IFTTT introduces IFTTT Pro, free accounts now limited to 3 applets
ifttt.com
ifttt.com
Affinity Photo, for instance, cost $60, and VMware Fusion cost $80, to name two products I purchased recently. Neither needs to be bought again after a year unless an update contains a new feature I want (and probably not even then for Affinity), and both can do a lot more than IFTTT. Neither has a server component, true, but how big a cost can that possibly be for IFTTT?
I’m probably never using IFTTT again. Oh well.
Yes. Would you rather have ice cream or get punched in the face?
> Would you maintain it?
If maintaining it means scheduling updates through my host's package manager or running docker pull, and not "hey it's thursday, time for a new configuration format", then sure.
> How much is your time worth?
Enough to never host Elasticsearch, not enough to go SaaS-only.
Any service with any level of client integration will a) version their APIs, and b) keep things sufficiently stable so that clients aren't constantly breaking.
I currently maintain about 280 different API integrations. I have a team that does constant maintenance. Usually 1-2 API breaking changes per day is what we see after you get past the stable big ones. Even versioned APIs kick you off the old version pretty regularly. In the upcoming months we have 3 scheduled version bumps that are mandatory as they will discontinue the old version completely. Not "use the new version for more features", like completely 100% "we are not supporting v2 any longer. You won't get responses in 60 days. Good luck."
It's easy to say, "they're doing versioning wrong" but it's the reality.
Everyone does oauth wrong. Everyone does versioning wrong. Everyone adds or removes fields that were once critical to someone's workflows. Maybe 25% of our integrations are a joy to work with. Once you get to the smaller players, things start to get weird.
And if I was trying to self-host software that integrated with 280 different APIs, I'd probably have that problem, too.
Most people don't need 280 different APIs. Then need a half dozen? Maybe a dozen? Most of which are likely to be the "stable big ones" that you refer to.
So the rate of breakage in your experience just isn't applicable for anyone doing anything at the hobbyist level.
That's not to say it's maintenance free! But I've been running my own automation with Huginn for a year now, and for what I need, I could not justify $120 per year.
One thing I notice is how some do the constant refresh token and most don’t.
IFTTT is just a bunch of web requests chained together. The strength of the product is its UI and the number of services it supports.
After inspecting my own personal finance, I’ve found that my spent on software subscription is less than 1% of my yearly spent. So, I’ve stopped worrying about it quietly accumulate. Not yet worth optimizing.
I would frame that the other way—it seems expensive because it is expensive, if you look at the long-term cost. And if you don’t look at the long-term cost, you’re fooling yourself.
You’re right that choosing one year as the time unit is arbitrary, but I actually think it’s an overly-generous choice, because as I mentioned, when I buy non-subscription software I almost always expect to use it for longer than a single year.
I’m increasingly viewing subscriptions as a cheap ploy to trick consumers into paying more. “Oh, that iPhone doesn’t cost hundreds of dollars, it’s just $20 a month for two years. You can pay $20, right?” What bothers me most about the scheme is it appears to be shockingly effective. This is literally grade-school arithmetic!
I’m suggesting to put it in the context of other recurring expenses, to get a real sense of how much it affect your finance. A recurring expense has a different impact on your finance than a one-time expense, so it should be evaluated as such.
In fact, $100000 dollar upfront is less affordable than $5000 for 20 months, due to the nature of income and expenses.
That's what all technical people I know use ifttt for.
And usually a 3$ one can run hundreds of these sort of automations, unless you're relying on some of these ifttt-ingrained applets.
And before anyone draws the "this takes longer"/labor costs cards.. I only started posting my blog post blurbs to Twitter/Fediverse via cronjob because the ifttt-rss-to-twitter thing was broken at some point.
I'm guessing this move to PRO will drive capable folks away.
God forbid I have to maintain a server, upgrade for new libraries, handle moving a server, etc etc. Write the code in the first place, debug problems, update my API keys...
I'd love to self host rather than use IFTTT, but is that even possible with those other tools?
Interesting approach. I wonder what users will pay on average during this first year.
If they give me a full blown console where I could run lambda-like python code on top of all the existing device integrations they already have, I'd be glad to pay the full $9.99/month. But the product would have to evolve a lot versus where it is today.
Are there any good OSS orchestration / automation frameworks out there that scratch this itch?
You can find huginn[1] & n8n[2] interesting.
Incredibly useful and convenient.
Re Pushbullet specifically: it no longer supports iOS but either way, it's also much more complex [0] to use.
1. Here's a URL (custom to each user/applet). You can either GET or POST to it. No auth/headers required (the URL includes a token).
2. You can optionally submit a JSON in the format of {"value1": ..., "value2": ..., "value3": ...} and set up the applet to set those values as the notification title, body, link, or image.
Rather unfortunately, you can only specify three values in the JSON so you can only ever have three of those four properties filled in for a single notification. But you can set up multiple receiving URLs/applets such that you can send the first notification containing three of those properties and then a second notification containing the last property.
Came in handy when I needed to poll something on my end, which would trigger the webhook when it met certain conditions.
I also use it to send important notifications from some of my servers to my phone. I just have to `curl` the info to IFTTT server with my API key and send the info I need.
We use it to relay tweets to a discord channel webhook. The requirement was that it had to relay the tweet contents with no flair or "tweeted by" or link to the tweet, all discord bot solutions fail this requirement and i didn't want to learn how2tweeterapi.
The problem with IFTTT has always been speed for me. I had the soccer goal notifications activated once I got my hue lights years ago so that when my team scored itd flash the lights. Usually this happened five minutes after I watched it on the TV. Useless.
If the developer is actually continuing development, new releases that are worth paying for will happen.
It literally will break if left unmaintained if not funded properly, unlike a traditional software.
I do agree with other subscription-based models that sells software like Adobe Creative Cloud, where I'd be perfectly okay with having a non-updating version for a fixed cost.
> Think of it as a hackable version of IFTTT or Zapier on your own server.
What does faster mean?
My biggest frustration is that my Maker Webhooks[0] requests take hours (4 hours on average maybe?) to execute with Wyze integration.
The 3-applet limit is weak, though.
IFTTT has rarely worked properly for me with synchronizations running terribly behind or not at all.
why would I pay for that, with a challenging interface and just single step actions? Zapier does just as much if not more for $15 a month.
polling rate is an hour normally, now with pro you can get it at 5 minutes