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Comment by canada_dry | Hacker News Reader

An aside... I've never really got why technical folks would use IFTTT vs self-hosted. For non-techies I get it... but there are so many great and free tools available e.g. python, tasker/automagic/B4A, node-red, etc, etc.

I'm guessing this move to PRO will drive capable folks away.

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Because I created applets/whatever’s on ifttt like 5 years ago and I haven’t touched them since, and they keep working.

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...

Anecdata, but the only thing I thought would be hard to get wrong was RSS-to-Twitter which broke multiple times for me.

It took me something like 2 minutes to set up an IFTTT action to email me whenever a keyword showed up in an RSS feed I'm interested in, and I didn't have to worry about keeping the script running or anything like that. There's no way I could have done it that fast even with Python, and I would have to maintain the damn thing.

My use of IFTTT is things like: * When my garage door is open (Garadget) then turn on my garage indicator light (TP Link Kasa Lightbulb). That way if I leave the garage door open on accident I have a bright red light telling me that * When the garage door opens after dusk, turn on the driveway lights * When the doorbell rings (Ring) and it's after dusk, turn on a group of lights (Leviton) * When the door unlocks (August Smart Lock) turn on a group of lights (Leviton)

I'd love to self host rather than use IFTTT, but is that even possible with those other tools?

Checkout Home Assistant. You can self host it, and as long as there is an integration available you should be able to do all that. Getting started with it is a bit of a pain compared to IFTTT but it's self hosted, open source, and free.

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/

This looks like exactly what I've been looking for! Thank you for the recommendation. I started playing around with it in a VM and it's been great so far.

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