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Show HN: We built a developer-first open-source Zapier alternative

trigger.dev

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Re: Show HN: We built a developer-first open-source Zapier alternative

#51

Post by phphphphp »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #41
phphphphp wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You work for a billion dollar company, are you speaking from your perspective as a software engineer or... something else? Price sensitivity as an individual is understandable but when you're talking about a team I struggle to understand why there's a meaningful difference between $5 and $50. For a business, if software is valuable enough to use, it's valuable enough to spend $50 on. Plus, $50 is below the threshold…

Maybe, and this might be confusing, folks didn't always work where they do today, and have experiences based on "I don't have money but I work on a project with 5 others that the world seems to use a ton, but no one's paying for". "A team" and "a business" are not the same. Running a business? Pay for team tier. Open source project that just has more than 2 people organized in a team? I'll let you think of that one.…

The situation you’re describing is exceptionally niche and one in which you can simply reach out to the company and ask for accommodation: there’s thousands of open-source projects sponsored by for-profit companies by granting access to paid services for free (your employer is one of them, Fastly sponsor a bunch of projects by giving free CDN).

Asking a company to sell their services to everyone at a huge loss because a minority of open-source projects can’t afford their service is more ridiculous.

Re: Show HN: We built a developer-first open-source Zapier alternative

#52

Post by stevekrouse »

gpuhacker wrote: post #43

I'm very unfamiliar with this family of tools, but if anyone knows a tool like this that can monitor arxiv or Google scholar for new papers matching a particular query, I'm very interested. I checked Zapier recently but I didn't see these among the support apps.

This is definitely something you could build in https://val.town. Someone made a little daily query that checks for new citations on a particular paper:

https://www.val.town/ernest.newCitationNotification

I'm the founder of val.town, so email me if you'd like help setting this up. I'd be more than happy to pair program with you on it. My email is steve @ val.town

Re: Show HN: We built a developer-first open-source Zapier alternative

#53

Post by bluehatbrit »

carrja99 wrote: post #37
aliqot wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and suddenly at least one of us realizes why zapier costs money. the cycle continues.

Comes up all the time. There was another tool like this (huggin?). I think what often gets missed and what gives zapier great power is the developer platform that can let devs build anything! I have a lot of custom integrations with apps that support use cases that afaik only I have. It is incredible effective.

Did you mean Huginn? (https://github.com/huginn/huginn)

Re: Show HN: We built a developer-first open-source Zapier alternative

#55

Post by TheRealPomax »

phphphphp wrote: post #51
TheRealPomax wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, and this might be confusing, folks didn't always work where they do today, and have experiences based on "I don't have money but I work on a project with 5 others that the world seems to use a ton, but no one's paying for". "A team" and "a business" are not the same. Running a business? Pay for team tier. Open source project that just has more than 2 people organized in a team? I'll let you think of that one.…

The situation you’re describing is exceptionally niche and one in which you can simply reach out to the company and ask for accommodation: there’s thousands of open-source projects sponsored by for-profit companies by granting access to paid services for free (your employer is one of them, Fastly sponsor a bunch of projects by giving free CDN). Asking a company to sell their services to everyone at a huge loss becaus…

It's literally the situation I was in before so: why are you trying so hard to gaslight what is a perfectly valid question? They probably have a good reasons for there not to be a middle tier: if so, cool, but it feels missing so hopefully they read HN comments and can explain why the first paid plan jumps straight to $50.

Re: Show HN: We built a developer-first open-source Zapier alternative

#56

Post by bradgessler »

robbiemitchell wrote: post #2

Speaking as a tech-forward "business user" who uses Zapier _a lot_: a key benefit of Zapier is that it enables business users to work independently. Moving triggers and actions behind "developer-friendly" (i.e., developer-required) tooling caps how fast an organization can move on anything outside the critical path for product and strategy. - Core transactional email flow? Great. - Alerting Slack for non-critical act…

It’s not hard to imagine a template library or code generator that sits on top of this code layer that’s more approachable to non-technical users.

If done well, that would be an advantage over Zapier since a non-technical user can start something basic, then have a dev look at it if they need to get more sophisticated.

This is what has made Excel and Access so successful—a biz person can get it started and have something tangible to hand off to a dev.

Re: Show HN: We built a developer-first open-source Zapier alternative

#57

Post by gsanderson »

I was recently looking for a simpler alternative to Temporal (https://temporal.io/) so this could be ideal. If you could add instructions for self-hosting it (_sounds_ like you just need an Express server, but I would guess some backend persistent store/database/queue too) that would be great. The Webhook catalog only lists Github: I think integrating with Stripe would be neat. Like, when someone pays an invoice, Stripe calls a webhook. That could trigger an action.

Re: Show HN: We built a developer-first open-source Zapier alternative

#58

Post by rangledangle »

ElFitz wrote: post #31
eallam wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup I've done the AWS Step Functions thing in the past, and it usually was about 90% wrangling with AWS and 10% writing code... we wanted to flip that ratio around (that's the goal at least!) As for temporal, we are pretty similar to them, although I think we have more of a focus on making it easy to trigger (sorry) the workflows from third party events (webhooks, etc.) and then making reliable requests once you are…

> Yup I've done the AWS Step Functions thing in the past, and it usually was about 90% wrangling with AWS and 10% writing code... we wanted to flip that ratio around (that's the goal at least!) That was the final straw what led a friend and me to try to do what you’ve done. We had started off using Zapier, and it’s horrendous objects & arrays handling, then moved on to Step Functions, then gave up on what we were ini…

Now that AWS App Composer is a thing is this still an issue though? I felt that pain in the beginning, but once you get the hang of Step Functions it doesn't seem so bad. I never found a good alternative. My company is using Workato and it's a nightmare.

Re: Show HN: We built a developer-first open-source Zapier alternative

#59

Post by phphphphp »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #55
phphphphp wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The situation you’re describing is exceptionally niche and one in which you can simply reach out to the company and ask for accommodation: there’s thousands of open-source projects sponsored by for-profit companies by granting access to paid services for free (your employer is one of them, Fastly sponsor a bunch of projects by giving free CDN). Asking a company to sell their services to everyone at a huge loss becaus…

It's literally the situation I was in before so: why are you trying so hard to gaslight what is a perfectly valid question? They probably have a good reasons for there not to be a middle tier: if so, cool, but it feels missing so hopefully they read HN comments and can explain why the first paid plan jumps straight to $50.

A challenge many startups face is undervaluing their service. You started out by saying that their service was too expensive — “that's a lot of money to the vast majority =(” — which is the sort of complaint that induces founders to think they need to lower their prices. They don’t. Most startups should be charging more. $50 is nothing to the customers that Trigger want to attract in order to succeed.

I have no beef with your point about open-source developers having very limited budgets, but it’s very important to contextual your feedback. You specifically talked about teams of multiple people, it was unclear you intended to describe a very niche situation.

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