It doesn't look like Automately is open source, but their API looks nice (based on examples from http://blog.automate.ly/).

We will actually be open sourcing our core very soon! We will also be including the source code for our SDK and Automately Pi (unreleased Raspberry Pi integration).

interesting but seems like just a selenium in the cloud. wouldn't it make more sense for someone to host automation scripts on their own servers?

It's actually more than that, our API doesn't only provide access to the Browser module. We provide an SDK that can help people build real-time applications that can connect with almost anything. We're getting ready to release our Raspberry Pi integration. We are also going to be going open source fairly soon.

how does the real time application benefit from automately?

We've basically created a connected platform that makes it very easy to connect things. You can have your web application talk to your server-side automately scripts. We've made it as simple as including some JavaScript on your web page. Our server-side APIs make it very easy to communicate with APIs and WebSites. Your Automately scripts can store data via the DataBus and they can talk to other execution jobs via the MessageBus.

Edit: Here's a very simple example http://searchproxy.automate.ly/

interesting idea! however, I am struggling to see when and how someone could use this, because almost always a developer such as myself would simply create an endpoint for something like this directly on the server.

It would be interesting to see what type of customers or use cases your solution might be of use.

I am not fully sure what you mean but if you mean running the automately stack on your own servers then you would be interested in automately-core our open-source core. Shoot us an email at [email protected].