[HN Gopher] Goodbye IFTTT
___________________________________________________________________
Goodbye IFTTT
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 254 points
Date : 2020-10-30 16:07 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (benjamincongdon.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (benjamincongdon.me)
| reaperducer wrote:
| The author is leaving ITTT because he doesn't want to pay
| $2/month.
|
| If I was ITTT, I would ask him not to slam the door on his way
| out.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| $2/month is only if you give in to pressure sales tactics and
| register your account before tomorrow.
| gk1 wrote:
| > pressure sales tactics
|
| 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.
| fuzxi wrote:
| 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.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| 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.
| fuzxi wrote:
| 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.
| gverrilla wrote:
| 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.
| michaelmior wrote:
| > 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.
| corobo wrote:
| Every time someone uses this title format I think it's an
| employee leaving
| Wistar wrote:
| In this case, the title initially led me to believe IFTTT was
| throwing in the towel.
| Macha wrote:
| May as well go full clickbait with "IFTTT: Our incredible
| journey" or "An update on IFTTT" so people think it's IFTTT
| closing down.
| gigel82 wrote:
| 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.
| timvdalen wrote:
| Is anyone else getting tired of the sheer _amount_ of emails
| they've received about this?
| fareesh wrote:
| 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?
| kevincox wrote:
| 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.
| rkerno wrote:
| 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.
| JustARandomGuy wrote:
| 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.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| This is basically the "fire your low profit customers" advice
| that comes around perennially on HN ('yeah, but we didn't mean
| us!', lol).
|
| I guess the gamble is will more than 20% of those who would pay
| $2 pay $10.
|
| $10/mo is not much for a Western programmer. If they did their
| market research I could see them coming out on top.
| healsdata wrote:
| 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.
| onli wrote:
| Always happy to help ;)
| asjldkfin wrote:
| Can anybody with experience using Node-Red and n8n comment on the
| difference between the two?
| kilroy123 wrote:
| I'm using n8n quite a bit but honestly I use huginn a lot more.
| It has a bit of a learning curve and not many integrations.
|
| Still, I have some zaps from zapier that I'm going to move over
| to n8n. It's good enough.
| janober wrote:
| That same question got actually also asked when I released
| https://n8n.io originally. Here the link:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21192243
| EricE wrote:
| 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.
|
| Choice is always good :)
| jzawodn wrote:
| Fellow HomeSeer user checking-in here... same thoughts. Thanks
| for the HomeBridge mention--I hadn't seen that before and it'll
| be really useful.
| cpursley wrote:
| http://n8n.com is a nice alternative that you can self host.
| alexellisuk wrote:
| 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
| toyg wrote:
| 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.
| matthewfelgate wrote:
| IFTTT use to be good. Now it's gone to shit.
| bluetidepro wrote:
| 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.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > but as time went on and services removed many useful hooks,
| it lost a lot of value
|
| Worries me that with post-smartphone technology it's more
| valuable for companies to remove interoperability than to
| foster it.
|
| Look at Instagram, you can't even post a hyperlink because it's
| more beneficial for them to prevent a fundamental internet
| feature.
| askafriend wrote:
| > Look at Instagram, you can't even post a hyperlink because
|
| It's likely due to the scale of spam and abuse with links on
| IG.
| OJFord wrote:
| I haven't watched Netflix's _How to Get Away with Murder_ ,
| but I 'm pretty sure a critical component is 'blame it on
| the scale of spam and abuse'.
| SoSoRoCoCo wrote:
| 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?"
| myself248 wrote:
| Let's throw this out there: Any tool that can't be abused
| wasn't versatile enough in the first place.
| martin_a wrote:
| Ah right, I get that in Direct Messages now all the time.
| And IG does not even remove all the obviously spammy
| accounts.
| ffpip wrote:
| 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.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| Why are you seeing so many promiscuous women commenting
| on things?
| bronson wrote:
| win-win!
| saurik wrote:
| 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).
| feanaro wrote:
| 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.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > 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.
| shbooms wrote:
| 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?
| cuddlybacon wrote:
| That is both really unfortunate, but also doesn't surprise
| me.
| atomi wrote:
| Over a long enough period, organizations tend to monopolize and
| limit what they allow on their platform.
| intrasight wrote:
| 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.
| guptaneil wrote:
| 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.
| aaronharnly wrote:
| Wow, what a disastrously short-sighted business model.
| jwr wrote:
| > 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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.
| Zaheer wrote:
| 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.
| rektide wrote:
| > 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.
| rtkwe wrote:
| My biggest thing was that there was only one trigger and no
| ability to add conditionals so I couldn't compose triggers
| together to automate things.
| omneity wrote:
| Check out https://monitoro.xyz
|
| (demo video here https://youtu.be/mY82F8GMSo0)
|
| 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)
|
| disclaimer, I'm the founder
| kc10 wrote:
| 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.
| homero wrote:
| Paying isn't that big of a deal but their pages have become
| useless and they're disabling applets I already have.
|
| I'd move to zapier but they want $20/month which is crazy for a
| hobby.
| alexashka wrote:
| 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.
| justin_oaks wrote:
| 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.
| napolux wrote:
| I've stopped using IFTTT completely after all these years. IFTTT
| going to pro this way is a suicide, change my mind.
| chasing wrote:
| Because they'll focus their services on people who pay them
| money?
|
| If you were using the service for free for all these years, you
| were a cost to them. Not a benefit.
| wmeredith wrote:
| Offering a free service indefinitely is suicide.
| devilduck wrote:
| Tell that to Facebook and Twitter
| fuzxi wrote:
| They charged companies for IFTTT integration. Free users
| certainly had value; what company would pay to integrate if
| they had no userbase to speak of?
| [deleted]
| nicpottier wrote:
| 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.
| rektide wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://knative.dev/docs/eventing/
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| 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
| sweetheart wrote:
| > 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.
| lotyrin wrote:
| 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.
| raimondious wrote:
| FWIW the screenshot is of Blockly, not Scratch.
| fireattack wrote:
| 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.
| nikolay wrote:
| 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.
| anonu wrote:
| So for a cup of coffee (or 2 cups) a month you can no longer
| afford a service you find really useful and that you've been
| using forever for free?
| Macha wrote:
| 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.
| fuzxi wrote:
| "I can't afford it" isn't the same as "it's not worth that
| much".
| [deleted]
| dheera wrote:
| Interesting comparison, I pay a lot less than you for
| coffee/tea.
|
| I did sign up for the $1.99/month plan though.
| sssparkkk wrote:
| 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.
| triangleman wrote:
| 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.
| keithwhor wrote:
| Founder of Autocode [0] here! We welcome you. :)
|
| 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.)
|
| [0] https://autocode.com/ [1] https://autocode.com/app/
| blobbers wrote:
| You don't get $2/month of value out of what you're doing? Then
| why are you doing it at all???
| themacguffinman wrote:
| 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.
| outworlder wrote:
| > 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _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.
| bluetidepro wrote:
| 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
| dheera wrote:
| > 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.
| biotinker wrote:
| 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.
| dheera wrote:
| Sure, almost all consumer products advertise themselves.
| You could say the same thing about cameras, cars, phones,
| ...
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| 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.
| jayrot wrote:
| 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.
| munificent wrote:
| _> 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.
| bronson wrote:
| And, if it's lower than the effort that unsubscribe will
| probably require, hard no.
| joecot wrote:
| 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.
| outworlder wrote:
| > I wonder why companies don't use a boil-the-frog approach
|
| Because, just like in real life, the frog will jump off way
| before it reaches the boiling point.
| draw_down wrote:
| 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.
| ruffrey wrote:
| 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.
| michaelmior wrote:
| 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.
| erik_p wrote:
| I'm still annoyed they don't support facebook groups :/
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Isn't that Facebook blocking off anything but business pages
| though? I think Buffer has the same issue with posting to
| Facebook, IIRC.
| kevindong wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0]:
| https://www.ecobee.com/home/developer/api/documentation/v1/o...
| ArmandGrillet wrote:
| > 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.
| gofreddygo wrote:
| 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 :)
|
| [1]:
| https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/fc526325b9eb4ebf99bce8da65a...
| machello13 wrote:
| > 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.
| nexuist wrote:
| 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.
| machello13 wrote:
| 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.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _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.
| [deleted]
| ArmandGrillet wrote:
| TIL about the Slack schedule, thanks for sharing!
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| Shortcuts isn't automation. Tasker on Android is automation,
| anything you can do from your phone it can do for you (it can
| do even more than that actually). iOS shortcuts don't work that
| way
| thinking2smll0 wrote:
| IFTTT was a helper for users given slow smartphones 10 years ago.
|
| Not so much now.
| codazoda wrote:
| 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.
| janober wrote:
| 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.io https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n (disclaimer: I am
| the author)
| bberenberg wrote:
| 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.
| janober wrote:
| Thank you very much for being part of our community and
| your support!
|
| Yes totally agree. Still a lot to do and improve.
| clarle wrote:
| 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.
| johns wrote:
| Basically Node-RED?
| cpitman wrote:
| Isn't that the node-red solution talked about in the article?
| fweespeech wrote:
| https://github.com/huginn/huginn
|
| https://nodered.org/
|
| Those projects already exist, you are probably better off
| contributiing to existing ones rather than creating a new one.
| michaelmior wrote:
| 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.
| janober wrote:
| 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.io https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n
|
| (disclaimer: I am the author)
| anaganisk wrote:
| 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.
| dddw wrote:
| Yeah it is also very decent license, nothing wrong with it.
| janober wrote:
| 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.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >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.
| cheschire wrote:
| 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!
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > how can IFTTT compete?
|
| 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 ...
|
| [1] Because Day One _still_ doesn 't have an API.
| [deleted]
| headcanon wrote:
| 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.
| soheilpro wrote:
| So IFTTT now charges both users AND developers to use their
| platform?
|
| I run a small service [1] and I've integrated it with Zapier but
| there's absolutely no way that I'm gonna pay $199/year to support
| IFTTT.
|
| [1] https://pikaso.me
| flomei wrote:
| Uh, that's actually a nice service. Build something like that
| myself [1] but yours is surely more ripe. :-D
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19336803
| webbruce wrote:
| This is why B2C businesses are so hard. Imagine trying to
| convince people to pay you $2-10/mo LOL
| bluehatbrit wrote:
| 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.
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