12 ms·

Show HN: Axiom – No-code Browser Automation

270 points by yaseer 6y ago

yaseer 6y ago
Hi all, We built a way for non-technical people to automate work in their browser. It’s in beta, and we’ve just made it public: https://axiom.ai/ https://axiom.ai/. After running a consultancy, we noticed lots of small tasks that never got automated. The cost was too high with existing consultancy-focused solutions. So lots of small repetitive tasks built up. Recently though, RPA has become a popular technology for automating big, repetitive processes. RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is a way to automate using the user interface of applications, rather than APIs. If you’ve ever used an Excel or Emacs macro, it’s the same principle. Companies like UiPath and Automation anywhere have had great success deploying RPA for enterprise use-cases (e.g. processing 1000s of invoices for a multinational) But we believe RPA also has potential as a no-code paradigm for smaller use-cases (e.g a customer support person doing data-entry). That's because most people intuitively understand UIs, but not APIs. So we thought, what would happen if you took RPA technology and packaged it up in a no-code Zapier-like SaaS? This way, all the small tasks too small for developer time can get automated. Our current users are mostly non-technical and in roles like sales or e-commerce administration. They have repetitive extract, transform, load (ETL) tasks, like: -Gathering data for sales enrichment, then inputting into their CRM -Connecting and exporting data from e-commerce systems like Amazon and Shopify, where APIs are limited. UI-based automation is not just a way to fill gaps in APIs. We've found it is a more intuitive and faster way for many non-technical people to automate. Along the way, we’ve also discovered many new niches (like sports betting funds) that we didn’t know existed. Axiom is not built for large-scale data-scraping or automated testing, though. These require specific features we do not yet support (e.g. IP switching, or assertion logic). We don’t touch your data. All data-processing and execution occurs client-side, on your machine. We only store the code for execution. For data storage, we use your Google drive account. Our beta only supports Google Chrome (this is just an MVP. We want to expand support to FireFox and other browsers with time and resources). I’m sure the HN audience has seen how challenging browser automation can be, particularly with the complexity of modern JS-heavy web-apps. We’d love your feedback, experience and thoughts! For example: Some users have said the permissions being requested by our app are off-putting. We’re listening and adapting. We’re removing permissions + improving communication. To reiterate, we do not store any data processed by bots on your machine: https://axiom.ai/privacy-policy https://axiom.ai/privacy-policy
jonny383 6y ago
Why is your product called Axiom "AI"? I'm struggling to see any actual AI baked into the product.
- yaseer 6y ago
  It was a convenient domain name with alliteration - we make no AI claims in any of our marketing.
  - onion2k 6y ago
    Your domain name is marketing.
    - yaseer 6y ago
      Well, the decision process to decide our domain went like this: 'axiom.pm is available and axiom.ai is available. axiom.ai sounds better'. Our users have voiced their concerns about many things (primarily data privacy), but to date, none have told us they felt deceived by the domain.
      - devsatish 6y ago
        seems .ai is the new .io for tech startups/projects..
        yaseer 6y ago
        That's pretty much how we see it. It's what .ai has become. .ai is a country-code, not an officially designated domain for artificial intelligence.
        onion2k 6y ago
        That's pretty much how we see it. It's what .ai has become. How you see it doesn't matter. Marketing is not about doing whatever you think is good and then telling your audience they're wrong when they interpret it differently. If someone sees .ai in your business name (and you're not based in Anguilla) then they're going to make some assumptions. In your case that assumption is that the "ai" part is just "marketing bullshit", and that will probably affect whether or not people give your product a fair try.
virvar 6y ago
As someone who implemented and runs RPA in the public sector I would be interested if you made a couple of things come true. No one offers an easy way to let employees build and share “personal” bots. Part of this has to do with non-programmers having a much harder time understanding things like loops than we imagined they would. Another problem is maintaining business process logic and knowledge as employees come and go. And lastly there is the security thing. In an enterprise setting you probably won’t want to run this in someone else’s cloud, you want to run it through your IT operations in your own onsite/cloud/whatever to both utilise your local accessing rights but also to make sure data never leaves you. Maybe we’re not who you are targeting, but we’ve yet to find a product that actually lets us let employees build small bots in a way that fits into our IT operations, and this is quite a big market in my country. Of course you’ll be late to the table, and not be what the big consultant agencies like EY are partnered with. But what they are currently selling isn’t actually what we need. So good luck, I’ll certainly add you to our “keep a look out” list.
- JoeSmithson 6y ago
  Are you able to say what part of the public sector you have worked with? I am interested in this area, I am sure it is a potential gold mine for productivity (and land mine!).
  - virvar 6y ago
    I work in the digitalisation department of a danish city. We have a couple of running processes. Mainly for paying already approved bills and benefits through different systems. Which aren’t only web based. But we had/have an intention of letting people use personal automation tools like this project when/if the right setup becomes available.
- yaseer 6y ago
  Thanks for the insights!
- productive 6y ago
  Virvar - out of curiosity - why is it that you would like to let the users build those bots? Intuitively, users just don't have the skills, patience, the technical mindset, the understanding of the IT landscape (imagine some non-working SSO - which user is going to know how to get that to work!). Basically "what's wrong" with doing it 'the normal way' - which is to have an IT team (in-house or external like EY) do the work?
rvz 6y ago
> Axiom is quick to use; just point and click, with no need for API integrations or complicated code. Get bots running fast and spend more time on the important stuff. Great and it gets to the point for the end users. But.. > Step 2 of 2 - Install the desktop application. > 168 MB for the DMG, 427 MB for the app. I get that this is your first release but is it possible that the Chrome extension can be used on its own? If not is it possible to reduce the size of this app? I say this because my impression after opening this app is that it will be running in the background which will take up more of my Macbook's RAM given that it is Electron. On top of that, I already have 11 other Electron apps installed and this one is twice as big as three other electron apps I already have and my disk is already complaining about freeing up space.
- yaseer 6y ago
  Yes, we definitely want to eliminate the electron app. I agree they are bloated and annoying. The first route for this is running your bots in the cloud, although that will mean we have to process your data (something we don't currently do). We do want to release a stripped down version that can run with the extension alone, however, this won't support many of the most common use-cases for axiom, like bulk downloading and uploading files.
keithnz 6y ago
"we do not store any data processed by bots on your machine" is that right?
- yaseer 6y ago
  Yes, 100%. All bots run on your local machine, we only store the code for execution, not the data it processes. We've taken steps to be classified as a GDPR-compliant data-processor. We use your browsers local storage for many operations that other applications store on their server.
  - kkotak 6y ago
    The sentence is misleading. I think you meant to say - "All data is stored locally on your machine and not on our server".
    - yaseer 6y ago
      Ah yes, I've re-read the sentence, this is what I meant to say!
polskibus 6y ago
Any plans for open source for on-prem use ?
- yaseer 6y ago
  Right now it's actually entirely on-premise, as bots run only on your local machine - we don't process data. Open-source is something we'd definitely consider - there are many hard technical problems with browser automation that would benefit from open-source collaboration.
  - yaseer 6y ago
    Correction -it's not entirely on-premise. The script storage and login is tied to our server. This thread has given us some serious thoughts about a fully on-premise version though!
fancyfish 6y ago
Happy Axiom customer here. Its main selling point: absolute ease of use. Like a point-and-click selenium. Our analysts , who are doing quick analytics or analytics without the need for a long-term engineered solution, are very satisfied with it. I find it powerful enough for production use (it works with IG and even FB to some extent). Only downside I can think of: pricing is a bit opaque, outside the “desktop” license.
- yaseer 6y ago
  Hey, thanks! Yeah, so pricing is opaque because in all honestly, we're still figuring things out. We're unlikely to lift pricing and annoy users. If anything, we're extending the free trial for most users, and may introduce a cheaper tier too.
  - shireboy 6y ago
    Cheaper tier would be great. I can think of some things I could use this for that are not 50$/mo things. Scraping personal finance, automating personal blog etc. but I definitely understand a startup needing to figure out pricing
    - yaseer 6y ago
      Cool, by way of a quick survey on HN, how much would you pay in a cheaper tier?
      - dotancohen 6y ago
        You're not asking me, but if home users are a target market then it would have to be $1 - $3 dollars per month. I could imagine scraping local events websites, banks, maybe online auctions, etc. When home users subscribed to one or two services, we could get away with $10 monthly. Now, with home users accustomed to $1 apps and subscribing to a dozen different services, $3 is about the maximum before signups drop significantly.
        6y ago
ronack 6y ago
Reminds me of Ghost Mouse from 20 years ago. I remember using it to automate Connect Four and win a few bucks from iWon.com.
eastendguy 6y ago
Hi, interesting. Does this run in the browser or on the backend? "All your bots live on you computer and process data in your web browser. We store the steps of your bot and data" It seems the scripts are stored on your servers? Why? Does this mean that you can see my code or is it encrypted? How does this compare to the more established web macro recorder tools (browser extensions) like the open-source kantu? https://github.com/A9T9/Kantu https://github.com/A9T9/Kantu
- yaseer 6y ago
  Good questions! This currently runs only on your local machine. We do have a cloud version coming soon, but running your bots this way will be optional. Yes, the code only is stored, not the data it processes. We could encrypt them so we can't read, but it would prevent us updating your scripts in future for new versions of axiom. It does mean we could run your code, but this is not something we do, unless you want us to run your script in our cloud. UI.Vision and long-established macro-recorders like iMacros target developers; this is a complete no-code approach. Our tool is primarily built for non-technical people. We also have and are building up a bot sharing system (i.e. templated bot app store). It will be subject to manual vetting for quite a while.
  - gt50201 6y ago
    In a previous company we were scraping customers web pages to load customer and product information because the number of systems and teams involved to connect to their CDP would take months to get up and running. A few problems we had to solve was the web pages changing underneath us and some pages not being formatted the same. We ended up having to detect those changes server-side to alert us to update the scraper. How do you all deal with these use-cases? Also, we tried to leverage: https://www.diffbot.com/ https://www.diffbot.com/ but the lack-of-accuracy/lack-of-complete-data + cost never justified it's usage.
    - yaseer 6y ago
      Yes, very good question (I've answered a similar one on detecting whether the page has finished loading). It's a deceptively hard problem. Essentially, what we do is fingerprint the element. If the page changes, it boils down to how effective our fingerprinting and search algorithms are, to find the element if it has moved or changed. The algorithms behind that are good enough for most use-cases now, but it's something we're continuously iterating on.
wheelerwj 6y ago
hey @yaseer, Really cool idea, thanks for sharing! RPA is a great, underserved niche for the SMBs. I've read through your privacy policy but i'd like some more clarification. specifically, can you talk about exactly what data is sent to your servers? For example, if i use Axiom to login to a vendor site, those log on credentials should be stored only locally correct? Does your team have the ability to access any of the data that would be retrieved from the vendor application? I have a few really solid use cases but I need to cover the data privacy concerns first.
- yaseer 6y ago
  Yep, of course. That's right; Right now, we don't store credentials. The cookie from your local machine when logged in is passed to axiom locally, and never sent to us. We store the code for your script on our servers. This is necessary to update scripts for future versions of axiom. We do not store the data this code processes. We do have a cloud version upcoming that will process data on our servers, but this will be optional, and not enforced.
  - wheelerwj 6y ago
    Thanks, for example, you would be able to see the steps of the automation, and the site (full URL) where the automation is targeted, the name of the fields being captured during scraping, and you might receive some data about the success of the step/process. But you do not receive any feedback about whats gathered or returned to the desktop. Cloud version could be cool for some people but i think it might kill any shot at the industry I serve.
    - yaseer 6y ago
      Yes, that's exactly right - we would see the URLs, the names of fields (from the DOM), and success states. Just not the data itself. It's basically what would be stored in a web-scraping or automated testing script.
wheelerwj 6y ago
also, there's no download link on your tutorials/help page. kind of a growth hack fail.
- yaseer 6y ago
  Very good point. There is now.
shakermakr 6y ago
I see this is sponsored by SAP. Is it integrated with their existing RPA offerings?
- yaseer 6y ago
  We're a startup from SAP.io's accelerator program, so quite a separate entity. We received funding/mentorship from SAP via Techstars, but don't integrate with their RPA (right now at least...). SAP's RPA is more focused on larger enterprise use-cases within their ecosystem, whereas we're looking at SME and even consumer use-cases.
iudqnolq 6y ago
The promo video includes "Click Social Media Buttons: This bot only clicks on the social media button if it has not already been liked or followed" [vid]. I can't think of the intended use case; how do you envision this might be used? [vid]: https://youtu.be/D3dqsZ1fyCU?t=112 https://youtu.be/D3dqsZ1fyCU?t=112
- yaseer 6y ago
  In private beta, a lot of users were using axiom to automate their likes and follows, to build up an audience on Instagram. They were doing this work manually in any case. We would not want this to be done at scale, in a cloud, like a nefarious bot-farm. However, at the scale of a bot tied to a single individual's browser, doing repetitive work in growth-marketing and sales, we'd allow this usage.
  - michaelmior 6y ago
    Isn't this a violation of Instagram's ToS?
    - yaseer 6y ago
      https://help.instagram.com/1188470931252371 https://help.instagram.com/1188470931252371 Creating user accounts with bots, and crawling certainly is, but I can't see anything about automating likes (correct me if I'm wrong). There are many chrome extensions which do specifically automate likes on the Chrome store. Ours is just a chrome extension for general browser automation, where this is just one use-case.
      - fenwick67 6y ago
        "We prohibit crawling, scraping, caching or otherwise accessing any content on the Service via automated means" ... "You must not create or submit unwanted email, comments, likes or other forms of commercial or harassing communications (a/k/a "spam") to any Instagram users."
iwangulenko 6y ago
Web scrapping is a huge problem and I am happy to seem more usable solution but why do you need these permissions from me: See, edit, create, and delete ALL of your Google Drive files See, edit, create, and delete ALL your spreadsheets in Google Drive
- bkanber 6y ago
  Google Drive and Google Calendar permissions are not that great. IIRC there is no distinction between individual CRUD actions, so if the app wants to create a file they also need perms to edit and delete.
- yaseer 6y ago
  This is the most common thing to cause alarm; Google's permissions are a little awkward. We are not reading all your files - we are only reading/writing to the google sheets input as a link to our bot. We're looking now at turning off access for anything outside Google sheets, so this message and permissions system is less alarming.
kennyangel 6y ago
This is a prove comment
levpopov 6y ago
Congrats on launching! yaseer, why does Axiom require a desktop app (vs running purely as a chrome extension)?
- yaseer 6y ago
  We found a whole set of technical limitations to using just a chrome extension (file downloads and uploads to name but one). The simplest solution was to include a desktop service, although I agree it's a huge inelegant electron app. This paved the way for running axiom in the cloud. Once we can do that, you won't need the desktop app. I hope with time we can have a slimmed down extension-only version too, but this will be more limited in capability.
xrendan 6y ago
How easy is it to customize data output? If I have a JSON Schema I want to conform to that requires collecting data from multiple linked pages, is it possible to do that?
- yaseer 6y ago
  It is possible - but you'll need to write code. Right now we have a custom code-block with a gloriously undocumented API. I recommend playing around, seeing if you think axiom is useful for you, then dropping our support an e-mail on ai AT axiom.ai and we can talk you through the rest of your use-case. We're pretty responsive.
msla 6y ago
Sounds like something similar to the PawClaws project: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pawclaws/figeaallbafpdefmmkfipkgdgpknmhfl?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pawclaws/figeaallb... https://github.com/TobiasKundig/PawClaws https://github.com/TobiasKundig/PawClaws https://github.com/PawClaws/chromePawExt https://github.com/PawClaws/chromePawExt I wonder though: How do you deal with asynchronous sites which may take a variable amount of time for elements to load? Do you synchronize with Angular or try to detect elements or is it just the old stopwatch-and-pray technique?
- yaseer 6y ago
  Very, very good question. The long-story short is that I don't think there's an algorithm that can determine the completion of page-load with certainty for complex JS SPAs. We fingerprint elements, check if the page is changing along the critical path and wait if it is, and look at network traffic. We can't say with certainty, but we can form a good guess - the accuracy of that guess is always improving. This is something I think would benefit from open-source collaboration, if we went down that route.
jhunter1016 6y ago
I think for anyone who has ever tried to do significant scraping, or even testing, with something like Puppeteer, you can easily see what services like this should exist. The price is surely targeted towards businesses, and I think that's a smart move.
vongomben 6y ago
Gonna check this tomorrow. Lately I had big pleasure using nbrowser node in node red https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-nbrowser https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-nbrowser
anandchowdhary 6y ago
Really exciting to see this! My friend and I are also working on a very similar open-source SaaS offering, Puppet [1], so much so that we use the same "no code browser automation" words to describe our service. When we launch in the coming weeks, I'll be sure to post on HN, but in a nutshell, it's entirely cloud-based (as opposed to having to downloading something), open-source, and at a price point closer to ~$5/m. Of course, Axios is a far superior product with many more features, but we're targeting individuals who want to automate small parts of their workflows rather than businesses who'd pay $50/m. I'm glad to see your launch and I'm sure there's plenty of room to play. :) [1] Very under construction landing page (all hash links) for the extra-curious: https://puppet.js.org https://puppet.js.org
- johns 6y ago
  Congrats on nearing launch. You’re being downvoted because it’s socially unacceptable here to use a competitors thread to promote your service. Unless you are specifically mentioned by another commenter or you have a broader, vendor-agnostic insight to provide related to the service, you’ll be better off discussing your service in your own submissions about it. Good luck with the launch!
  - anandchowdhary 6y ago
    Got it, thanks for letting me know!
- wackget 6y ago
  When you say it's powered by Chrome, is it actually using the full Chrome browser or just the Chromium project's rendering engine etc.? Chrome has privacy problems and I prefer my browsing data stays out of Google's hands.
voldemort1968 6y ago
Looks like a great tool, but $50/month is pretty steep especially when I'm the provider of the computing power. Can you explain the rationale behind this price?
- yaseer 6y ago
  Yes, we decided to start high, and introduce lower tiers after, because lowering your prices doesn't upset people, but putting them up does. Many of our users are expecting to pay $50 p/m, but will get a present surprise of a cheaper tier this month, rather than the other way around.
  - rasabatino 6y ago
    AS someone who is the core demographic that will use this: if this works the way it says it does, it could cost $100 and I would still expense that to my company without blinking.
swyx 6y ago
congrats! i saw that you submitted this 27 and 28 days ago. just wondering what you think made this post the successful one? titling? random chance?
- dang 6y ago
  I'll take this one! The short version is that I invited the repost and coached the founders the same way that I do for YC startups with their Launch HNs, about which see https://news.ycombinator.com/launches https://news.ycombinator.com/launches and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22launch%20hn%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... I will come back and add more explanation about what this means, and how it works, because the intention is to open this facility more up to the community. Edit: here are the details. I helped edit the text with which they were appealing to HN. Then, when the post was ready, I put it in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380), so it got a random placement on HN's front page. We're happy to do that for posts that we think will interest the community. If they don't interest the community, they fall off the front page soon enough. The support I gave these guys was exactly the same as what we do for YC startups who want to launch on HN—with the exception of the front-page placement mechanism, which is different (see links above). I've wanted to open this Launch HN process up to non-YC startups for quite some time, and have begun to do it experimentally. The goal is to produce threads that the community finds interesting, and also to help startups. The downside with this is that I'm the only person doing it, there is only one of me, and it doesn't have much spare time. If you want to be considered for this experiment, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com, but please have mercy if I don't reply right away or don't feel that it's a good fit. There's simply no possibility of supporting everybody, even though I would love to.
  - swyx 6y ago
    dang, you are a treasure. someday i would love to take advantage of that, tho i dont need it right now (launching on HN seems like such black magic to me, yet can drive so much traffic when done well). meanwhile, thank you for all you do here.
wackget 6y ago
I really like the concept, having personally struggled with browser automation scripting in the past for business and personal use. However, I'm concerned about the privacy and security implications of storing users' automation scripts in the cloud. What if I want to automate processes on sites or applications which contain sensitive data? In other responses I think you've confirmed that scraped data itself is never sent to your servers, but even the script and its metadata (e.g. names of fields, search terms, IDs of elements on the page etc.) can contain sensitive information. In several of my clients' environments the use of this tool simply wouldn't be allowed because no third party data is allowed to leave the internal network. Is there a way to use the product without sending any data whatsoever to your servers? Also, does this work with browsers other than Chrome?
- yaseer 6y ago
  This currently only works with Chrome (still an MVP). We would eventually like to expand support to other browsers with future iterations. RE: Data leaving the network. This is a very good point. If you have a strong business-case you'd like us to look at, but find privacy is the main issue, e-mail me at yaseer AT axiom dot ai; we may be able to investigate what on-prem would look like.
marc_io 6y ago
This looks quite similar to Ghost Inspector.
dmix 6y ago
I could see this being useful for tracking COVID data on government websites. Ontario only posts the current days stats for 24hrs until the next day. You could extract it into a spreadsheet with this. I'm also curious if there are some use-cases for tracking releases of new content on various sites, similar to how CouchPotato combines TV show releases and tracking them on torrent sites.
- yaseer 6y ago
  We've thought about this too! It's not really effective with our desktop version. The cloud version should enable it though. One of the most common things people want to do is create a series of bots than consolidates data and generates reports; it has general applicability for use-cases outside COVID.
dan-robertson 6y ago
I saw an old demo from Microsoft research in their programming by example group. The idea was to figure out how to extract (json-shaped) data from websites given a few examples of where that data was by the user. The video on this site reminded me of that. I think this presents a better interface than MSR and by restricting to tabular structures of data (as far as I can tell), I think the system is easier to understand and likely more reliable.
- yaseer 6y ago
  We do indeed restrict ourselves to tabular structures of data, both on the web-page level and outside. Many non-technical people think in terms of spreadsheets and tables. If you give people the spreadsheet/table as the data structure primitive through which you're iterating, they get the concept of a loop straight away. Couple that concept with teaching them a variable, and they can achieve a lot.
  - dan-robertson 6y ago
    I think a tabular model is probably a good idea
oredbored 6y ago
You mentioned sports betting funds - Just wondering if you could elaborate further on the use case here?
- yaseer 6y ago
  Collecting and consolidating data + filling in the forms across different sites to place bets

270 points by yaseer 6y ago

Hi all, We built a way for non-technical people to automate work in their browser. It’s in beta, and we’ve just made it public: https://axiom.ai/ https://axiom.ai/. After running a consultancy, we noticed lots of small tasks that never got automated. The cost was too high with existing consultancy-focused solutions. So lots of small repetitive tasks built up. Recently though, RPA has become a popular technology for automating big, repetitive processes. RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is a way to automate using the user interface of applications, rather than APIs. If you’ve ever used an Excel or Emacs macro, it’s the same principle. Companies like UiPath and Automation anywhere have had great success deploying RPA for enterprise use-cases (e.g. processing 1000s of invoices for a multinational) But we believe RPA also has potential as a no-code paradigm for smaller use-cases (e.g a customer support person doing data-entry). That's because most people intuitively understand UIs, but not APIs. So we thought, what would happen if you took RPA technology and packaged it up in a no-code Zapier-like SaaS? This way, all the small tasks too small for developer time can get automated. Our current users are mostly non-technical and in roles like sales or e-commerce administration. They have repetitive extract, transform, load (ETL) tasks, like: -Gathering data for sales enrichment, then inputting into their CRM -Connecting and exporting data from e-commerce systems like Amazon and Shopify, where APIs are limited. UI-based automation is not just a way to fill gaps in APIs. We've found it is a more intuitive and faster way for many non-technical people to automate. Along the way, we’ve also discovered many new niches (like sports betting funds) that we didn’t know existed. Axiom is not built for large-scale data-scraping or automated testing, though. These require specific features we do not yet support (e.g. IP switching, or assertion logic). We don’t touch your data. All data-processing and execution occurs client-side, on your machine. We only store the code for execution. For data storage, we use your Google drive account. Our beta only supports Google Chrome (this is just an MVP. We want to expand support to FireFox and other browsers with time and resources). I’m sure the HN audience has seen how challenging browser automation can be, particularly with the complexity of modern JS-heavy web-apps. We’d love your feedback, experience and thoughts! For example: Some users have said the permissions being requested by our app are off-putting. We’re listening and adapting. We’re removing permissions + improving communication. To reiterate, we do not store any data processed by bots on your machine: https://axiom.ai/privacy-policy https://axiom.ai/privacy-policy

jonny383 6y ago

Why is your product called Axiom "AI"? I'm struggling to see any actual AI baked into the product.

yaseer 6y ago
It was a convenient domain name with alliteration - we make no AI claims in any of our marketing.
- onion2k 6y ago
  Your domain name is marketing.
  - yaseer 6y ago
    Well, the decision process to decide our domain went like this: 'axiom.pm is available and axiom.ai is available. axiom.ai sounds better'. Our users have voiced their concerns about many things (primarily data privacy), but to date, none have told us they felt deceived by the domain.
    - devsatish 6y ago
      seems .ai is the new .io for tech startups/projects..
      - yaseer 6y ago
        That's pretty much how we see it. It's what .ai has become. .ai is a country-code, not an officially designated domain for artificial intelligence.
        onion2k 6y ago
        That's pretty much how we see it. It's what .ai has become. How you see it doesn't matter. Marketing is not about doing whatever you think is good and then telling your audience they're wrong when they interpret it differently. If someone sees .ai in your business name (and you're not based in Anguilla) then they're going to make some assumptions. In your case that assumption is that the "ai" part is just "marketing bullshit", and that will probably affect whether or not people give your product a fair try.

virvar 6y ago

As someone who implemented and runs RPA in the public sector I would be interested if you made a couple of things come true. No one offers an easy way to let employees build and share “personal” bots. Part of this has to do with non-programmers having a much harder time understanding things like loops than we imagined they would. Another problem is maintaining business process logic and knowledge as employees come and go. And lastly there is the security thing. In an enterprise setting you probably won’t want to run this in someone else’s cloud, you want to run it through your IT operations in your own onsite/cloud/whatever to both utilise your local accessing rights but also to make sure data never leaves you. Maybe we’re not who you are targeting, but we’ve yet to find a product that actually lets us let employees build small bots in a way that fits into our IT operations, and this is quite a big market in my country. Of course you’ll be late to the table, and not be what the big consultant agencies like EY are partnered with. But what they are currently selling isn’t actually what we need. So good luck, I’ll certainly add you to our “keep a look out” list.

JoeSmithson 6y ago
Are you able to say what part of the public sector you have worked with? I am interested in this area, I am sure it is a potential gold mine for productivity (and land mine!).
- virvar 6y ago
  I work in the digitalisation department of a danish city. We have a couple of running processes. Mainly for paying already approved bills and benefits through different systems. Which aren’t only web based. But we had/have an intention of letting people use personal automation tools like this project when/if the right setup becomes available.
yaseer 6y ago
Thanks for the insights!
productive 6y ago
Virvar - out of curiosity - why is it that you would like to let the users build those bots? Intuitively, users just don't have the skills, patience, the technical mindset, the understanding of the IT landscape (imagine some non-working SSO - which user is going to know how to get that to work!). Basically "what's wrong" with doing it 'the normal way' - which is to have an IT team (in-house or external like EY) do the work?

rvz 6y ago

> Axiom is quick to use; just point and click, with no need for API integrations or complicated code. Get bots running fast and spend more time on the important stuff. Great and it gets to the point for the end users. But.. > Step 2 of 2 - Install the desktop application. > 168 MB for the DMG, 427 MB for the app. I get that this is your first release but is it possible that the Chrome extension can be used on its own? If not is it possible to reduce the size of this app? I say this because my impression after opening this app is that it will be running in the background which will take up more of my Macbook's RAM given that it is Electron. On top of that, I already have 11 other Electron apps installed and this one is twice as big as three other electron apps I already have and my disk is already complaining about freeing up space.

yaseer 6y ago
Yes, we definitely want to eliminate the electron app. I agree they are bloated and annoying. The first route for this is running your bots in the cloud, although that will mean we have to process your data (something we don't currently do). We do want to release a stripped down version that can run with the extension alone, however, this won't support many of the most common use-cases for axiom, like bulk downloading and uploading files.

keithnz 6y ago

"we do not store any data processed by bots on your machine" is that right?

yaseer 6y ago
Yes, 100%. All bots run on your local machine, we only store the code for execution, not the data it processes. We've taken steps to be classified as a GDPR-compliant data-processor. We use your browsers local storage for many operations that other applications store on their server.
- kkotak 6y ago
  The sentence is misleading. I think you meant to say - "All data is stored locally on your machine and not on our server".
  - yaseer 6y ago
    Ah yes, I've re-read the sentence, this is what I meant to say!

polskibus 6y ago

Any plans for open source for on-prem use ?

yaseer 6y ago
Right now it's actually entirely on-premise, as bots run only on your local machine - we don't process data. Open-source is something we'd definitely consider - there are many hard technical problems with browser automation that would benefit from open-source collaboration.
- yaseer 6y ago
  Correction -it's not entirely on-premise. The script storage and login is tied to our server. This thread has given us some serious thoughts about a fully on-premise version though!

fancyfish 6y ago

Happy Axiom customer here. Its main selling point: absolute ease of use. Like a point-and-click selenium. Our analysts , who are doing quick analytics or analytics without the need for a long-term engineered solution, are very satisfied with it. I find it powerful enough for production use (it works with IG and even FB to some extent). Only downside I can think of: pricing is a bit opaque, outside the “desktop” license.

yaseer 6y ago
Hey, thanks! Yeah, so pricing is opaque because in all honestly, we're still figuring things out. We're unlikely to lift pricing and annoy users. If anything, we're extending the free trial for most users, and may introduce a cheaper tier too.
- shireboy 6y ago
  Cheaper tier would be great. I can think of some things I could use this for that are not 50$/mo things. Scraping personal finance, automating personal blog etc. but I definitely understand a startup needing to figure out pricing
  - yaseer 6y ago
    Cool, by way of a quick survey on HN, how much would you pay in a cheaper tier?
    - dotancohen 6y ago
      You're not asking me, but if home users are a target market then it would have to be $1 - $3 dollars per month. I could imagine scraping local events websites, banks, maybe online auctions, etc. When home users subscribed to one or two services, we could get away with $10 monthly. Now, with home users accustomed to $1 apps and subscribing to a dozen different services, $3 is about the maximum before signups drop significantly.
      - 6y ago

ronack 6y ago

Reminds me of Ghost Mouse from 20 years ago. I remember using it to automate Connect Four and win a few bucks from iWon.com.

eastendguy 6y ago

Hi, interesting. Does this run in the browser or on the backend? "All your bots live on you computer and process data in your web browser. We store the steps of your bot and data" It seems the scripts are stored on your servers? Why? Does this mean that you can see my code or is it encrypted? How does this compare to the more established web macro recorder tools (browser extensions) like the open-source kantu? https://github.com/A9T9/Kantu https://github.com/A9T9/Kantu

yaseer 6y ago
Good questions! This currently runs only on your local machine. We do have a cloud version coming soon, but running your bots this way will be optional. Yes, the code only is stored, not the data it processes. We could encrypt them so we can't read, but it would prevent us updating your scripts in future for new versions of axiom. It does mean we could run your code, but this is not something we do, unless you want us to run your script in our cloud. UI.Vision and long-established macro-recorders like iMacros target developers; this is a complete no-code approach. Our tool is primarily built for non-technical people. We also have and are building up a bot sharing system (i.e. templated bot app store). It will be subject to manual vetting for quite a while.
- gt50201 6y ago
  In a previous company we were scraping customers web pages to load customer and product information because the number of systems and teams involved to connect to their CDP would take months to get up and running. A few problems we had to solve was the web pages changing underneath us and some pages not being formatted the same. We ended up having to detect those changes server-side to alert us to update the scraper. How do you all deal with these use-cases? Also, we tried to leverage: https://www.diffbot.com/ https://www.diffbot.com/ but the lack-of-accuracy/lack-of-complete-data + cost never justified it's usage.
  - yaseer 6y ago
    Yes, very good question (I've answered a similar one on detecting whether the page has finished loading). It's a deceptively hard problem. Essentially, what we do is fingerprint the element. If the page changes, it boils down to how effective our fingerprinting and search algorithms are, to find the element if it has moved or changed. The algorithms behind that are good enough for most use-cases now, but it's something we're continuously iterating on.

wheelerwj 6y ago

hey @yaseer, Really cool idea, thanks for sharing! RPA is a great, underserved niche for the SMBs. I've read through your privacy policy but i'd like some more clarification. specifically, can you talk about exactly what data is sent to your servers? For example, if i use Axiom to login to a vendor site, those log on credentials should be stored only locally correct? Does your team have the ability to access any of the data that would be retrieved from the vendor application? I have a few really solid use cases but I need to cover the data privacy concerns first.

yaseer 6y ago
Yep, of course. That's right; Right now, we don't store credentials. The cookie from your local machine when logged in is passed to axiom locally, and never sent to us. We store the code for your script on our servers. This is necessary to update scripts for future versions of axiom. We do not store the data this code processes. We do have a cloud version upcoming that will process data on our servers, but this will be optional, and not enforced.
- wheelerwj 6y ago
  Thanks, for example, you would be able to see the steps of the automation, and the site (full URL) where the automation is targeted, the name of the fields being captured during scraping, and you might receive some data about the success of the step/process. But you do not receive any feedback about whats gathered or returned to the desktop. Cloud version could be cool for some people but i think it might kill any shot at the industry I serve.
  - yaseer 6y ago
    Yes, that's exactly right - we would see the URLs, the names of fields (from the DOM), and success states. Just not the data itself. It's basically what would be stored in a web-scraping or automated testing script.

wheelerwj 6y ago

also, there's no download link on your tutorials/help page. kind of a growth hack fail.

yaseer 6y ago
Very good point. There is now.

shakermakr 6y ago

I see this is sponsored by SAP. Is it integrated with their existing RPA offerings?

yaseer 6y ago
We're a startup from SAP.io's accelerator program, so quite a separate entity. We received funding/mentorship from SAP via Techstars, but don't integrate with their RPA (right now at least...). SAP's RPA is more focused on larger enterprise use-cases within their ecosystem, whereas we're looking at SME and even consumer use-cases.

iudqnolq 6y ago

The promo video includes "Click Social Media Buttons: This bot only clicks on the social media button if it has not already been liked or followed" [vid]. I can't think of the intended use case; how do you envision this might be used? [vid]: https://youtu.be/D3dqsZ1fyCU?t=112 https://youtu.be/D3dqsZ1fyCU?t=112

yaseer 6y ago
In private beta, a lot of users were using axiom to automate their likes and follows, to build up an audience on Instagram. They were doing this work manually in any case. We would not want this to be done at scale, in a cloud, like a nefarious bot-farm. However, at the scale of a bot tied to a single individual's browser, doing repetitive work in growth-marketing and sales, we'd allow this usage.
- michaelmior 6y ago
  Isn't this a violation of Instagram's ToS?
  - yaseer 6y ago
    https://help.instagram.com/1188470931252371 https://help.instagram.com/1188470931252371 Creating user accounts with bots, and crawling certainly is, but I can't see anything about automating likes (correct me if I'm wrong). There are many chrome extensions which do specifically automate likes on the Chrome store. Ours is just a chrome extension for general browser automation, where this is just one use-case.
    - fenwick67 6y ago
      "We prohibit crawling, scraping, caching or otherwise accessing any content on the Service via automated means" ... "You must not create or submit unwanted email, comments, likes or other forms of commercial or harassing communications (a/k/a "spam") to any Instagram users."

iwangulenko 6y ago

Web scrapping is a huge problem and I am happy to seem more usable solution but why do you need these permissions from me: See, edit, create, and delete ALL of your Google Drive files See, edit, create, and delete ALL your spreadsheets in Google Drive

bkanber 6y ago
Google Drive and Google Calendar permissions are not that great. IIRC there is no distinction between individual CRUD actions, so if the app wants to create a file they also need perms to edit and delete.
yaseer 6y ago
This is the most common thing to cause alarm; Google's permissions are a little awkward. We are not reading all your files - we are only reading/writing to the google sheets input as a link to our bot. We're looking now at turning off access for anything outside Google sheets, so this message and permissions system is less alarming.

kennyangel 6y ago

This is a prove comment

levpopov 6y ago

Congrats on launching! yaseer, why does Axiom require a desktop app (vs running purely as a chrome extension)?

yaseer 6y ago
We found a whole set of technical limitations to using just a chrome extension (file downloads and uploads to name but one). The simplest solution was to include a desktop service, although I agree it's a huge inelegant electron app. This paved the way for running axiom in the cloud. Once we can do that, you won't need the desktop app. I hope with time we can have a slimmed down extension-only version too, but this will be more limited in capability.

xrendan 6y ago

How easy is it to customize data output? If I have a JSON Schema I want to conform to that requires collecting data from multiple linked pages, is it possible to do that?

yaseer 6y ago
It is possible - but you'll need to write code. Right now we have a custom code-block with a gloriously undocumented API. I recommend playing around, seeing if you think axiom is useful for you, then dropping our support an e-mail on ai AT axiom.ai and we can talk you through the rest of your use-case. We're pretty responsive.

msla 6y ago

Sounds like something similar to the PawClaws project: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pawclaws/figeaallbafpdefmmkfipkgdgpknmhfl?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pawclaws/figeaallb... https://github.com/TobiasKundig/PawClaws https://github.com/TobiasKundig/PawClaws https://github.com/PawClaws/chromePawExt https://github.com/PawClaws/chromePawExt I wonder though: How do you deal with asynchronous sites which may take a variable amount of time for elements to load? Do you synchronize with Angular or try to detect elements or is it just the old stopwatch-and-pray technique?

yaseer 6y ago
Very, very good question. The long-story short is that I don't think there's an algorithm that can determine the completion of page-load with certainty for complex JS SPAs. We fingerprint elements, check if the page is changing along the critical path and wait if it is, and look at network traffic. We can't say with certainty, but we can form a good guess - the accuracy of that guess is always improving. This is something I think would benefit from open-source collaboration, if we went down that route.

jhunter1016 6y ago

I think for anyone who has ever tried to do significant scraping, or even testing, with something like Puppeteer, you can easily see what services like this should exist. The price is surely targeted towards businesses, and I think that's a smart move.

vongomben 6y ago

Gonna check this tomorrow. Lately I had big pleasure using nbrowser node in node red https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-nbrowser https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-nbrowser

anandchowdhary 6y ago

Really exciting to see this! My friend and I are also working on a very similar open-source SaaS offering, Puppet [1], so much so that we use the same "no code browser automation" words to describe our service. When we launch in the coming weeks, I'll be sure to post on HN, but in a nutshell, it's entirely cloud-based (as opposed to having to downloading something), open-source, and at a price point closer to ~$5/m. Of course, Axios is a far superior product with many more features, but we're targeting individuals who want to automate small parts of their workflows rather than businesses who'd pay $50/m. I'm glad to see your launch and I'm sure there's plenty of room to play. :) [1] Very under construction landing page (all hash links) for the extra-curious: https://puppet.js.org https://puppet.js.org

johns 6y ago
Congrats on nearing launch. You’re being downvoted because it’s socially unacceptable here to use a competitors thread to promote your service. Unless you are specifically mentioned by another commenter or you have a broader, vendor-agnostic insight to provide related to the service, you’ll be better off discussing your service in your own submissions about it. Good luck with the launch!
- anandchowdhary 6y ago
  Got it, thanks for letting me know!
wackget 6y ago
When you say it's powered by Chrome, is it actually using the full Chrome browser or just the Chromium project's rendering engine etc.? Chrome has privacy problems and I prefer my browsing data stays out of Google's hands.

voldemort1968 6y ago

Looks like a great tool, but $50/month is pretty steep especially when I'm the provider of the computing power. Can you explain the rationale behind this price?

yaseer 6y ago
Yes, we decided to start high, and introduce lower tiers after, because lowering your prices doesn't upset people, but putting them up does. Many of our users are expecting to pay $50 p/m, but will get a present surprise of a cheaper tier this month, rather than the other way around.
- rasabatino 6y ago
  AS someone who is the core demographic that will use this: if this works the way it says it does, it could cost $100 and I would still expense that to my company without blinking.

swyx 6y ago

congrats! i saw that you submitted this 27 and 28 days ago. just wondering what you think made this post the successful one? titling? random chance?

dang 6y ago
I'll take this one! The short version is that I invited the repost and coached the founders the same way that I do for YC startups with their Launch HNs, about which see https://news.ycombinator.com/launches https://news.ycombinator.com/launches and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22launch%20hn%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... I will come back and add more explanation about what this means, and how it works, because the intention is to open this facility more up to the community. Edit: here are the details. I helped edit the text with which they were appealing to HN. Then, when the post was ready, I put it in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380), so it got a random placement on HN's front page. We're happy to do that for posts that we think will interest the community. If they don't interest the community, they fall off the front page soon enough. The support I gave these guys was exactly the same as what we do for YC startups who want to launch on HN—with the exception of the front-page placement mechanism, which is different (see links above). I've wanted to open this Launch HN process up to non-YC startups for quite some time, and have begun to do it experimentally. The goal is to produce threads that the community finds interesting, and also to help startups. The downside with this is that I'm the only person doing it, there is only one of me, and it doesn't have much spare time. If you want to be considered for this experiment, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com, but please have mercy if I don't reply right away or don't feel that it's a good fit. There's simply no possibility of supporting everybody, even though I would love to.
- swyx 6y ago
  dang, you are a treasure. someday i would love to take advantage of that, tho i dont need it right now (launching on HN seems like such black magic to me, yet can drive so much traffic when done well). meanwhile, thank you for all you do here.

wackget 6y ago

I really like the concept, having personally struggled with browser automation scripting in the past for business and personal use. However, I'm concerned about the privacy and security implications of storing users' automation scripts in the cloud. What if I want to automate processes on sites or applications which contain sensitive data? In other responses I think you've confirmed that scraped data itself is never sent to your servers, but even the script and its metadata (e.g. names of fields, search terms, IDs of elements on the page etc.) can contain sensitive information. In several of my clients' environments the use of this tool simply wouldn't be allowed because no third party data is allowed to leave the internal network. Is there a way to use the product without sending any data whatsoever to your servers? Also, does this work with browsers other than Chrome?

yaseer 6y ago
This currently only works with Chrome (still an MVP). We would eventually like to expand support to other browsers with future iterations. RE: Data leaving the network. This is a very good point. If you have a strong business-case you'd like us to look at, but find privacy is the main issue, e-mail me at yaseer AT axiom dot ai; we may be able to investigate what on-prem would look like.

marc_io 6y ago

This looks quite similar to Ghost Inspector.

dmix 6y ago

I could see this being useful for tracking COVID data on government websites. Ontario only posts the current days stats for 24hrs until the next day. You could extract it into a spreadsheet with this. I'm also curious if there are some use-cases for tracking releases of new content on various sites, similar to how CouchPotato combines TV show releases and tracking them on torrent sites.

yaseer 6y ago
We've thought about this too! It's not really effective with our desktop version. The cloud version should enable it though. One of the most common things people want to do is create a series of bots than consolidates data and generates reports; it has general applicability for use-cases outside COVID.

dan-robertson 6y ago

I saw an old demo from Microsoft research in their programming by example group. The idea was to figure out how to extract (json-shaped) data from websites given a few examples of where that data was by the user. The video on this site reminded me of that. I think this presents a better interface than MSR and by restricting to tabular structures of data (as far as I can tell), I think the system is easier to understand and likely more reliable.

yaseer 6y ago
We do indeed restrict ourselves to tabular structures of data, both on the web-page level and outside. Many non-technical people think in terms of spreadsheets and tables. If you give people the spreadsheet/table as the data structure primitive through which you're iterating, they get the concept of a loop straight away. Couple that concept with teaching them a variable, and they can achieve a lot.
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  I think a tabular model is probably a good idea

oredbored 6y ago

You mentioned sports betting funds - Just wondering if you could elaborate further on the use case here?

yaseer 6y ago
Collecting and consolidating data + filling in the forms across different sites to place bets