Hacker News Reader

Slack is also super responsive when you file a ticket and in some cases have pushed out a change in a few hours. They accept tickets and issues from anyone (not just admins).

I wouldn’t even know how to file a ticket with GDocs.

Can you explain the last sentence? Sort of blew my mind..

Like if you find a bug in Google Docs ... what do you do? Scream into the pillow? Work around it? Complain on twitter?

I believe OP meant "file a bug for GDocs", not "file a bug using GDocs".

Ah, that makes sense. I was thinking of how one could file a bug using GDocs and it was an interesting idea. Thanks!

Theoretically I think it's possible to submit bugs using GDocs especially since you can essentially use Javascript to do so. The coding engine is pretty powerful. I can imagine using forms to do so.

My home address has been bugged in Google Maps for months. When you enter it, Google Maps modifies it for some reason and makes it point to the wrong location.

I've sent a bunch of reports and "feedback" in about it but it all just seems to go into a black hole without even being acknowledged.

For example Google Fonts - there are several very good and popular open-source fonts that still (after years) waiting to get pulled into the service. You can just look at the tickets at https://github.com/google/fonts

This is quite suprising to me because i think google this way gets their snooping JS on lot of websites. It generates data for them. Sure they also have to host it... but then again this is just matter of accepting pull request.

Chrome vs. Zapier is an unfair comparison. Chrome is ~6.7 million lines of code and takes hours to build while Zapier is probably a microsevice architecture and is easier to update a component / validate an issue.

I'm not _just_ talking about Chrome. I think that you would be hard-pressed to find any Google product where you'll find a responsive support channel.

Having humans doing customer service is not something google will ever do well. It’s not in their DNA. They are all about solving big problems with fancy algorithms.

There is a reason Google keeps on making failed social networking products and a 100 messaging apps. They are far more interested in algorithms that can scale than messy little customer issues.

The problem is that you can’t deliver great customer service with algorithms just yet.

Couldn't agree with you more. Google is not a people-company.

Yet Google is very successful

At selling ads.

Had a major DNS bug with Google DNS, it was on their side and they were completely messing up how they were handling some requests. Took them 2 months or so to fix it, they never described what happened, never said what was broken, and it took finding resources inside the company to solve. Google doesn't functionally have support for many of their paying services, nevermind their non-paid services.

So what you're saying is microservices for desktop apps, right ?

> Zapier is a monolithic application built on Python and Django.

https://zapier.com/engineering/go-no-go/

>If it isn't Adwords and isn't customer impacting

I think that explains it.

>Zapier made a lot of my contracting work way easier and often I get the client involved

Could you please elaborate more?

Also if you ever wish one missing feature in Zapier, what would it be?

> Also if you ever wish one missing feature in Zapier, what would it be?

For me it'd be a price point between free and 25/mo. I like the product and would have so many uses for it.. but I'm a person not a business and $25/mo is a bit too steep for what I need

>but I'm a person not a business and $25/mo is a bit too steep for what I need

Same. There are several things I want to do with Zapier but at the free tier I have to limit it to one if I want it to for sure work all month.

I'm not using it for business, I'm using it to make things a little easier for myself wholly unrelated to any income generating thing so it's just not worth paying 25$ a month to me so for right now I only use it to get text messages when I get email from a specific individual.

What kind of scenario is worth $12.50 but not $25 to you?

In general, it doesn’t make sense to price a business tool so that an individual can afford to under-use it.

>In general, it doesn’t make sense to price a business tool

SAAS isn't exclusively a business service and many, many, many services have multiple pricing tiers. In fact, Zapier has multiple tiers... for businesses 'starting at 20$' and for teams 'starting at 250$' a month. They scale price based on how much you use the service.

With the free tier you are limited to two 'zaps', they run less frequently, you don't have access to multi-step, you have a rather finite limit on how many times they can run each month etc.

It's just bizarre there isn't a lower tier. I mean, it's even more than my squarespace hosting and squarespace has a 12$ and 18$ tier. Or evernote. Or any number of other services.

I'd happily pay 5$ a month for considerably more functionality but I'm not trying to automate an entire business and 20-25$ or more is nowhere near justifiable. Sure, if you make 6 figures maybe you're like "hey 20$ to handle some weird email situations for me and make some docs automatically, sure!" but for the majority of people it's a "well, guess I won't be giving them anything".

regarding the pricing, i dont think its fair to compare Zapier (or IFTTT) services with other SaaS. The reason is there is considerable amount of investment on maintenance from Zapier side for keeping their plugins/libraries up to date with the APIs/services. If you consider evernote, once they develop it, they have to fix bug on may be the core platform plus a dozen other microservices and UI modules. But for an integration service like Zapier, they have to maintain more than 200 and sometimes close to 1000 components.

>The reason is there is considerable amount of investment on maintenance from Zapier side for keeping their plugins/libraries up to date with the APIs/services.

Which they are already doing for the companies paying them several hundreds, or thousands, of dollars a month...

That's like saying "Sorry, we won't sell you 100 lowly private individual an Impala, we only want to sell hundreds of them at a time to fleet-buyers, it costs us a lot of money to design these things!"

That’s actually how it would go if there were a lot of interested fleets and not enough individual buyers to sustain dealerships.

I totally understand that you want to use Zapier and save money, but you have to keep in mind a) you are (likely) a more expensive customer than you think you are, b) Zapier can’t serve you without self-cannibalizing. And this is an issue because you undervalue software; if Zapier is worth anything to you, it’s likely worth $20/mo but you are conditioned to not pay for something like that. This isn’t peculiar to you, but it’s something to be aware of.

Not all SaaS are B2B-focused, but Saoier is. They sell tools that make sense for businesses to use. It doesn’t make sense that they should offer something to someone who barely values what they do (you most likely can afford $20/mo if you can afford $5/mo, so your issue is that you don’t think you are getting that $15/mo value from Zapier, and that’s most likely because you aren’t running a business and are trying to automate something unimportant.)

And it might still be fine for Zapier to provide a cheap tier for people who don’t value what they do, but if they offered that, too many businesses that get a lot of value from Zapier from, say, running five zaps, would downgrade.

When you are in a situation where you don’t want something very much, and a seller would lose a lot of money by trying to make you happy, you find a substitute and Zapier has plenty, especially for a developer with more time than money.

Two patterns to lowest tier customers:

1. They still submit support tickets. Sometimes more often than people on higher tiers.

2. They’re hard to convert to higher paid plans.

Also, the market for note taking and web hosting is bigger than Zapier. It’s not quite as horizontal.

In the end, sometimes it just isn’t worth it to offer a lower price.

> Also if you ever wish one missing feature in Zapier, what would it be?

Extracting images from emails!

If anyone from Zapier is reading, how do you folks do it? What does your support staff look like? Do you have allocated support engineers?

I'm on a team of fiveish serving a whole company of fiftyish. Sometimes we resolve issues quickly, but often it pains me how long resolutions take. I'd love to do better but it's not clear how, short of staffing an engineer towards those reactive things specifically.

I work at Tyk.io and our average response time is less than an hour. If we talking about resolution time, it is about few weeks (depending on release cycle). But overall we are so good at it, because all team members, including engineers, do the support. There is some "first line" of support, which answer basic questions, and re-directs to the related person. Additionally, since we are a remote team (same as Zapier), we have team members across all over the globe, and literally 24 hours online.

Involving engineers into support is not cheap, but it pays off with extraordinary customer loyalty.

And for sure a lot of automation, extensive internal and external FAQs, and good documentation.

New ticket: don't intervene with the user scroll in your home page. It's painful. (I'm on a mobile device)

Yeah, we are aware of it. In process of fixing.

I agree and had a similar experience with them. Plus, their suite of integrations just work.