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> These modern, pretty tools are all communicating with the services they automate using APIs behind the scenes anyway, and accessing those is usually straight

• Chris_Newton 8y ago
  Could you give some examples? Sure. In fact, Zapier have a good example right on their home page, showing a connection between someone submitting a form to Wufoo and adding their email address to a MailChimp mailing list. For automation purposes, Wufoo can trigger a webhook when a form is submitted and MailChimp have a REST API that can be used to manage mailing lists. So, if I wanted to automate that sort of task, I’d probably just set up an endpoint on a server to receive those webhooks and then write a few lines of Python to extract the required form fields and send them off to MailChimp, instead of introducing the additional dependency and potentially cost of an intermediary service like Zapier.
  • laittg 8y ago
    I used Zapier in about 2 months and had the same conclusion. It is still easier and to write a few lines of code (Node.js in my case) to expose a REST API, extract some fields and make a POST request to another service with an authorization header. The benefits of using Zapier as an intermediary service makes no sense for me.