Workflow Proof-of-Concept

[leigh-johnson]

Describe your Request
Placeholder issue for milestone schedule. I need to write a PRD that captures 3-5 workflows.

If you use Zapier or IFTTT, I'd love to hear about your current workflows. If you switched away from Zapier/IFTTT, I'm curious about what you're doing instead to automate repetitive tasks.

[leigh-johnson]

After chatting with a few Founding Members about Zapier, some common themes emerged around Zapier's pricing model (price is too high).

Zapier's hobby tier

For a "prosumer" 3D printing as a hobby, Zapier's monthly plan ($29/month-to-month, $20/month billed annually) is too expensive to justify.

The target entry-level price for ALL of PrintNanny is $10-15/month for your first printer, so an extra $29 on top of that doesn't work for a prosumer with one 3D printer.

However, the Zapier free tier doesn't provide enough workflows ("zaps") to cover prosumer usage. The free tier is limited to 5 active zaps, and doesn't support multi-step zaps.

Zapier's Professional tier

I talked to 2 small biz owners running 3D printing ecommerce shops, who switched away from Zapier due to the high cost. In both cases, they ended up writing some Python glue scripts that they manually run to sync data to/from Shopify via API.

Tideline3D also mentioned they had previously tried Zapier to integrate shipping/orders from eBay and Etsy into Shopify, so they could manage shipping in one place. The owner of Tideline3D mentioned they switched to https://www.sellbrite.com/ because Zapier's pricing model didn't scale for their needs.

Enter Windmill.dev

I've decided to pilot https://docs.windmill.dev/ instead of Zapier for the Workflows proof-of-concept. Windmill provides Kubernetes helm charts to stand up a self-hosted version. PrintNanny's cloud infra is already running in a Kubernetes cluster, so I'm expecting this to only take a day or two to deploy.

For an SMB that needs an SLA and 24/7 support, Windmill offers a $10/month tier with 10,000 computations (compared to Zapier's 750 tasks/$29/month).

For prosumers/hobbyists who don't need reliability guarantees or extra support, running a Windmill instane amortizes out to an extra $1-2 per user per month.