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This company reminds me of library vs service topic on here a couple of days ago.

5 billion dollars for what should've been a free set of libraries and competing UI interfaces to cater to different levels of tech savviness.

It's crazy how complicated the simplest things are in tech that these companies even need to exist. Hopefully it's just growing pains, rather than consolidation and a swamp for decades to come, like we've had with Microsoft.

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I agree overall that many things suited to libraries have become SaaS, but Zapier and similar are well-suited to being a SaaS. For example, a lot of Zapier's services are triggered by incoming webhooks, which doesn't work so great running on the boss's desktop. Same with cron-triggered services.

You really need to run these kinds of services on a server. And the people who use Zapier typically aren't comfortable setting up a server.

Also, there are some very well-done and rather old open source alternatives to Zapier (Huginn, Node Red, etc) but they run best on servers for the reasons mentioned above, so few non-technical people use them.

Who are these engineers that would have built these free libraries?

They work for the companies selling the UI?

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