Peter

I'm a multi-hat "hands-dirty" CTO type with a track record of helping entrepreneurs scale their projects from zero to large-scale - having previously worked in a number of successful startups that have outperformed in their respective niches.

I'm also a seasoned full-stack web and app engineer/developer, with apps in the major stores.

I've cut my teeth in M&A, being familiar with dealmaking/brokering and what it takes to fund a lean/hungry startup.

Zap killer

Zapier is an amazing platform for building automations and for connecting APIs, however it suffers from a number of drawbacks, namely:

• Free plans are stingy, with a limit of 5 zaps comprised of single-steps. Many basic features, and all advanced features are disabled.

• Lower tier plans incur execution delay “penalties” up to 15 minutes, limiting the utility of anything requiring “near-real-time” responsiveness.

  • Zapier is expensive! For those companies running high volumes of zaps per month ($600/Mo for 100K zaps, and $2,500/Mo for 1M zaps).

  • Plans that enable collaboration (i.e. “teams”) start at $300 per month.

  • Support for multi-branched flows within a zap is clunky at best, and is only available to those users committed to professional plans or higher.

  • Support for custom coded steps is available, but these steps cannot access data from other steps.

  • Custom steps have no access to the more than 1.5 million open-source projects on npmjs, severely limiting functionality and utility.

For a little perspective on pricing, running 1 million 1 second functions on Amazon’s AWS lambda platform (which Zapier uses) costs around $10.00 (sans discounts), meaning that Zapier’s gross margins on compute functionality is around 25,000% - and that’s for high-volume accounts.

The answer:

• Smart-blocks will provide a very generous free tier, allowing unlimited integrations that can be run up to 500 times per month (5x Zapier)

• No artificial delays for free and lower priced tiers, enabling near-real-time responsiveness

• Support for collaboration/teams on ALL plans – even free

• No-code, low-code and expert modes, with instant access to the top 100,000 packages on npmjs, enabling users to leverage the amazing work of the open-source community, and to stand on the shoulders of giants!

• An intuitive UI experience that allows interconnection of blocks with multiple inputs and/or outputs, simplifying the design and use of branching and looping constructs

• A mechanism (phase 2) that will allow experienced developers to earn revenue from the platform