make, governance could become more ad-hoc: instead of navigating dashboards, teams could query the platform directly for oversight and compliance signals. The foundations exist; what’s missing is a unified layer that ties them into a living operational model.
The AI Underlay
AI was everywhere, but framed almost exclusively as productivity and creativity, not cognition. The new normal is agentic AI—models that assist in designing and wiring systems into Make. For most attendees, this meant faster ideation and support, not automation of full builds.
AI’s growing presence is shifting the perception of code itself. Custom development now feels like craftsmanship rather than the business default. “The new backend is Make,” one speaker said, and it didn’t sound like exaggeration.
The convenience, however, masks a structural risk: architectural literacy is thinning. In one exchange, a developer asked how to integrate Make with an on-prem database. When AWS tunneling was suggested via API Gateway, PrivateLink, or VPN, they replied, “We just use ngrok.” The simplicity was appealing, but it revealed how easily governance and network design are being bypassed in the pursuit of speed.
The Human Layer
Younger builders dominate the ecosystem. Many learn from TikTok or short-form tutorials, and some are self-regulating to protect attention span. Older professionals carry context—the before and after of SaaS waves—and can sense the deeper transition underway.
Conversations were open, generous, slightly chaotic. There’s a sense of shared discovery, but not yet shared discipline. Partnerships are being formed quickly, often between companies that still lack defined operating maturity.
Geography and Growth
Roughly 80% of attendees were European. The rest were scattered—some North American partners, some from emerging markets. North America is clearly next on Make’s expansion agenda. The opportunity is large because the region remains under-served. Enterprise buyers there still default to custom development and haven’t yet embraced Make’s visual layer as a governance-safe option.
Takeaway
Make.com is entering adolescence. Its community has the enthusiasm of a movement but not yet the muscle of an industry. The talent density is high, but uneven. Governance is still rhetoric, not reflex. AI is amplifying both progress and fragility.
The next phase will hinge on whether professional partners emerge who can bridge that gap—turning no-code excitement into enterprise reliability without losing the speed that makes it powerful.
Until then, Make’s story, like Munich in autumn, sits in transition: ordered, optimistic, and not yet finished.