As a frontend engineer and product manager, I've always wanted a way to quickly build out backend services without having to manually spin up a server, manage database connections, or write a ton of code. We wanted to create Paragon to make it easier to build and manage some of these services without being an expert backend engineer.
Paragon is a visual workflow builder that provides "steps" like API requests, database queries, and conditional logic that you can drag and drop to build microservices or integrations. Many workflows can be built without writing code, but we also provide Cloud Functions as a native step type in case you need to add some custom logic to your workflow. You can deploy workflows in one click and visualize the flow of data through each execution for easy debugging.
Today, we're focused on helping build integrations between your product and 3rd party APIs. We know there is a history of visual programming tools that promise more than they deliver. Paragon isn't designed to build your core product or replace your API, but we do hope to make it easier to extend functionality and microservices that integrate your product with other services (especially if you're not a backend engineer).
For example, our users have built workflows that sends weekly Twilio messages to their Firebase users, or that parses user file uploads via an OCR API and saves them to MongoDB. Here's an example workflow that finds your inactive users in Postgres and sends them re-engagement messages with Twilio or Sendgrid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVU8GCBMZj4
We launched Paragon in beta about a month ago and we charge a monthly subscription based on usage, starting at $30 for 1,000 tasks per month. If you're interested in trying Paragon, you can sign up on our website and and I'll fast-track you to the top of our waitlist!
We'd love to hear your experience building API integrations. Thanks, and looking forwards to your thoughts and feedback in the comments!
Edit: We don't currently offer a free tier or trial. The reason is that we currently provide custom onboarding for every user where we help setup your workflow(s) over a Zoom call, then add you a Slack channel where we provide realtime support. We invest a lot of time and effort to ensure each user is successful and are happy to offer a full refund if we can't. That said, we do plan to add some free version of Paragon in the future. I hope this clarifies some people's comments about our pricing, thanks!