For me, the biggest downfall of IFTTT was how many services started locking them out of useful hooks. Early on, I felt like I could do anything in IFTTT with any platform that was on there. There were so many hooks available as triggers, but as time went on and services removed many useful hooks, it lost a lot of value.
Spotify is one that comes to mind, originally there was so many triggers on Spotify that were useful, but now there is only like 2 boring triggers. It really killed the IFTTT platform when there was less options from so many of the services.
They went from having less services, but a very deep amount of triggers/hooks to hundreds of services with very little depth. From a deep pond to a wide shallow ocean. And I'm not sure if that's IFTTT to blame, or the services themselves just doing it and IFTTT had no say. Could be a bit of both, who knows. Or maybe services made exclusive partnerships with other services like Zapier, and made their triggers exclusive to Zapier for some deal they put together.
And just to add, at the end of the day, anything automation related that I was doing for professional work was always done on Zapier because they had far better/more options. So IFTTT had always just been a personal playground, noting serious, which is all more reason to not pay for it.
> Worries me that with post-smartphone technology it’s more valuable for companies to remove interoperability than to foster it.
I've been in this position before. We wanted to open up our APIs, encourage integration with 3rd-party tools, and make our product as open as possible.
Good intentions, but the unintended consequences are significant. We expected the openness to drive more sales, improve customer satisfaction, and generate more goodwill around our product.
In reality, less than 1% of our customers used the API at all. A portion of those who did were the most demanding customers we had, constantly complaining on social media that our API didn't support everything they wanted from day 1. Ironically, the most vocal API-using customers were more negative than positive for us. The extreme fringes of the DIY hacker communities can get very entitled and ugly.
Creating and maintaining the API was more work than we anticipated. With every new feature we had to make the decision to exclude it from the public API, or spend 50-100% more time integrating it into the next public API release cycle.
Overall, it doesn't make business sense to create an API if it will only be used by <1% of your customers. The only time an API makes sense is if the API will really, truly, genuinely be used by a significant portion of your customer base.
As techies, it's easy to forget that tools like IFTTT aren't mainstream outside of technical products. They're actually extremely obscure for the vast majority of the general public.
Just curious, was there any sort of poll taken of your user base prior to implementing the API to determine a rough idea of how much desire there was for it?
In my experience (B2B) nearly 50% claim API access as critical during the sales cycle, which poses huge obstacles to sales. Then of course, only 5% implement and it'll turn out their unspoken use case isn't supported. This hits home for me.
We've been there before and history is just repeating itself because people are not insisting on decentralised technology and open standards. They've forgotten (or have never known) the dangers of lock-in and are giving in to the allure of fancy web services. So we will burn ourselves again, until it becomes untenable, and then we will go into another cycle of decentralisation.
For social things, decentralization is always going to be a non-starter. I'm never going to be able to convince most of my friends to choose Mastodon over Twitter.
Things aren't sufficiently bad yet for the average person to consider doing this since the present way works well enough for them. These things happen gradually in the beginning, but after a critical mass of people have heard, considered and tried an alternative, it can become very quick.
I don't think decentralization is inherently a non-starter and I don't see a convincing argument why it would have to be. It's a matter of marketing and UX.
I actually think the hyperlink on Instagram thing is a conscious decision to limit people doing stuff like just posting news articles, and is a critical part of what makes Instagram feel very different than other platforms, in the same way people sometimes claim Twitter's decisions on short content affects its community (for better or worse). Like, I 100% agree with your point of companies limiting interoperability, but just not that example (and actually maybe also don't agree it has to do with smart phones: I bet a lot of this walled garden BS would also happen if everyone stayed on the web, and I feel was in fact already happening before apps became a thing).
It seems to me that Instagram is trying to limit automation and linking to stop it feeling businessy. While some automation platforms exists, scheduled posts break all the time, it's hard to share responsibilities for posting, and all that. You can't even upload images by logging in to Chrome unless you hack user agents or something like that. They want a one to one mapping of account to person and have you use the app when you're out and about instead of sitting in an office, for a more personalised feel. Probably because we already have Facebook for that.
Its the age old walled garden approach isnt it? Capture the market.
We aren’t the customers and we need companies that will treat us properly, but imho the root cause is providing everything for free - that will necessarily need to change.
Are you saying that "scale of spam" is a strawman? I'm stuck on this issue, because GP used the term "internet feature", and the OP claims that they can be abused: reductively this becomes, "Are links good or bad?"
If you browser instagram comments for more than 10 seconds, you have a 100 percent chance of seeing a bot or a thot. They do not give a fuck about spam. Only engagement.
I'm guessing he's talking about thotbots that go to "famous" "influencers" pictures and post comments to lure them over to said thotbot's owner and raise their magic internet numbers as well
Part of the problem was that IFTTT started charging businesses a few years ago to add support. I think they used to charge per trigger, so lots of companies pulled everything but the bare minimum. Now IFTTT is trying to charge consumers instead but it’s likely too late. A cloud-based consumer automation platform is of dubious value in a world filled with smart home platforms and local options like iOS Shortcuts.
> Part of the problem was that IFTTT started charging businesses
Evidence: I run a SaaS and had a long-standing TODO: "Implement Zapier and IFTTT support". Well, I eventually did implement both, and then learned that in the meantime IFTTT changed its approach, started charging businesses, and the amounts are not insignificant. I had no idea if any of my customers actually wanted IFTTT, so I simply killed the integration and sticked to Zapier.
Both models can coexist (Zapier charging the end user instead of integration partners, IFTTT offering for "free" or very low cost if integration partners will pay and absorb those costs elsewhere, maybe baked into recurring revenue or the cost of hardware sold), but the use cases are drastically different.
I want to say our tiny startup was quoted about $30k? Then they dropped it recently to $199, and now it's free.
I'm guessing "hope Google calls asking for a new integration and charge them a million dollars" was the business model, and they're hoping to transition into a model where they charge users.
> For me, the biggest downfall of IFTTT was how many services started locking them out of useful hooks.
Absolutely. The 2000 - 2010 time range was filled with such great hope for APIs, for expanding humanity creativity.
The last decade though has been shuttering & closing & withdrawl of computing, the systems receding, getting further & further away from general usability, a retreat into the walled garden, systems effervescing from manipulability, going up, into the cloud.
I've been calling the before time the Pax Intertwingularis era, the peace of intertwingularity, interoperation, interfacing of systems. When we were all excited to build & interconnect & share, when the hope, what we all saw, was humanity getting better & better from the power to wire ourselves together in new & changing ways.
We basically allow you to create your own custom triggers based on any change happening on a website, with value presence, absence, increase/decrease detection (deltas) etc.. and we’re compatible with both Zapier and IFTTT (and custom webhooks if you want)
When automation gets too much traction with social media services, it makes sense that they'll pull the plug as you are avoiding being monetized with your attention on their platforms.
I actually Zapier has the same problem: mediocre depth. The customizability on logic is weak compared to newer competitors like Integromat, Tray, etc. I hope Zapier takes heed.
For a while I felt silly sticking with HomeSeer while sites like IFTTT started springing up offering much of the functionality I had for free. I still prefer local control for stability. Internet outages are rare, but twice they have happened when I am out of town and exactly when I really need certain aspects of my automation to work.
And I always suspected these services wouldn't be free forever - and what a surprise, they eventually had to figure out a way to make money.
If you don't want to go commercial like HomeSeer there are many other open source projects like HomeAssistant that are still relatively friendly and provide great functionality. The RasbperryPi has really been a game changer offering cheap local processing for very cheap. I don't mind using cloud for remote access, but I would never want all my logic running remotely in the cloud. Been burned too many times by services either changing with zero or little notice, or as I stated earlier, internet issues.
With projects like HomeBridge, gluing different standards and universes together is getting easier which also negates a lot of the necessity for things like IFTTT if you are willing to trade some time for convenience of just subbing to a service like it.
Not OP but feel the same way as OP. Some of it was just fun stuff to setup, and do originally. And since it was unlimited, I did a lot of things that were just fun to do for the heck of it. Once paying actually comes into play, over 90% of the actions I have setup are NOT worth paying for because I hardly ever actually use them in real life. They were just simply fun passive things to set up to show friends/family for fun mainly.
Example: Making a smart light flash red every-time President Trump tweeted was just a silly goof to setup to show friends. Not something I'm actually going to pay for. haha
> Making a smart light flash red every-time President Trump tweeted was just a silly goof to setup to show friends
Just to play devil's advocate, have you ever been introduced to either a job opportunity or investment opportunity via your friends, who see that you're able to build stuff? If so, you could potentially place a monetary value on the benefit you derived from doing that.
If we're going this route, every time someone builds something like this and shows it to friends, that's a tacit advertisement for IFTTT. IFTTT can also then place a monetary benefit on allowing users to make unlimited things like this.
Many consumers will stop using a service if they have to pay any money for it with little regard to how useful the service is to them. These consumer services generally help save free time, but unlike businesses where labor time is expensive, many consumers don't think of their free time as particularly valuable.
Especially developers, they'd gladly trade their free time for other benefits like more control or openness like the OP is doing here:
> It's just that this was the nudge I needed to move my automations to infrastructure that I have more control over, which has other benefits outside the scope of this article.
> unlike businesses where labor time is expensive, many consumers don't think of their free time as particularly valuable.
On a tangent, I think it's important to understand "why" is that. Not because most people are stupid, or they don't know the concept of opportunity costs, as popular explanations go. It's because for most individuals, time is illiquid. You can't just turn every 10 minutes you save on some chore into 1/6 of your hourly rate. So, for most people, that $2/month is a pure loss, even if it saves more than 10 minutes a month, so it needs to be (or at least feel) truly worth it.
I agree. Outside of a business context, most individuals aren't hurting for time in the first place. They usually don't even notice anything less than huge time savings or splashy benefits.
It's no wonder consumer software, especially productivity software, is mostly free nowadays even when they cost a lot to develop. It's actually pretty hard for consumers to justify paying for any software. The consumer software developers that succeed usually shift the software cost way from the consumer somehow, either by creatively re-arranging prices (eg. baking the price into bundled hardware) or charging someone else (eg. ads). IFTTT has a tough gig and I wish them the best.
> Many consumers will stop using a service if they have to pay any money for it with little regard to how useful the service is to them
I don't agree.
If the service is free, you can just use it. The moment you have to pull your wallet, you start doing cost benefit analysis. "Do I really need to use this?" The answer is often no, even though some benefit could be potentially worth more than $2. Potentially. Often, it is difficult to calculate a monetary value.
Not only that, but this is a case of "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further". Had they started with some limitations in place, and then charged to expand them, this probably wouldn't have caused such backlash. People don't really like things taken away from them, even if they originally paid nothing. They tend to prefer deriving some sort of "benefit" out of a deal.
As for developers... I'm another one who ditched IFFT. Not just because they want to charge me, but because they started charging manufacturers a lot too, which caused many of them to drop IFFT integrations (even though these same manufacturers kept many others, like Alexa). Having things stop working, specially if it's related to home automation, can be a bigger hassle than setting them up "properly" in the first place.
So now I have Home Assistant and Node Red. With Hass.io, all you have to do is download the image, put on a SD card, stick it into a Raspberry Pi and you have Home Assistant. A couple of clicks and it installs Node Red already integrated and ready to go.
Does it cost more than $2? Certainly. In both labor and parts. In return, I can integrate almost all my devices (I'm missing a couple that don't have APIs at all, but they didn't work with IFFT anyway). I can do things that IFFT can't even dream of. I don't have to worry about price increases, EULA changes, keeping payment information up to date, cloud or internet outages. If the Pi goes up in smoke, I can throw it away and move the SD card over (or restore a snapshot).
Yes, it did cost a couple of hours of work. But since I had to do something about it anyway, might as well bit the bullet and trade off the time I'd be watching a movie to do this instead. I'd argue that the resulting system is worth way more than $2 a month.
As the article states: because of inertia. They had things in place, there were some shortcomings but it was free so there was no reason to be too bothered, and there was no reason to really switch away from IFTTT.
Now they have that reason, and so they wrote this article.
> Shortcuts also has a much more sophisticated integration with iOS
Anecdotally, here is the first shortcut I wanted to create when Shortcuts appeared on my iPhone: switch off Slack notifications at 6pm on Fridays, switch them back on every Monday at 6am. This is still not doable as of iOS 14.
I really don't get the hype around fancy automation (stuff you can see on website like MacStories for example) if simple toggles I need to improve my life are not there yet.
> switch off Slack notifications at 6pm on Fridays, switch them back on every Monday at 6am. This is still not doable as of iOS 14.
FWIW, you can do this in Slack itself (on iOS, see You > Notifications > Notification Schedule).
iOS 13 added time- and location-triggered Shortcuts (see Automation, but Slack doesn't expose this functionality to Shortcuts, and (as you note) Apple hasn't yet exposed iOS notification controls to Shortcuts.
Shortcuts isn't really automation. Its just what it says - shortcuts. I tried getting shortcuts to do things for me and all it did was give me more notifications. Sucks.
For example, when I get to work, i wanted it to log the time, all it did was showed me a notification that I had to click (!) before it did the task I asked it to. Silly.
One feature I'm using more these days is the "share" popup. For example, one shortcut [1] i hacked up accepts an amazon url, extracts the product id and opens that product on camelcamelcamel. So now I can be in the amazon app, hit the share button, click this shortcut and see the product price history. pretty useful. Without this shortcut it was pretty annoying. CamelCamelCamel folks could use something like this to increase their usage :)
> For example, when I get to work, i wanted it to log the time, all it did was showed me a notification that I had to click (!) before it did the task I asked it to. Silly.
In iOS 14 you can run more triggered shortcuts without needing user confirmation — I would see if this is possible for you now.
> Shortcuts isn't really automation. Its just what it says - shortcuts.
No, it's automation, in the quite literal sense. You ran into trouble running shortcuts based on triggers, but that doesn't change the fact that it's essentially a scripting language that allows you to automate tasks that would otherwise be tedious.
As another hardcore Shortcuts user, while it may be a scripting language the standard library is woefully inadequate. I have to use third party apps like Toolbox Pro to "fill in the blanks" and even then, there's things iOS just won't let you do - automating responses to iMessages, for example, or sending iMessages in the background, or responding to arbitrary notifications (wouldn't it be great if I could have iOS notify all my friends I'm driving on any chat app, rather than just Messages?)
A good starting point would seem to be what OP wanted - enable Shortcuts access to every toggle in the Settings app. Let me programmatically read and update notification, widget, screen, background, accessibility, Siri, battery, privacy, etc. settings that I can only access through the Settings app. Yes, I know I can do this for WiFi or Bluetooth settings, but there should be much, much more. And I should be able to consent to Shortcuts doing things in the background without my explicit permission, much like I can set up cron jobs on my home PC.
Totally agree with you. I just disagreed with the OP's statement that it's not "real automation" just because some triggers don't work without user input.
> And I should be able to consent to Shortcuts doing things in the background without my explicit permission, much like I can set up cron jobs on my home PC.
Again, this is now the case for many triggers (not all, I don't think) on iOS 14.
Yeah, the "not all" is what I was referring to. I should be able to do it for everything, not cherry-picked actions.
My guess though, is that they've already got this working, they're just going to wait until iOS 15 to drop it. The integration of Shortcuts into iOS has been slow but steady ever since they were acquired, and I think eventually it will do everything we want.
Personally I don’t see shortcuts having “everything we want” until they merge iOS and macOS automation. I do think it will eventually happen, but I think it will indeed be slow and steady, and will take a lot of engineers pushing for automation, which isn’t always a flashy selling point, strangely enough...
And that involves a third party app. I wanted to do a shortcut to modify my wake-up alarm for the next day (in the "Health" sleep schedule). Not possible.
I agree that IFTTT isn't useful enough for me to warrant the cost (I need another monthly subscription like a need an arrow in the knee).
That said, it seems they did handle it in a much classier way than Wink who really pissed people off when they moved to a subscription model. Likewise, that was a good nudge for a lot of people to move off the "easy" platform and figure out something better.
I wonder why companies don't use a boil-the-frog approach to try to avoid this "nudge". Like, if they started off by charging, say, $1 a year I'm sure everyone would stay and just go "OK". Then start increasing the price slowly until you find the sweet spot.
> Like, if they started off by charging, say, $1 a year I'm sure everyone would stay and just go "OK". Then start increasing the price slowly until you find the sweet spot.
There's a psychology-caused pricing dead zone if the price is too low. Users assume the price of something implies its value. If the value is lower than the mental effort to decide whether or not to purchase it, most won't. In the user's mind, somethat that only costs $1 a year can't be worth the effort to decide whether to spend $1 a year on it.
There's a large gulf between users who will play nothing and users who will pay something. If you start charging you have to account for how much of the user base will leave just for there being any cost at all. If you're using Paypal or similar for transactions you lose 39 cents out of each $1 yearly transaction (and if you run your own merchant account now you have to secure credit card information). Additional customer service overhead having to deal with people's $1 yearly transactions, on top of people expecting better responsive customer service because they're paying customers now, maintaining private customer data ... the variable costs per customer would probably end up more than $1. It'd be cheaper, literally, to make it free.
Maybe $5 a year could work as a price point, and given the gulf between Pay Nothing vs Pay Something, I doubt $5 a year would've lowered the conversion enough to make $1 a year transactions worth it. Don't do credit card transactions for a dollar or less unless you're counting on it converting into a higher amount a month later.
That’s like doing layoffs one by one instead of ripping off the bandaid. $1 might be ok, but if it keeps going up by $1 then it would seem like the sky is the limit.
I've ever only managed to get two useful workflows out of IFTT: making my iPhone ring from a Google Home command, so I can locate it in the house; and tweeting a link whenever I write a new blog post. So this new payment model just forced me to purge a bunch of crap that was never used or never actually worked. I could probably replace those two workflows too, at a push, with little effort.
TBH I never understood all the hype about IFTT; most of its usefulness can actually be achieved by the services themselves, once they choose to care about integration. The early focus on usability had already gone overboard years ago, when their redesign basically made it mobile-only. It always felt like a typical SV-hype-driven phenomenon, mostly based on short-lived home-automation gizmos, and I'm surprised they're still around - although this sort of move might well indicate they are circling the drain.
FWIW I was considering switching to a paid plan. But I really only have 3 applets anyways, and I could easily live without them.
But their spam killed me. They started sending a new message asking me to subscribe what seemed like every day. I eventually clicked the unsubscribe link which seemed to reduce the flood but I still got a handful more. So now all of their mail goes directly to my spam bin.
I don't need to be giving money to a company that spams like that.
I fully agree with the author about the UI.. who thinks this is a good interface for web/desktop?! https://i.imgur.com/p85MGi5.png
And I personally also think their free tier should be a little bit better. Currently it's extremely limited and I barely find any use of it any more.
They're constantly removing services too. I used to use it to do one thing, which was to automatically tweet any songs I like last.fm. About 2-3 years ago, they simply removed all the Last.fm triggers.
I used IFTT for quite a while but eventually moved over to Huginn (https://github.com/huginn/huginn) because it fit my needs a little better. I've been over the moon with it so far and really like how it's event driven.
I'm glad to see they're still doing well, and I'd still recommend them to non-technical friends but huginn is a lot more enjoyable to use and I found it really simple on a day-to-day basis.
Would there be any demand for an open-source, more code-oriented version of IFTTT for the devs around here?
So still the same concepts of inputs -> outputs, but you would self-host on AWS Lambda / Azure Functions / etc. It would also have more flexibility to add custom code if needed to transform data too.
Not open-source, rather fair-code licensed (so you are not allowed to commercialize it but use it totally for free and the source-code is available) but apart from that you can try:
https://n8n.iohttps://github.com/n8n-io/n8n
I strongly support you guys for the license you use, its sad that though the source is open people expect it to be licensed in a way, so that any mega corporate can just rip you off cough aws cough. I wish you guys get the attention you deserve.
Thank you very much! It is very appreciated. Yes, think it is never easy if you take a new and different approach, but I am sure it will be worth it. Not just for us, also for other people that think the same way.
>Would there be any demand for an open-source, more code-oriented version of IFTTT for the devs around here?
Probably but there's so many IFTTT alternatives around (including the referenced node-red). If you're more tech savvy, you can either stand something up yourself, or you can use something like glitch (https://glitch.com/) to create some quick webhook adapters.
There are existing open-source solutions that from what I hear work quite well. I would personally like to see a low-cost hosted version of one of these so I can use it without ever having to think about keeping it running.
I've got my issues with IFTTT's limitations and UI sure, but it still is reasonably decent for 'basic' things like checking an RSS feed and doing something. A use-case that helped propel it forward from the early days. It's not easy to find a service/set a service to check something regularly etc....without spinning up a server and stuff yourself.
Yes, I get that doing other things more advanced like IoT integration and whatever else IFTTT has moved into bring up challenges etc, but that basic thing at the heart of what the If This Then That concept is rooted in is still useful and them asking for a few bucks isn't that bad.
I've still got some things running out there to send an email, post a tweet etc on updates. But doing some things more regularly than their tweet/check limits has forced me to move elsewhere on my own recently. All depends on the use.
And yeah, totally miss Yahoo Pipes but from the time when I used that, IFTTT actually improved slightly just enough to cover what I was using Pipes for haha. (and yeah there's pipes.digital)
ActionsFlow recently shared around here using github actions is interesting but I didn't feel like migrating a bunch of stuff over to it just to test
I could never get IFTTT to work for me because I needed multiple IF's and they only supported one. For example, I recently tried...
If Time is 5:00p
If TempOutside < 70 and
Send Alert to "Open Windows"
It sounds like they now support multiple IF's but I can't use that feature in my three free, so I will never know if it would have worked for me. Getting a notice to open my windows when it's 70 outside isn't worth the price of admission but I suspect I could get hooked and find other things that were more useful. Just never happened for me.
If you want to automate complex tasks, with multiple IFs, Merge, triggers ..., easily extendable, a node based flow and self-hostable you can check out the fair-code licensed https://n8n.iohttps://github.com/n8n-io/n8n
(disclaimer: I am the author)
Happy to put in a good word for n8n and I am not the author. App does what it says on the box. Jan and team are easy to work with. They have done a good job of accepting my PRs as well.
They have a ways to go in terms of improving UX, but I think that is coming.
From what I can tell, their public pricing is as low as $4 monthly ($48 a year) if locked in now. I guess it does not seem very expensive for unlimited integrations for an individual. I have not actually used the service but people have sung its praises. It sucks when something free goes away, but this is as cheap as a Starbucks per month in the US.
I managed to lock in the price for $2/mo. I'm not super happy with the Pro features at the moment, but I'm hoping to see them turn it around. The price is low enough that I'm willing to stick around for a while.
To me, the problem with IFTTT and other 'do programming without actually programming!' tools are this: unless you're serving an extremely narrow goal, I want a programming language!
Even something as non-programmer as taking notes - what if I want some notes automatically added/removed/modified depending on what happens elsewhere in the world? I need a programming language!
Almost no problem is too trivial to not want a programming language attached to it which begs the question - why don't we already have it? I hope the answer is quite simply that we've been so focused on new hardware, that software is lagging behind. There are more sinister possibilities but I'd err on the side of nobody having made it a priority because most people think small by default.
Agreed. I started using node-red, but then I realized that it was much easier for me (a software developer) do what I wanted with code, instead of in node-red.
The only downside to plain, old code is that there isn't a pretty UI for it.
The main value I get from IFTTT is that they handle the integration with a wide variety pack of services that individually would be a massive pain to touch.
I don't value my time too highly, but I certainly do value it enough to not want to put in the grunt work needed to work with the APIs [0] that my smart thermostat provides. While as with IFTTT, setting the temperature given a particular trigger is a couple button clicks.
I'm pretty averse to no-code, etc. Is there some event-based set of libraries that have a common protocol which have all the boilerplate code in place to connect to popular APIs and receive webhooks from the likes of Dropbox, Google Drive etc.
In other words a programmable ecosystem like IFTT?
If I were IFTTT, I'd be asking myself why a customer provided a bulleted list of valid complaints about longstanding issues to explain why my service isn't worth $2/month.
They are offering a life-long 80% discount for early registrants, with one month's notice. That is quite generous. To twist that into a "pressure sales tactic" is one of the most HN things I've heard.
They sent an email every 1-2 days since the announcement of the price change. After a week or so, they changed the email category from "Promotions/Marketing" to "Important Account Information", so they could respect user email settings while still spamming them daily about the pricing offer.
To me, being asked, "Hey are you gonna buy this? You've only got a month, come on, buy it already!" on a daily basis qualifies as a pressure sales tactic, no matter how good the deal may be.
Why only make it one month's notice with a big countdown at the top of the website and pretty much daily emails?
I have an email that says "Upgrade to Pro before your Applets are archived" and then one for 12 days remaining, one for 9 days remaining... 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 and finally 1 day remaining.
Imagine if this was the sales page for the newest iPhone with a "discount for existing customers" and only one month to use the discount. The entire internet would be up in arms.
Pressure doesn't mean that their product does not have any worth. In fact, I subscribed to it. It just means that they used pressure to close the sale.
You can't even edit your own applets right? Like, you create an applet, hit save, and then it's set in stone. Can't modify it, you'd just have to make a new one. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
If that's true, no way I'm paying $2/month for that. I'm moving to Autocode.
Edit: OK I see I can still edit RSS applets after they're created. Still doesn't seem worth keeping the service.
For those who don't know - we have a full App Automation platform that runs on serverless tech. We automatically handle auth to your favourite APIs and easily handle webhook setup and signing. Apps can be published open source and shared with the community. We're easy for non-developers to get started with (folks more on the business operations side can get started via our Apps [1]) and everything you work with is ultimately code.
We're definitely not a "consumer solution" and if you're looking for something self-hosted we're happy to suggest alternatives. We run in the cloud but have a pretty sophisticated system that supports version controls, rollbacks, CI (dev vs. prod) and a whole ton of other neat features.
We have a pretty permissive free tier for developers, but what we really focus on bringing to the table is professional & team tooling around automation which is what we charge for. We don't charge by # of automations, steps, or anything like that -- just access to organization-level tooling that allows you to more easily collaborate with a broader team.
Happy to answer questions if you have any! (We just launched officially on July 7th, so if you haven't heard of us yet -- that's why.)
I signed up for Pro with the $2/mo plan. I agree, $10/mo would be too much, but the ability to do more advanced scripting intrigued me enough to give it a try.
My only issue is that most services do not have enough triggers or abilities to prove useful for the workflows I currently want. For instance, I would like to append to a Dropbox Paper document when I star a github repo, possibly filtered by some logic. Guess what? Even though both APIs would allow this, IFTTT has neither the trigger nor the action I need. This is just one example, but I frequently run across this problem, which is a major inhibitor to me using it more. I don't have a ton of "smart home" devices which is where IFTTT shines the most IMO.
I'm staying on for now to see if I get enough value at $2/mo with the triggers and actions currently available. If I'm not getting much out of it a year from now I'll probably switch fully over to a more programmable solution.
Some of these things (price increases, balkanisation of streaming services, cutbacks to free tiers) become more about opportunity cost. I'm willing to spend $x in discretionary services, if those discretionary services go up in price or I need more of them for the same feature set, some of them have to go.
> Eventually, the UI got to the point where it felt like using Duplos or something. It didn't have
to be this way! There are great low-to-no-code tools that have much more usable interfaces, like Scratch.
I had no idea what Duplos was so I had to Google it, but I can't imagine that for a complete non-programmer, the Scratch UI would be more clear than littler sticking giant building blocks together without issue. It sounds like the author simply fell out
of the target market for IFTTT, rather than IFTTT becoming _worse_.
FWIW, that Scratch UI screenshot was so hard to mentally parse. I would not expect a non-programmer to look at that and feel more secure in their understanding of the product at all.
Yeah. Scratch is not a no-code tool, it's a no-syntax tool. Every other skill required to understand code is still required. It makes it impossible to put a semicolon in the wrong place or understand that there's wrong and right places to put them, but you still have to parse code and imagine what it'll do before it does it, etc.
first time I've heard about IFTTT I was really excited by the possiblities, but once I tried it, I noticed I had no use for it because I was/am not: a developer, a marketer, a social media manager, a smart home/car/tv owner, a system admin. This sums up my 5min experience with this software.
For folks moving away from IFTTT, if it's primarily because you have to pay, then I think it might be time to consider paying for the value of the service and support.
For folks looking for a lightweight webhook processor, "faasd" is a reimagined version of OpenFaaS which runs on a single host without K8s. I would imagine it being used for "just a few functions" and automations etc. https://github.com/openfaas/faasd
I pay for IFTTT but mostly use it for controlling Hue bulbs via Google Assistant without any feedback from the device. That alone is well worth the cost (set the response to '¿'.)
On top of that, I've got RSS feeds for some subreddits I run that benefit from IFTTT. I also have some RSS feeds automatically go to Pocket so I can read them on my Kobo.
IFTTT isn't perfect... and I absolutely hate the interface, but for the simple tasks I need, it does them well. And that is easily worth two bucks per month.
I just setup shortcuts today for the first time on my apple device. Painlessly in 5 minutes I had two shortcuts for calculating prices with and without tax, and 2 minutes after that I created a shortcut to log my blood pressure numbers into the health app. All 3 now also run from my watch with siri.
With functionality like that, effectively for free (cost of device not withstanding), how can IFTTT compete?
edit: And now I've discovered I can create trello cards this way!
Whilst Shortcuts is great, there's a lot it can't do - it can't accept webhooks to post content to your Day One journals[1], for example, or read RSS feeds and add those to your Pocket library or add your Netatmo temperatures to a Google Docs spreadsheet or ...
There's also power automate (what used to be called Flow) from MS; don't know what the limit is for free but it works ok for a few basic things that don't already connect directly (through webhooks and whatnot).
The official examples / etc. are "corporate" focused but it works quite well for personal use as well.
I use several home automation devices from different companies (Google, Kasa, Wyze) and have several recipes setup in IFTTT.
Currently there are no other alternatives to IFTTT for all the triggers and actions I have across these products and so I just signed up for IFTTT Pro for now.
Even after downgrading to their free 3 applets in the hopes that they'd leave me alone, they were aggressively advertising through push notifications and emails. Just now as I tried to delete my account, I got two separate prompts to upgrade my account.
I’m not certain if other commenters have commentered about this yet, but in late 2019 - before they offered a paid plan - they nerfed some services. Specifically, they downgraded the “tweets per day” limit from 100 to 25. They did this without offering an option to pay to get back to the 100 limit (I would have gladly paid). So I was essentially forced to find an alternative.
It’s puzzling that they didn’t sync up the nerf + pro option.
Maybe this has been mentioned already, but they seem to have some special integration with the Google Assistant. As far as I know there are currently no alternatives that allow you to e.g. perform a web request for any arbitrary voice command. And you can use arguments in voice commands. You can even override the (ever growing) reserved assistant commands by prepending 'please', I think.
I signed up for IFTTT Pro for $4/month - as the article says, I think the suggested $10/month is too much, but there is definite value in what IFTTT provides.
IFTTT is great for quickly moving data around, but I wish there was a zapier/google apps scripts/lambda functions way to quickly hack apart and reassemble data for easier consumption by external services.
Yeah. I wanted to use an RSS feed with IFTTT but it wasn't 100% spec compliant. I ended up having to use https://www.pipes.digital/ to split the feed apart, filter out the bad tags, and create a new feed before IFTTT would use it.
> It's pretty clear that desktop-usability was not high on IFTTT's design priorities.
While I think this is true, it's also frustrating that desktop is the only way to edit filter code. So I find myself wanting to use both interfaces for different purposes.
These sort of capabilities are exactly what serverless / function-as-a-service ought to be giving us! How do we expand them beyond industrial developer tools, & make them more user tools?!
I think one of the missing pieces on DIY/user serverless is that there's not a lot of connectivity. Systems like node-red have integration points for all kinds of systems, whereas serverless tech tends to have a more concentrate developer-oriented focus for it's connectivity, taking events off queues and via http endpoints.
We're only just starting to bring more focus onto the messaging bus underpinning serverless. Knative Eventing, for example, is one of the contenders, which defines a pluggable architecture for what events are, where they come from, how to write more. That way you could start extending the system, having events come in for your light switch, or your weather sensor, or your car's location or what not, adapting whatever protocols or systems you might have.
I looked at IFTTT a while back but found Integromat to be so much better. Lots of integrations too, and you can create some quite complex flows especially if you chain them together through webhooks.
IFTTT failed to innovate and having a useless product they started to charge once of a sudden. Zapier, almost way more powerful and way more expensive, is another example of a missed opportunity.
Seems like they are making the right choice if they are driving away a "customer" that had many services connected but was paying them nothing. That's no way to run a business.
Spotify is one that comes to mind, originally there was so many triggers on Spotify that were useful, but now there is only like 2 boring triggers. It really killed the IFTTT platform when there was less options from so many of the services.
They went from having less services, but a very deep amount of triggers/hooks to hundreds of services with very little depth. From a deep pond to a wide shallow ocean. And I'm not sure if that's IFTTT to blame, or the services themselves just doing it and IFTTT had no say. Could be a bit of both, who knows. Or maybe services made exclusive partnerships with other services like Zapier, and made their triggers exclusive to Zapier for some deal they put together.
And just to add, at the end of the day, anything automation related that I was doing for professional work was always done on Zapier because they had far better/more options. So IFTTT had always just been a personal playground, noting serious, which is all more reason to not pay for it.