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Flasho: Open-source,no-code tool to setup transactional notifications in minutes

4 points by jhansie 4y ago

jhansie 4y ago
Hi HN, We just launched Flasho- an open-source, no-code tool to set up transactional notifications in minutes. Last year when we were building an avatar-based social app, we realised that building notifications took up significant time and development effort (establishing microservices, integrating with a bunch of different service providers etc). And every time we wanted to set up new notifications or make changes to existing ones, we had to make multiple changes across the codebase which was time-consuming and messy. We realised we needed a better way to manage this. Existing solutions were either too expensive or required us to share customer data with third parties. And that is when we decided to build an in-house tool. This tool turned out to be incredibly useful for us. It was a single dashboard to create and manage all our customer notifications across channels. It saved us weeks of developer bandwidth and we could now create and manage notifications without writing any code. We decided to open source this tool and thus Flasho was born. Flasho is self-hosted(docker/deploy from source). You can just connect your DB, set up event triggers and conditions, create content and connect to the service providers of your choice in a matter of minutes, without writing any code. We have SMS and email notifications now. We plan on adding in-app and push soon. We have currently built it for PostgreSQL. We will make it compatible with more databases in the coming days. We’ve launched it under the MIT licence so any developer can use the tool. We don't intend on charging individual developers. The plan is to generate revenue through a cloud hosted service, priority support, features like multi-user login etc. Check it out and let us know what you think!
satya71 4y ago
Interesting approach and could solve a pain point for us. I'm not sure about the no-code rules however. Whoever is using it will probably need to know enough about the data-model, that they'd likely be a programmer. As a programmer, I've found code is faster than no-code. I could be wrong about who uses it. Will keep an eye on it.
- jhansie 4y ago
  Fair point. In our experience with our previous product (for which we had originally built Flasho as an in-house tool ) ,we saw that both devs and non-devs (from the growth team) used it to set up customer notifications . Obviously , the growth folks initially needed a short introduction to the database. Once that was done, they were pretty comfortable with the tool.

4 points by jhansie 4y ago

Hi HN, We just launched Flasho- an open-source, no-code tool to set up transactional notifications in minutes. Last year when we were building an avatar-based social app, we realised that building notifications took up significant time and development effort (establishing microservices, integrating with a bunch of different service providers etc). And every time we wanted to set up new notifications or make changes to existing ones, we had to make multiple changes across the codebase which was time-consuming and messy. We realised we needed a better way to manage this. Existing solutions were either too expensive or required us to share customer data with third parties. And that is when we decided to build an in-house tool. This tool turned out to be incredibly useful for us. It was a single dashboard to create and manage all our customer notifications across channels. It saved us weeks of developer bandwidth and we could now create and manage notifications without writing any code. We decided to open source this tool and thus Flasho was born. Flasho is self-hosted(docker/deploy from source). You can just connect your DB, set up event triggers and conditions, create content and connect to the service providers of your choice in a matter of minutes, without writing any code. We have SMS and email notifications now. We plan on adding in-app and push soon. We have currently built it for PostgreSQL. We will make it compatible with more databases in the coming days. We’ve launched it under the MIT licence so any developer can use the tool. We don't intend on charging individual developers. The plan is to generate revenue through a cloud hosted service, priority support, features like multi-user login etc. Check it out and let us know what you think!

satya71 4y ago

Interesting approach and could solve a pain point for us. I'm not sure about the no-code rules however. Whoever is using it will probably need to know enough about the data-model, that they'd likely be a programmer. As a programmer, I've found code is faster than no-code. I could be wrong about who uses it. Will keep an eye on it.

jhansie 4y ago
Fair point. In our experience with our previous product (for which we had originally built Flasho as an in-house tool ) ,we saw that both devs and non-devs (from the growth team) used it to set up customer notifications . Obviously , the growth folks initially needed a short introduction to the database. Once that was done, they were pretty comfortable with the tool.