Launch HN: Activepieces (YC S22) – Open-Source Zapier Alternative

Hi HN, I’m one of the creators of Activepieces, an open source (MIT) no-code business automation tool. We’re excited to share it with HN! Our Github is https://github.com/activepieces/activepieces, our website is https://www.activepieces.com/ and there’s a video that shows how to build a Pipedrive + Slack + Email flow in 2 minutes at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IY4TI6jGBwM

When we used automation tools like Zapier at my previous job, we found that it became incredibly expensive very quickly, and we had only too few options to self-host business automation when data had to reside on prem.

There are open-source automation tools that we think are too technical like Huginn and Node-RED or developed under less permissive open source licenses like N8n.

So we decided to build an open source automation tool under a permissive license (MIT) with a simple user experience that doesn’t require technical knowledge, and can be self-hosted. We plan to make money from the cloud version and a future enterprise edition with advanced features - maybe advanced roles and permissions.

The current version includes a visual designer for automation flows which can run on schedules (Cron), by Webhooks, or by triggers from external apps—25 apps and counting, including Stripe, Calendly, Google Sheets and others (we’re building these rapidly).

The app is customizable, you can add custom steps using HTTP requests or you can write Node.js code and bring in your npm packages.

If you’re curious about how it works, here are the docs: https://www.activepieces.com/docs

We’d love to hear HN’s thoughts on what we’re building! Thanks!

Considering that another open source alternative [0][1] was posted just a few days ago, how does this compare?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34610686

[1] https://trigger.dev/

Congrats on the launch! Huge TAM so there’s lots of room for a healthy ecosystem of competitors in no code low code. My suggestions for succeeding in this ecosystem:

* The value is in the long tail. Major services will integrate with other major services on their own. Make it easy to integrate with the smaller services.

* Enterprise features is where the rev is at, you want to be able to get into Corp customers who are willing to spend $50k-$150k/year with you because you offer automation their internal it or dev teams can’t (along with RBAC, audit logs, and the usual trimmings that an enterprise offering entails) (individual and smb personas are fine, but they are price sensitive and have higher churn)

* UX is important. Spend the resources as you scale to understand how your users are leveraging your product for their workflows; it should be magical to them. The easier it is to use, the more it’ll be used, which translates to more revenue (assuming revenue tied to tasks executed).

* Integrations will break frequently; instrument to know when this happens and to rapidly roll out fixes.

* It is crucial to be able to pause your workers as well as replay data from webhooks and polling. Also, log all the things (while redacting secrets) as data is processed. This will make troubleshooting integration issues and edge cases (which will pop up often at scale) less painful as data structures flow through your code paths.

I agree that we should show some display of how our features compare to existing apps in the market.

Thank you for the cost comparison, I'd like to highlight that some apps price on whole flow execution and others on step execution. We chose pricing on step execution to easily compare with Zapier and Make. We'll see how this will develop.

Thank you-there is huge similarity between how we think and your comment!

How do you define long tail? Fewer users?