Re:Software will eat software in a remote-first world
by RNCTX on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @12:56AM
(#23307555)
There are already successful lower-level tools than Zapier, though.
Look at IBM's NodeRed platform, for instance. More importantly, go look at the user-contributed examples and use cases. It runs in all sorts of small custom implementations, like home one-off home security systems and small town public utility monitoring setups.
You just don't see those because they don't have a reason to publish their stuff on Github or write a Medium post and link it on HN.
I assure you that anyone who is proficient with Zapier could be graduated to handling raw APIs, direct database transactions, and rendering the output with modern javascript frameworks in a few days, tops.
Anything more than very basic requirements, to your point, probably requires someone specialized to the job, like a developer or at least more technical role to gather requirements and build.
Ive also noticed that whenever tech is built specifically to remove technical complexity (PaaS, for example), it's inevitably priced in a way that over time, it's very close to or more expensive than the thing it replaced. Magic can be expensive, and sometimes prohibitively so with scale.