Yes, I hear you. I worked at a start-up doing insurance quotations on the web... horrible mess of backend stuff to connect to the insurers. The best ones had a responsive XML based interface over HTTPS, others just told us their algorithm for insurance quotes (which we then had to maintain), others gave us a buggy Visual Basic application that was never meant to be the backend for anything. Nightmare to link it all together and make it look like the consumer was getting real time quotes from different vendors.