Request for your kind consideration: I completely empathize with the need to tier your pricing based on features, and have certain items that one only gets for "contact us"-level pricing.

But, I am very bummed out every time I see a startup where SSO is that feature. SAML/Okta, fine, whatever. But, it'd be really nice for any little startup to be able to let their users log in with G Suite and get two factor and all of the other security niceties that come with it. Letting folks adopt security best practices shouldn't cost them money (and isn't really core to your value prop). Just my two cents.

Ps. With GDPR coming into effect, and all the surrounding brouhaha, this is particularly important as many of your use cases are going to be piping around and manipulating user data.

I agree - I often see companies offer security features for "premium" customers only. This is the wrong approach and I wish more services focused on security first and then price the premium features accordingly.

The problem is that security is often the feature that has the biggest gap between how much the end user cares about it and how much the IT buyer cares about it, which makes it perfect as an upsell.

It's a very nice idea but these tools always have limitations that become super annoying after a while.

Programming is total freedom to do what you want and these tools try to make it look like you cab drag and drop data flows together and it will just work in a optimal way. And it will at first, until your first special or odd requirement needs to somehow be implemented in that tool.

Snap! is a visual "blocks" programming language like Scratch, but with the full power of Scheme:

First class functions.

Visual lexical closures.

User defined blocks including control structures.

Macros and special forms.

Call with current continuation!

Written in JavaScript and easy to integrate with JavaScript libraries.

https://snap.berkeley.edu

Adding Machine Learning Blocks to Snap!

https://s4scoding.com/adding-machine-learning-blocks-to-snap...

https://project.ecraft2learn.eu/

https://github.com/ecraft2learn/ai

https://ecraft2learn.github.io/ai/

"total freedom" — never heard of it

Why can't you use a coding widget(not sure if this tool supports it) in those special cases? In that way common things are super easy and you can also tackle those corner cases as well.

But who is writing the widget? If it's a programmer, then why is he using this tool when most of this stuff is one liners in code anyway? And if it's a non-programmer, he now can't do something that he may have still been able to do in excel.

A non-developer who has access to developers. A developer can be paid to write the widget, which would likely be cheaper, easier, and faster than paying a developer for every minor change. It really depends on context. In a larger organization, for example, the user might have access to plenty of developers but need to open a ticket and wait forever every time they need something.

Hey, nice work.

What would you say differentiates this service from say, Zapier?

I really like how dbranes described it below:

>"drag-and-drop data transformation pipelines that comes with app integrations at both ends"

Parabola is very focused on data transformation/manipulation. Our best customers end up with hundreds of steps in their flows, essentially creating full-fledged programs. As part of this focus on data transformation, we primarily operate in a batch-processing fashion. We also perform calculations live while you work on your flow, similar to a spreadsheet or a python notebook.

Zapier on the other hand is great at connecting with TONS of tools, and makes integrations between those tools really smooth. It operates best in an event-based paradigm when you don't need to do much transformation/calculation in between connection points.

There's probably a small amount of overlap at the edges, but in general it's pretty clear when a use case will be a good fit for a tool like Zapier or when it's a good fit for Parabola.

This feels like an IPaaS to me - pricing aside, how would you compare this to built.io, SnapLogic, Jitterbit, Informatica and Boomi?

Disclosure: recent ex-employee of SnapLogic.

Hi Alex, I see in your examples section the pulling data from various cryptocurrency API's. I see a lot of potential in your product through targeting the cryptocurrency market. Is this a direct goal of yours or just a use case?

I'd classify it as a budding use case but one we're really interested in! Anything specific you're trying to do or would like to see Parabola support? Would love to hear more - hi [at] parabola.io

It would be cool to have the tool working also in offline scenarios, where no internet connection is possible, tough an automated workflow is still needed/possible

What kind of integrations would you expect in an offline feature? Do you have a specific use case in your industry?

Payments, PCI DSS for instance.

Hi, I'm curious -- what are the underlying technologies?

I noticed they were using jsPlumb https://jsplumbtoolkit.com/ for the UI builder

Greetings!

I'll get straight to the point. I've used Node-Red (https://nodered.org) in building my own IoT network along with automating quite a lot of things. I run my own Node-Red instance locally as well as online. Node-red has 1500 different functionality plugins, including things like "push flow to another node-red installation". Node-red also uses javascript as its frontend and backend. I can share whole code by giving someone the js block - which means that backing up flows is trivial. Sharing is also as easy.

So, I looked at your solution. It seems like a prettified version of Node-red with backup, js, and lack of ecosystem.

So, what's your buy-in? What're you doing better than a spare VPS running node-red? Not everyone is going to install and maintain a server.... but you're here on HN. I'd say that 95% or higher could get Nodered up and running here.

I suppose with that logic you don’t even need node red. You could just put your requirements into a .js file.

What’s your buy-in? What are you doing with node red that can’t be done with a text editor and npm?

That's certainly reducto-ad-absurdum if iv'e ever seen one.

They're both in the realm of "graphical programming language in the browser". One is a pay-per-$something, and the other is libre/gratis.

And sure, you could use backend js to write scripts to do $thing, but requires a lot of setup to work with different APIs. So absolutely no, js+text editor is nowhere near the same.

My time is more valuable than running, managing, maintaining, and monitoring a VPS just to save $180/mo.

If I've saved 1.5 hours, it's paid for itself, and I've been freed up to be productive on other things, like watching YouTube.

With cloud functions you don’t really need to do any of that

Thanks to the pointer for Node Red; I saw it on my Pi and forgot about it. It's pretty impressive (esp since it's got IBM all over it).