Show HN: Automatisch – Open source workflow automation, an alternative to Zapier

Hey, HN community,

We're so excited to share Automatisch with HN finally. Automatisch is an open-source workflow automation tool, an alternative to Zapier. Together with my co-founder (@barinali), we have been working on it for about 15 months and have started getting early adopters.

Automatisch is a workflow automation tool that lets you connect different web services like Slack, Github, Twitter, and more to automate your business processes. For example, you can build automation that gets all new tweets, including the "open source" phrase, and post them to the Slack channel you specified. You can adjust the services and steps depending on what you actually need to automate in your business.

Even though some existing cloud solutions do the job well enough, we still wanted to build an open-source and self-hosted alternative to those. Because it allows you to store your data on your own servers, which is essential for businesses that handle sensitive user information and cannot risk sharing it with external cloud services. This is especially relevant for industries such as healthcare and finance, as well as for European companies that must comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

You can see the available integrations here (https://automatisch.io/docs/guide/available-apps). We currently have limited integrations but are constantly working on adding more and enhancing the existing ones. You can also request a new integration by using GitHub discussions: (https://github.com/automatisch/automatisch/discussions/categ...).

You can use the following links to check it out:

Website: https://automatisch.io Docs: https://automatisch.io/docs GitHub: https://github.com/automatisch/automatisch

Please give it a try and let us know if you have any feedback, and if you like what we are doing with Automatisch, please give us a star on GitHub.

Cheers!

Show HN: Automatisch – Open source workflow automation, an alternative to Zapier
automatisch.io

Neat! Do you plan to actively sell enterprise licenses to mentioned industries, like healthcare and finance? Is that how you'll make money?

Random idea: Maybe sell integration building as well? Instead of just being able to request a integration. For example, if I would want to run this as a marketer and self host (for whatever reason), I would need integrations such as Facebook Lead Ads, TikTok Lead Ads, Gmail, etcetera. But instead of requesting them being built, I can imagine some people would rather pay $1000 to have them built _guaranteed_ within let's say 1 month. Because if there's some integration missing that is essential for my business, requesting and waiting 12 months until it's _maybe_ build is probably not an option. At least mentioning this service on the landing page and docs will cost 5 minutes of your time and maybe get some business. :)

Iyi sanslar!

Yes, we plan to sell enterprise licenses, but we also have other services, like prioritizing the integrations, as you suggested. The integrations prioritized will be available to all other users, but the companies don't have to wait until it's becoming most-requested integrations in the community.

Tesekkurler!

What do you believe your biggest challenges to adoption are? Also, Zapier’s value is in the long tail of integrations and their staff who keep those integrations working for their non technical user base when there are breaking changes (expected and otherwise). How will you solve for that? (Recently I thought ChatGPT might be a fun possible solution when Sentry gets the exception from an integration runner, and it could propose a code fix for the on call SRE or platform engineer, something to consider)

Best of luck, big market with a lot of dollars to go around.

Imho we need to separate the customer base here to think about the adoption. If anyone (people/company) would like to have automation but is also okay with using cloud solutions, it would be too difficult to convince them to use Automatisch rather than Zapier, Integromat, or any other. But if they don't have the option to use cloud solutions with the compliance policy of their company or just because of the sensitive user data, they need to check open source solutions. So those customers will be our main target. While we're doing that, we don't limit the open source version in terms of integrations but create another license to separate the feature set that will be only required by corporate companies.

We wrote one of the actions in our integrations by using ChatGPT. So action was easy to build, but still, we would like to utilize AI for those tasks.

Thanks for the comment!