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Actionsflow – IFTTT/Zapier free alternative based on GitHub Actions
- theowenyoung 6y agoActionsflow helps you to automate workflows, it's the best IFTTT/Zapier free alternative for developers. With Actionsflow, you can connect your favorite apps, data, and APIs, receive notifications of actions as they occur, sync files, collect data, and more. You can use many triggers provided by the community (Like Slack, RSS, Webhook, Typeform, Email, Reddit, NPM, Telegram, Twitter...), you can also create your own triggers easily. You can also use Github Action as your workflow steps.
- theowenyoung 6y agoHey Hackers I'm Owen, a workflow lover. A few days ago, I received an email from IFTTT that we loved has officially started a paid plan. I'm sorry that we are missing another free and great tool. I wish the IFTTT team all the best and hope they can succeed ! If you want a free, customizable alternative to IFTTT or Zapier, I hope Actionsflow can bring you a different experience. I’d love for you to check it out and hear your thoughts! Happy commenting!
- pettycashstash2 6y agoIfttt is trying to monetize. Can’t blame them. Thanks for this alternative. Also discovered reddit bans on accounts who used ifttt. Wandering if anyone else has same experience
- yewenjie 6y agoI thought IFTTT integration was authorized by reddit. Also, can you please provide a regarding the bans?
- sdflhasjd 6y agohttps://old.reddit.com/r/help/comments/j32vo3/is_reddit_doing_mass_bot_suspensions/ https://old.reddit.com/r/help/comments/j32vo3/is_reddit_doin... A few users who claim to have used IFTTT even for read-only operations are saying they've had their reddit accounts banned. This thread as well, with a response from a reddit staff member: https://old.reddit.com/r/bugs/comments/j343d2/ifttt_is_being_detected_as_a_bot_and_causing_many/ https://old.reddit.com/r/bugs/comments/j343d2/ifttt_is_being...
- tssva 6y agoIFTTT already was monetizing. They previously did so by charging fees to IoT manufacturers which wished to allow their customers to connect their devices to IFTTT. They have raised those fees recently which led to some device manufacturers dropping IFTTT or charging their customers fees to use IFTTT with their devices. This along with IFTTT dropping some actions which resulted them incurring costs, sending SMS messages for example, has significantly reduced the usefulness of IFTTT for many. It will be interesting to see if the decision to monetize through consumers along with manufacturers will work out or alienate enough consumers that even more manufacturers decide that connecting to IFTTT is not worth the expense.
- efreak 6y agoIt always seems like constant searches by ifttt might violate tos, so most services I do searches like that on (or use ifttt to search on) I have separate accounts for automation.
- conatus 6y agoThis is very cool and interesting. Are there any other Zapier clones out there in the open source world?
- theowenyoung 6y agoyes https://n8n.io/ https://n8n.io/ https://nodered.org/ https://nodered.org/ https://github.com/huginn/huginn https://github.com/huginn/huginn
- conatus 6y agoThanks! I guess none of them are amazing, which is why you built this :)
- theowenyoung 6y agofor me, the problem is all of them need to host soemwhere(like vps), but I just want a simple, free, forever service...
- dewey 6y ago> simple, free, forever service I'd argue that running something on a VPS is lot more a "forever service" than abusing Github's free tier for something that's not covered by their ToS.
- anaganisk 6y agoBut this is Directly against Github TOS,and could be shutdown by them like tomorrow.
- searchableguy 6y agoI think the amount of time (work) you have put into this would have given you enough dollars to rent a smallish vps for longer than the life expectancy of GitHub. $50/hour = assuming 10 hours total = $500 A droplet on DO costs $5/month. On few others, it's down to 3$/month. That will run you about 8-10 years with yearly discounts.
- rvz 6y ago> We implemented it based on Github actions. Is this lock in?
- theowenyoung 6y agoThanks, yes for now. You can run it locally for testing, but you need to deploy it to github actions finally. Anyway, this sounds a good idea for no limitation with platform.
- chiefalchemist 6y agoBuffer? Can it feed into Buffer? Or similar? For example, Like a video on You Tube, send that to Buffer. I like IFTTT but consistency and support are always an issue. When it's free that's part of the deal. But if we pay and there's still unreasonable wonkiness...
- theowenyoung 6y agoI haven't used Buffer, I searched Buffer at Github Actions, but there is no actions yet, but it seems that it's easy to support Buffer, I'll add it to todolist.
- Larrikin 6y agoDoes anyone have examples of IFTTT flows that actually make use of the "Pro" features. I hadn't been using it much besides having rss comics sent to my email but had an account for years so figured I'd try it out. As far as I can tell it is exactly the same except I'm paying two bucks a month now.
- BrianOnHN 6y agoIs there no GUI? GUI is very important when you get past the IFTTT and into more IFTTTIFTTTIFTTIFTT workflows. The GUI makes the workflow understandable. And huginn has indicators that enable you to measure progress or identify errors on a diagram.
- theowenyoung 6y agoYes, no GUI, it's more suitable for developers, or you can use it with IFTTT together..
- Thev00d00 6y agoIsnt this a ToS Violation? > Actions should not be used for: >... > any other activity unrelated to the production, testing, deployment, or publication of the software project associated with the repository where GitHub Actions are used.
- theowenyoung 6y agoThank you, I have to say I noticed it from your reply. I'm not sure if it's a ToS Violation, I saw some simillar scheduled actions by other people, I supposed it's ok for github actions. I need to review it again.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoThere was another project on HN recently that used Actions in a manner that also was a ToS violation and there was a lot of discussion there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24452384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24452384 The biggest fear from a lot of devs is that a lot of projects depend on the free Actions quota for their builds, and if a lot of other services start misusing this then Microsoft may shut down or more greatly restrict the free tier.
- shortformblog 6y agoA more general comment because I see these services popping up on here from time to time: You’re not an alternative to IFTTT or Zapier unless you have a comparable GUI, full stop. I would love to see an alternative to these services that could be self-hosted, but the reason why these services are useful for most people is because they have a simple web-based interface, even compared to something like Yahoo Pipes. This opens up their capabilities to non-technical users. If you’re asking people to edit configuration files, you’ve already lost them, unfortunately. If someone can do that, that’s where the opportunity lies for an open-source alternative to Zapier or IFTTT.
- bitxbit 6y agoAm I the only who thinks Zapier and IFTTT are useless? The only one that comes close to delivering on utility is autocode.
- lhoff 6y agoMy brother uses Zapier to automate a lot oft the processes in bis company. Especially the backoffice processes. He is is not a tech savy Person. If you ask him what an API is, he has no idea. It obviously only works if you use SaaS pltaforms for everything but, sadly, thats the default in a lot of companies anyway.
- bitxbit 6y agoInteresting. I personally would never use those services for production/work. And even for personal it’s iffy at best. I wasn’t aware they had so many users.
- djrogers 6y agoInteresting. I personally would never pass up an opportunity to save myself ~20hr a month by automating a business process for free, or nearly free.
- 6y ago
- avel 6y ago> Actionsflow helps you to automate workflows, it's the best IFTTT/Zapier free alternative for developers. Perhaps I'm a bit old school or not as invested in open source "marketing", but I appreciate some more humility and honesty in a project description. With amazing open source projects like n8n and nodered around, it's usually best to wait and receive the title of the "best" from others rather than give it to yourself.
- theowenyoung 6y agoI’m sorry about the description of "best", I have removed this word from the project description, Thank you for your advice, I will remember it.
- mxmilkb 6y agorelated; "best practice" < "good practice"
- avel 6y agoI did not expect that, and sorry if I sounded harsh. I truly admire your enthusiasm, being proud of your work, and of course sharing your work with the open source community.
- canadaduane 6y agoThis is the fastest, coolest, humblest response to constructive criticism I've seen in recent memory. Wow!
- qppo 6y agoGitHub actions isn't free
- theowenyoung 6y agoFree for open source.
- ChrisArchitect 6y agobeen working on this long? interesting - recently just coded something my own as IFTTT limitations on things like twitter were too annoying. Trying to visualize how could recreate my work in this format/actions setup - seems like might work....but alot of this is hanging on Github being 'ok' with Actions being used for this and their cron/scheduler being used all day? I suppose it's running tasks anyways but seems like really could bog it down with a bunch of these just running and not really using Github for anything
- zoobab 6y agoGithub is non-free.
- sydd 6y agoReadme full of emojis? ⁉️ Must be a JavaScript/Typescript project