My friend and I used to do a ton of Hubot scripting but wanted to use a language other than Coffeescript to do it. So, we built a bot that used C#... then we realized there was a lot of other stuff that we had to do to run a bot, so we built a platform to run it (and added support for Python and JavaScript while we were at it).
We handle all the annoying stuff about running a bot (hosting, persistence, secrets management, job scheduling) and add a bunch of other cool stuff on top (Triggers, which make it so that Abbot can respond to events from outside chat or on a schedule, a package manager so people can easily share skills, the ability to create some kinds of skills from inside chat, etc).
The timing of this Ask HN is perfect -- we've been running a beta for Slack users for the past few weeks and just started beta for Discord yesterday. We handle all the middleware so skills written for Abbot work in both Slack and Discord without any changes.
Everything is free during beta, and we'll always have a free plan for basic bot usage (we will probably tier based on the number of custom skills people have running).
If you do end up trying it out, please let us know you found out about Abbot from this thread -- just say `@abbot feedback I found this from HN!` or `@abbot feedback I came from Hacker News` or something similar. We're going to do something fun for our beta testers (probably have some fun stickers made). We love feedback, so even if you don't try it out; I'd love to hear why. My email is in my profile!