Show HN: Dexter, an open platform for building, sharing, and deploying your hack | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Dexter, an open platform for building, sharing, and deploying your hack

rundexter.com

62 pointsilkovich18 comments

Hi everyone - I'm the founder of Dexter (@danielilkovich) and am excited to share it with the Hacker News community.

We're a platform that enables users to quickly connect several third party APIs and custom code via a visual interface. Some people have called us Yahoo Pipes on steroids. A couple things that really set us apart:

- We're a completely open platform. Modules can be contributed to us via a `git push` and are subsequently made available to the community to use. We currently support NodeJS packages, but are planning to open up Python support soon. Docs here: http://docs.rundexter.com

- We have a marketplace where you can share your creations and collaborate with the rest of the community.

- Everything is deployed on our infrastructure. Your hacks no longer have to live on that old laptop in your closet.

- We support OAuth across 20+ providers with more on the way. Native OAuth support makes it easier to share your creations. Also, no more sifting through API docs to find out which flavor a third-party supports.

Looking forward to hearing everyone's feedback!

Thanks for making this. However, I've been burned by some other services like this shutting down. This looks like IFTTT for devs, and my only concern is about you shutting down.

Totally appreciate that concern!

Other community-oriented services out there are built on top of a completely free platform, which makes it very difficult to pay the bills and why you see so many of them shutdown.

While we're in beta, our services are totally free, but we will have to find the right pricing model down the line.

I suggest to start now. Benefits: you will know sooner if this business is sustainable, and you won't piss off customers "down the line".

Strongly agree. We'll be rolling out of beta pretty soon with a pricing structure.

We're also using a very open development model - most of the code that runs our apps is MIT licensed and easy to use elsewhere: https://github.com/rundexter

Having some loose set of code repos up that claim to "run your apps" is no excuse for not having a sustainable and publicly scrutinized revenue model for the project. Without a model in place, savvy users (like those here on HN) will realize that your model may change later (because the VCs require you to exit for example) and that will affect how we get along holistically with your product later.

Feature request: Skype module. Yeah yeah Slack whatever, non-developers use Skype, Facebook and WhatsApp and I have to talk to such people.

Noted!

How are you completely open? Can I run a dexter server on my own hardware instead of using your service?

I noticed at https://www.producthunt.com/tech/dexter someone said dexter was "more open" that https://bip.io/ but I don't think that's true. You can find their server code at https://github.com/bipio-server/bipio

I don't mean to come across too harshly, looks like you've built a great product and it is an open platform. Something about seeing it called completely open, while an open source competitor was being downplayed, rubbed me the wrong way.

Yes, this seems like more of an issue of semantics. It's true, that you can't set this up on your own hardware. Though, that may be something we are open to in the future. Our definition of open in this context is being able to contribute/share modules.

Hey Daniel, what are the plans for monetizing apps I build in the marketplace? Will I be able to define my own prices?

Good question!

Yes! Eventually we will support paid modules (the building blocks of the apps you see in the marketplace) that allow developers to define a price and a license. That will in turn dictate how much an app would cost a user to use.

For example, you can imagine a Twilio module that costs a penny to use, so the end user of the app would be charged a penny per use.

Is this a similar service to IFTTT, but one can connect multiple API endpoints in one script ("recipe")? Thanks.

Indeed. You also aren't limited to what is offered to you, as you are free to build your own and deploy to use and share with the community at large.

*Enjoy exclusive free access to the Dexter compute platform while we are in beta!

nice

Can someone explain to me exactly what this is/does?

I understand that I can link Google Docs to Slack.

Is it like a linking tool for third-party APIs?

Put plainly, this is a platform that allows you to connect web services. So yes, it is a linking tool for third party APIs. But there's a lot more than that here. The differentiator is in how that manifests itself. So with something like IFTTT, you're given the option to connect X to Y, with finite versions of X and Y to connect. So while it fits a number of use cases, there's a lot that's left to be desired. Dexter gives you the ability to connect X to Y, but since you can deploy your own code, the developer / user and the API endpoints they are using are what effectively limits the number of permutations. Additionally, you can connect far more than two endpoints, can switch based on expressions, can fetch from a data store, can wait for user input and more. Hope that helps!

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