5 ms·

Show HN: Scriptable.run, make your product extendable by anyone.

38 points by cheerioty 4y ago

nubela 4y ago
I don't get it. What is this supposed to do? How will it help my product? Or am I not the target audience?
- cheerioty 4y ago
  Apologies for that. Please see my other comment for a bit more context and examples.
  - politelemon 4y ago
    Hi just had a look at every comment you've made and every starter page on your site. I'm still lost and don't understand what this is, even though I see some people are already understanding and using your product, which is baffling me more. I think I'm missing where your product runs and who is running what and why they are running a curl command, and if I'd have to make changes in my application to support this. A general conceptual diagram on your site would go a long way.
    - cheerioty 4y ago
      Sincere apologies for that. We’ll make sure to fix this up asap and include a diagram as you suggested as well. Happy to give you a ping as soon as we did!
CJefferson 4y ago
A brief review. I have no idea what your product does. The example at the top of the docs pages still doesn't help me understand what your product does. It also doesn't work, it just returns: {"message":"access token is not valid for this request"} I'm guessing that's because I need to get a valid access token to run the example? Well then you'd better say that, and tell me how to do it, or even better don't require it for your first example to work. I tried going into the "Advanced Guide". It had a handy first link that linked me to "Hello world in scriptable". That sent me back to the first page of the docs, with the example that doesn't work. At this point, I'm stuck and out, sorry.
- cheerioty 4y ago
  Thanks mate, that feedback is really valuable. We definitely need to sharpen our message and guidance there quite a bit. In a nutshell, Scriptable allows you to provide your users with a code escape hatch, for everything your product doesn't support natively yet. For Shopify this might be a function that calculates a custom discount (https://shopify.dev/docs/apps/discounts/experience https://shopify.dev/docs/apps/discounts/experience), while for something like Framer (see example here: https://www.framer.com/learn/how-to-work-with-real-dynamic-data/ https://www.framer.com/learn/how-to-work-with-real-dynamic-d...) it might be to integrate and fetch data from a 3rd party API. There are countless other examples (Auth0 for instance), which provide something similar to their users to bridge gaps. We also use it within our own product to build some custom components, like providing restricted access to a Tesla, Alarm System, Philips Hue System, etc. Here are two examples of that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG1ApkFQ5xU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG1ApkFQ5xU .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6Lf-n3WYh8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6Lf-n3WYh8 Apologies again for doing a poorly job of getting the message across. We're currently working on revamping our landing page, docs and general onboarding story.
  - perk 4y ago
    Exciting product. You should describe some common problems people have, and show us how you could use Scriptable to solve them. That's a nice and "easy" way to showcase a service IMHO.
    - cheerioty 4y ago
      Cheers mate! And thanks a lot for suggestion, this is how we’ll so it!
      - perk 4y ago
        No worries mate. The examples don't have to be ground-breaking or even relevant (for me), but clear so I can see how I can apply Scriptable.dev to solve my specific problems. And, since you target developers, add as much info as you have. Don't skip messy stuff like "how to authenticate" or similar. Good luck!
faizshah 4y ago
It sounds like this is providing a sandboxed wasm runtime as a service is that right? I think in this case the landing page is lacking in technical details to the point where it’s hard to understand what the product actually is. I like the general idea of firecracker as a service and sandboxed code as a service though. Even the webhook example doesn’t really show where scriptable fits in, I think what you’re trying to say is that the customer can write some code to integrate the product with their slack and then the service will call the customer’s code in a sandboxed environment which is how the customer can extend the product right?
- cheerioty 4y ago
  You're 100% on the money here. One way to use it is to fire off user-provided scripts tied to certain events in your product, similar to webhooks. But it's also flexible and quick enough to make your product extendable in terms of UI. It's 100% deploy-less (and stateless) as well, meaning you can just through whatever code at it, and it will quickly evaluate and respond with the result.
  - esperent 4y ago
    > You're 100% on the money here Why isn't this in the first paragraph of the introduction on your website?
- ponyous 4y ago
  This is the only comment that clarified the product to me. Everything else including the website is just confusing.
  - cheerioty 4y ago
    I'm glad at least this one gave you some clarity. We surely learned our lesson regarding our messaging here today.
    - tyingq 4y ago
      The comment does make the high level clear, but it's still confusing a level down. For example, your copy suggests I can use it to allow customers to write scripts that execute based on events from my application. But what's the interface for them? Is there a UI to add/manage/monitor scripts? Is there some multi-tenant concept that keeps each of my customers isolated from another? If not, what's the value add over just using something like Cloudflare Workers for this?
js4ever 4y ago
I understand the idea, but I don't understand why your product is easier to use than aws lambda
- cheerioty 4y ago
  Thanks mate. The difference is that you wouldn't really want to simply copy code from your customers/3rd parties for a couple of reasons: Missing out-of-the-box security/sandboxing, the time it takes to deploy and (cold) startup time. With Scriptable, you don't need to worry about any of that. And there’s nothing for you to provision or maintain apart from saving the user-provided scripts in your database.
  - aflag 4y ago
    How is aws lambda less of a sandbox? What can they do with lambda that they wouldn't be able to with scriptable?
    - hitsthings 4y ago
      You'd have to ensure they didn't have any privileges, for a start. E.g. you have to ensure you set the role correctly so they can't execute other lambdas in your account, etc. If you are running multiple users on the same lambda, one could potentially read filesystem data that another saved, for example (if the lambda hasn't restarted). You also probably want to make sure each user has individual compute limits, so one user can't execute 1000 scripts/second and DDOS other users. There's probably a lot of little things to think through (that I have not).
memalign 4y ago
My favorite Scriptable is from a different developer: an iOS app that lets you automate things by writing JavaScript. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scriptable/id1405459188 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scriptable/id1405459188 I use this to schedule notifications, create widgets (e.g. to show AQI from PurpleAir), and do quick text processing automation.
- cheerioty 4y ago
  Totally agree, it’s an awesome app. The name clash is a bit unfortunate and we’re already considering alternative names.
CSDude 4y ago
Hey fellow ex-Atlassian! This is a nice product. I assume it has derived from the use case at Atlassian, with Forge? https://developer.atlassian.com/platform/forge/ https://developer.atlassian.com/platform/forge/
- cheerioty 4y ago
  Hah, hey mate! Just walking by the office on George St. You’re totally right. This is pretty much “Forge as a Service” for others to use in their products as well :) In fact, we propably wouldn’t have build it (again) if we could have used Forge. I’m glad we did though, as it suits us actually much better, e.g. by being completely deployless.
- rikroots 4y ago
  I'm still very sore with Atlassian for their decision to close down Hipchat. Maybe Slack was beating Hipchat in the popularity stakes, but I spent a huge amount of time at a previous job building integrations (or whatever they were called) which would, for instance, allow colleagues to setup a new client project (Google Drive directories and files, Assembla project management stuff, Trello tracking for the project etc, etc) with a simple `/build project-name client-name` comment in a Hipchat room and then, one day ... all of it gone! I really wish the devs of this new shiny the best with their endeavours ... but that wound still smarts!
  - cheerioty 4y ago
    Sorry to hear this. I truly can relate. Hipchat/Stride was one of the very first products at Atlassian that adopted our cross-product service and components for attachment and link handling, even before Confluence, Jira and Bitbucket if I recall correctly.
hubraumhugo 4y ago
I've been using Scriptable to develop a Discord Bot integration for our Questmate task and I think it's a very powerful and flexible solution for creating custom integrations.
- cheerioty 4y ago
  Wow, now I remember. That was one of the first usages of Questscript (which is powered by Scriptable) we saw when just added it. Thanks for your trust and support!
rtpg 4y ago
I have had a similar-ish idea floating in my head for a while, which is a library + executor + editor UI for per-app scripting capabilities. Something that would let people write out basic automation workflows to respond to events, similar to what Zapier or Salesforce offers to its users. There are, of course, halting problem-style issues. I _think_ you could paper over some of that at the description level. But really you want the right kind of hooks into the actual system. A scripting tool that is just "oh but you just hit the API" is way less nice than bespoke components for your own system. And with event systems you have the usual event propogation issues of accidentally causing a massive fan-out of events from some action and causing your sysetm to fall over. But this is really something that someone could write out as a component for other systems and make a lot of business SaaS's automation floors way better. You really do want to offer _something_ to users, though. The users that can write Javascript... well, Zapier lets you write Javascript. Hell, Google Cloud Platform lets you write Javascript in little script blobs, complete with Google Docs-level concurrency. This is a bit weak compared to that.
- cheerioty 4y ago
  100%. This is literally what we’re working on next right now. We just had to start somewhere and with the thing that enables us to do all the other things. We have developed quite a bit of that already inside our own product (e.g. account linking, an editor + live preview, a UI rendering layer, pre-defined connectors, etc) and are in the process of extracting and productizing this, so it’s all part of Scriptable and it’s broader vision (Extendable)… We refer to these things as the batteries we’re missing right now :)
- llamaLord 4y ago
  Not to hijack OP's thread, but what you describe is what our end-state plan is for G-script (https://g-script.io/ https://g-script.io/), the underling tooling is literally implementable as ~10 lines of Javascript (5 to implement the back-end "engine", 5 to render the front-end editor). The idea being that any SaaS app could basically bolt it in and then add trigger events that match to their apps business events/entities and allow user to extend the core business logic with their own "Scripts".
bluelightning2k 4y ago
I saw your testimonial from a company called Questmate, then later saw a copyright notice for the site with that same company. Raised eyebrows is an understatement
- cheerioty 4y ago
  Very fair point! We just updated this to make the association of Questmate and Scriptable much more clear.
pictur 4y ago
looks like a producthunt product. i don't understand what problem the product is trying to solve.
- cheerioty 4y ago
  You are unfortunately not alone and we’re about to fix this. Not sure what you mean with “ProductHunt Product”. Can you elaborate? We haven’t done our ProductHunt Lunch yet. Will certainly defer now a bit until we fixed or messaging/positioning.
schappim 4y ago
Ha! We just implemented this for our own product. We ended up using Lambdas to be able to achieve this, w/ async rendering of custom Liquid templates for each account.
- cheerioty 4y ago
  Congrats mate, that's awesome! Did you create a separate AWS account for that to separate from the rest of your stack? How did you achieve isolation for each script? V8 isolates or dedicated Lambda per script? Any other challanges you ran into? We're really keen to learn from others doing similar things.
DeathArrow 4y ago
What is this trying to solve? If a customer wants to run custom code, why can't I allow him to input an endpoint in his Web API or a webhook?
- cheerioty 4y ago
  I'm glad you asked. Maybe this is the page we should have shared in the first place: https://www.scriptable.run/why https://www.scriptable.run/why
itsaquicknote 4y ago
Your corporate memphis girl splash-art is holding a puzzle piece that can clearly never fit. The subtle negative implications of that really sat with me.
- cheerioty 4y ago
  Hah, dang!
melx 4y ago
The pricing modes are confusing - I've seen it at other websites too, is this some kind of trend?! The issue: when I choose "yearly" subscription, the page still shows price per month. So you're about to charge me every month? Despite I chosen to pay yearly. And where's the "2 months free" if I end up paying monthly?? Your starter pack costs: $79/m (in "yearly" subscription) - so $79*12 = $948 (or $79*10 ??? because of the "2 months free") $99/m - so $99*12 = $1188 $1188 - $948 = $240 - so it's actually more than "2 months free". It's super confusing and I leave immediately no matter how badly I just wanted to buy it.
- cheerioty 4y ago
  Thanks for pointing this one out! We just fixed this :)

38 points by cheerioty 4y ago

nubela 4y ago

I don't get it. What is this supposed to do? How will it help my product? Or am I not the target audience?

cheerioty 4y ago
Apologies for that. Please see my other comment for a bit more context and examples.
- politelemon 4y ago
  Hi just had a look at every comment you've made and every starter page on your site. I'm still lost and don't understand what this is, even though I see some people are already understanding and using your product, which is baffling me more. I think I'm missing where your product runs and who is running what and why they are running a curl command, and if I'd have to make changes in my application to support this. A general conceptual diagram on your site would go a long way.
  - cheerioty 4y ago
    Sincere apologies for that. We’ll make sure to fix this up asap and include a diagram as you suggested as well. Happy to give you a ping as soon as we did!

CJefferson 4y ago

A brief review. I have no idea what your product does. The example at the top of the docs pages still doesn't help me understand what your product does. It also doesn't work, it just returns: {"message":"access token is not valid for this request"} I'm guessing that's because I need to get a valid access token to run the example? Well then you'd better say that, and tell me how to do it, or even better don't require it for your first example to work. I tried going into the "Advanced Guide". It had a handy first link that linked me to "Hello world in scriptable". That sent me back to the first page of the docs, with the example that doesn't work. At this point, I'm stuck and out, sorry.

cheerioty 4y ago
Thanks mate, that feedback is really valuable. We definitely need to sharpen our message and guidance there quite a bit. In a nutshell, Scriptable allows you to provide your users with a code escape hatch, for everything your product doesn't support natively yet. For Shopify this might be a function that calculates a custom discount (https://shopify.dev/docs/apps/discounts/experience https://shopify.dev/docs/apps/discounts/experience), while for something like Framer (see example here: https://www.framer.com/learn/how-to-work-with-real-dynamic-data/ https://www.framer.com/learn/how-to-work-with-real-dynamic-d...) it might be to integrate and fetch data from a 3rd party API. There are countless other examples (Auth0 for instance), which provide something similar to their users to bridge gaps. We also use it within our own product to build some custom components, like providing restricted access to a Tesla, Alarm System, Philips Hue System, etc. Here are two examples of that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG1ApkFQ5xU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG1ApkFQ5xU .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6Lf-n3WYh8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6Lf-n3WYh8 Apologies again for doing a poorly job of getting the message across. We're currently working on revamping our landing page, docs and general onboarding story.
- perk 4y ago
  Exciting product. You should describe some common problems people have, and show us how you could use Scriptable to solve them. That's a nice and "easy" way to showcase a service IMHO.
  - cheerioty 4y ago
    Cheers mate! And thanks a lot for suggestion, this is how we’ll so it!
    - perk 4y ago
      No worries mate. The examples don't have to be ground-breaking or even relevant (for me), but clear so I can see how I can apply Scriptable.dev to solve my specific problems. And, since you target developers, add as much info as you have. Don't skip messy stuff like "how to authenticate" or similar. Good luck!

faizshah 4y ago

It sounds like this is providing a sandboxed wasm runtime as a service is that right? I think in this case the landing page is lacking in technical details to the point where it’s hard to understand what the product actually is. I like the general idea of firecracker as a service and sandboxed code as a service though. Even the webhook example doesn’t really show where scriptable fits in, I think what you’re trying to say is that the customer can write some code to integrate the product with their slack and then the service will call the customer’s code in a sandboxed environment which is how the customer can extend the product right?

cheerioty 4y ago
You're 100% on the money here. One way to use it is to fire off user-provided scripts tied to certain events in your product, similar to webhooks. But it's also flexible and quick enough to make your product extendable in terms of UI. It's 100% deploy-less (and stateless) as well, meaning you can just through whatever code at it, and it will quickly evaluate and respond with the result.
- esperent 4y ago
  > You're 100% on the money here Why isn't this in the first paragraph of the introduction on your website?
ponyous 4y ago
This is the only comment that clarified the product to me. Everything else including the website is just confusing.
- cheerioty 4y ago
  I'm glad at least this one gave you some clarity. We surely learned our lesson regarding our messaging here today.
  - tyingq 4y ago
    The comment does make the high level clear, but it's still confusing a level down. For example, your copy suggests I can use it to allow customers to write scripts that execute based on events from my application. But what's the interface for them? Is there a UI to add/manage/monitor scripts? Is there some multi-tenant concept that keeps each of my customers isolated from another? If not, what's the value add over just using something like Cloudflare Workers for this?

js4ever 4y ago

I understand the idea, but I don't understand why your product is easier to use than aws lambda

cheerioty 4y ago
Thanks mate. The difference is that you wouldn't really want to simply copy code from your customers/3rd parties for a couple of reasons: Missing out-of-the-box security/sandboxing, the time it takes to deploy and (cold) startup time. With Scriptable, you don't need to worry about any of that. And there’s nothing for you to provision or maintain apart from saving the user-provided scripts in your database.
- aflag 4y ago
  How is aws lambda less of a sandbox? What can they do with lambda that they wouldn't be able to with scriptable?
  - hitsthings 4y ago
    You'd have to ensure they didn't have any privileges, for a start. E.g. you have to ensure you set the role correctly so they can't execute other lambdas in your account, etc. If you are running multiple users on the same lambda, one could potentially read filesystem data that another saved, for example (if the lambda hasn't restarted). You also probably want to make sure each user has individual compute limits, so one user can't execute 1000 scripts/second and DDOS other users. There's probably a lot of little things to think through (that I have not).

memalign 4y ago

My favorite Scriptable is from a different developer: an iOS app that lets you automate things by writing JavaScript. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scriptable/id1405459188 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scriptable/id1405459188 I use this to schedule notifications, create widgets (e.g. to show AQI from PurpleAir), and do quick text processing automation.

cheerioty 4y ago
Totally agree, it’s an awesome app. The name clash is a bit unfortunate and we’re already considering alternative names.

CSDude 4y ago

Hey fellow ex-Atlassian! This is a nice product. I assume it has derived from the use case at Atlassian, with Forge? https://developer.atlassian.com/platform/forge/ https://developer.atlassian.com/platform/forge/

cheerioty 4y ago
Hah, hey mate! Just walking by the office on George St. You’re totally right. This is pretty much “Forge as a Service” for others to use in their products as well :) In fact, we propably wouldn’t have build it (again) if we could have used Forge. I’m glad we did though, as it suits us actually much better, e.g. by being completely deployless.
rikroots 4y ago
I'm still very sore with Atlassian for their decision to close down Hipchat. Maybe Slack was beating Hipchat in the popularity stakes, but I spent a huge amount of time at a previous job building integrations (or whatever they were called) which would, for instance, allow colleagues to setup a new client project (Google Drive directories and files, Assembla project management stuff, Trello tracking for the project etc, etc) with a simple `/build project-name client-name` comment in a Hipchat room and then, one day ... all of it gone! I really wish the devs of this new shiny the best with their endeavours ... but that wound still smarts!
- cheerioty 4y ago
  Sorry to hear this. I truly can relate. Hipchat/Stride was one of the very first products at Atlassian that adopted our cross-product service and components for attachment and link handling, even before Confluence, Jira and Bitbucket if I recall correctly.

hubraumhugo 4y ago

I've been using Scriptable to develop a Discord Bot integration for our Questmate task and I think it's a very powerful and flexible solution for creating custom integrations.

cheerioty 4y ago
Wow, now I remember. That was one of the first usages of Questscript (which is powered by Scriptable) we saw when just added it. Thanks for your trust and support!

rtpg 4y ago

I have had a similar-ish idea floating in my head for a while, which is a library + executor + editor UI for per-app scripting capabilities. Something that would let people write out basic automation workflows to respond to events, similar to what Zapier or Salesforce offers to its users. There are, of course, halting problem-style issues. I _think_ you could paper over some of that at the description level. But really you want the right kind of hooks into the actual system. A scripting tool that is just "oh but you just hit the API" is way less nice than bespoke components for your own system. And with event systems you have the usual event propogation issues of accidentally causing a massive fan-out of events from some action and causing your sysetm to fall over. But this is really something that someone could write out as a component for other systems and make a lot of business SaaS's automation floors way better. You really do want to offer _something_ to users, though. The users that can write Javascript... well, Zapier lets you write Javascript. Hell, Google Cloud Platform lets you write Javascript in little script blobs, complete with Google Docs-level concurrency. This is a bit weak compared to that.

cheerioty 4y ago
100%. This is literally what we’re working on next right now. We just had to start somewhere and with the thing that enables us to do all the other things. We have developed quite a bit of that already inside our own product (e.g. account linking, an editor + live preview, a UI rendering layer, pre-defined connectors, etc) and are in the process of extracting and productizing this, so it’s all part of Scriptable and it’s broader vision (Extendable)… We refer to these things as the batteries we’re missing right now :)
llamaLord 4y ago
Not to hijack OP's thread, but what you describe is what our end-state plan is for G-script (https://g-script.io/ https://g-script.io/), the underling tooling is literally implementable as ~10 lines of Javascript (5 to implement the back-end "engine", 5 to render the front-end editor). The idea being that any SaaS app could basically bolt it in and then add trigger events that match to their apps business events/entities and allow user to extend the core business logic with their own "Scripts".

bluelightning2k 4y ago

I saw your testimonial from a company called Questmate, then later saw a copyright notice for the site with that same company. Raised eyebrows is an understatement

cheerioty 4y ago
Very fair point! We just updated this to make the association of Questmate and Scriptable much more clear.

pictur 4y ago

looks like a producthunt product. i don't understand what problem the product is trying to solve.

cheerioty 4y ago
You are unfortunately not alone and we’re about to fix this. Not sure what you mean with “ProductHunt Product”. Can you elaborate? We haven’t done our ProductHunt Lunch yet. Will certainly defer now a bit until we fixed or messaging/positioning.

schappim 4y ago

Ha! We just implemented this for our own product. We ended up using Lambdas to be able to achieve this, w/ async rendering of custom Liquid templates for each account.

cheerioty 4y ago
Congrats mate, that's awesome! Did you create a separate AWS account for that to separate from the rest of your stack? How did you achieve isolation for each script? V8 isolates or dedicated Lambda per script? Any other challanges you ran into? We're really keen to learn from others doing similar things.

DeathArrow 4y ago

What is this trying to solve? If a customer wants to run custom code, why can't I allow him to input an endpoint in his Web API or a webhook?

cheerioty 4y ago
I'm glad you asked. Maybe this is the page we should have shared in the first place: https://www.scriptable.run/why https://www.scriptable.run/why

itsaquicknote 4y ago

Your corporate memphis girl splash-art is holding a puzzle piece that can clearly never fit. The subtle negative implications of that really sat with me.

cheerioty 4y ago
Hah, dang!

melx 4y ago

The pricing modes are confusing - I've seen it at other websites too, is this some kind of trend?! The issue: when I choose "yearly" subscription, the page still shows price per month. So you're about to charge me every month? Despite I chosen to pay yearly. And where's the "2 months free" if I end up paying monthly?? Your starter pack costs: $79/m (in "yearly" subscription) - so $79*12 = $948 (or $79*10 ??? because of the "2 months free") $99/m - so $99*12 = $1188 $1188 - $948 = $240 - so it's actually more than "2 months free". It's super confusing and I leave immediately no matter how badly I just wanted to buy it.

cheerioty 4y ago
Thanks for pointing this one out! We just fixed this :)