I skipped to chapter 9 in the article ("Clogged"), and it looked like Pipes failed because it didn't have a large enough team or a well-defined mission. As a result they couldn't offer a super robust product that would lure in enterprise users. "You could not purchase some number of guaranteed-to-work Pipes calls per month" is the quote from the article.

The reason I think that interesting is because that's the model these days for everything from AI tokens to Monday.com seats. It makes me feel like Pipes was before its time.

That said I've been collecting different "business glue" products that are similar to Pipes. To me, like you say, they aren't as interesting, exciting and intuitive as Pipes was, but maybe it just takes a little more digging. I tried to focus on open source tools but some aren't.

- n8n io: https://n8n.io/integrations/mondaycom/

- Node-RED: https://nodered.org/ (just read about this one in this thread)

- trigger dev: trigger.dev

- automatisch.io: https://automatisch.io/docs/

- Activepieces: https://www.activepieces.com/docs/getting-started/introducti...

- Huginn: https://github.com/huginn/huginn

- budibase: https://budibase.com/

- windmill: https://www.windmill.dev/

- tooljet: https://www.tooljet.com/workflows

- Bracket: https://www.usebracket.com/pricing (just SalesForce <-> PostgreSQL)

- Zapier: zapier.com/

Anyway I hope some of these are fun!