TLDR: automation saves you time; here's a $30,000/year tool that you can use for it. If you only need 10 automations.
My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools
41–50 of 70 posts
Re: My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools
#42Co-Founder of tines here, thanks for all of very valid feedback, there’s loads to think about! I’ll respond to a bunch of the comments individually but the one thing I’d say is try it - it’s way more powerful and flexible than any of the products listed here, although it’s marketed as no-code it’s built by engineers for engineers, with tonnes of enterprise features (Retry on status, connecting to external password va…
Can you expand on your approach to pricing? $30k/year to only automate 10 separate tasks would be a non-starter for me. As a personal tool, the community version w/ 3 free is a nice way to demo things but too few stories to bother trying to run personal projects & conveniences on it.
My interpretation of your pricing is that you're positioning it towards businesses that only have a small number automation targets, but those targets might have a high level of complexity & are repeated very often. At least that's the main market target that makes sense to me given the pricing model.
Re: My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools
#43This is an advertisement. That said, I never played with Yahoo Pipes. It looks like Alteryx I think?
No pipes is more like node red. Alteryx is fairly unique given the heavy excel focus
I guess visually they look the same in that it’s flowchart building blocks
Re: My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools
#44The very last thing I want out of my automation tools is SaaS. Not even if it’s free.
Ansible, bash, python etc. stuff I can control, self host and move around at will. Even selfhosted gitlab ci makes me wary
Tired of getting held hostage by all these crappy SaaS that start of ok and then squeeze
Re: My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools
#45The very last thing I want out of my automation tools is SaaS. Not even if it’s free. Ansible, bash, python etc. stuff I can control, self host and move around at will. Even selfhosted gitlab ci makes me wary Tired of getting held hostage by all these crappy SaaS that start of ok and then squeeze
At least for $30,000 per year you know they are also taking you for a ride, not just locking you in. I’d personally rather hire an assistant than pay $3,000 per year to have my lights turn off when I’m on a call.
Can you even imagine putting a price of $3000 per automation on a glorified IFTT? It doesn’t matter how much better it is.
Re: My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools
#46I can't believe I got all the way to the bottom without seeing a mention of integromat.
As an automation addict (and a no longer coding coder) this is what you should be using.
Prices range from free to cheap and I'm sure it does 99.9% of what "tines" does
Re: My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools
#47$30k/year?!
If the price seems too high, you aren't their target market. There are people who want this that think $30k is a rounding error.
Re: My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools
#48I once worked with a software stack called ActiveBatch. I really wish there was something as easy to set up as ActiveBatch available for the consumer market. Even something like Apache Airflow isn't competitive in terms of ease of setup.
Activebatch is literally just install the scheduler on a Windows system, connect a SQL Server DB(use community edition) and then install the "execution agent" on whatever machine you want to run jobs on. In 10-15 mins you have a full automation environment.
From there, you have access to a decent GUI where you can drag, drop connect jobs together and mix and match different technologies, APIs, whatever because you can actually pass data and context from one step to another. They have a library of hundreds of "Job Steps" that range from simple stuff like copying files/FTP/SSH to things like calculating checksums to things like interacting with Twitter to send out tweets based on whatever condition you specify. There is just so much you can do and then they allow you to extend it with scripting/APIs etc.
Has anyone here used Activebatch? It is a hidden gem. Unfortunately it is an enterprise product so it is off limits to most people. Really wish someone made an open source alternative. :/
Here is a video but it does a pretty poor job explaining the capabilities of this software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6Pw-Sisry0
Re: My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools
#49$30k/year?!
Starting at $30k, but that is the lowest paid tier!
I guess the thought is you can fire your developers and replace them with this. Ok I’m joking a little, but the sales pitch is probably that if you can hire one less developer, then it is worth it (I am skeptical, myself).
They’re not competing against other SaaS, they are competing against someone’s salary.
Re: My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools
#50THIS IS A FRIGGIN' AD!
Didn't figure it until close to the end...