HN user
Thanks! I'd say each each integration has its own nuances that can be tricky - we've found Salesforce notoriously has one of the most challenging and monolithic APIs, while Slack is typically pretty nice to work with. Interestingly, they're both the same company now.
Great question! Not yet, but this is very much on our roadmap and something we're looking to support soon!
Luckily, many other people believe this too which is why we think there's a big opportunity no one has addressed here.
I made an edit to the original post to clarify the reasoning around our pricing. I think that many people want a fully hosted solution so they don't have to manage their own servers, performance, etc. and we can take care of all of that for you.
Thanks, edited our post to clarify why we're charging $30/mo - we do plan to offer a free version or trial in the future.
I think that most other "low-code" players are focused on RPA (helping ops automate internal business processes) whereas we're focused on helping product & engineering build integrations between their product and other services.
Our focus is on helping developers and product teams build integrations between their core product and 3rd party services. "Medium complexity" is a good way to describe it - you can accomplish a good amount on Paragon without writing code, but if you need to write a custom function to go the last mile, you can.
Appreciate the feedback. We mention in the post that we charge for Paragon and that it starts at $30/mo. I've added another edit to clarify why we don't offer a free trial, although we plan to in the future.
Good point - many experienced engineers like yourself can build things like this quickly without Paragon. However, many of our users are frontend engineers or semi-technical product managers who may not be as comfortable spinning up their own service as you are. For backend engineers who do use Paragon, they can handoff workflows to other, less technical team members who then don't have to rely on engineering every time they need to make a small change. We've gotten feedback from customers who've told us this is well worth the $30/mo we charge for Paragon.
Thanks, we've edited our post above to clarify why we aren't offering a free trial right now, although we do plan to in the future.
Absolutely - our vision is that one day frontend devs will be able to spin up entire backends on Paragon, and just need to plug in their database / email provider / etc. of choice.
Appreciate your feedback on our onboarding flow, you're right and I apologize for any misunderstanding. We'll update our flow to better reflect our pricing.
Right now, $30/mo is for access to Paragon and the your first 1,000 tasks. We provide additional pricing tiers for higher usage where the cost/task drops significantly.
Thank you! We consider a task to be an "action" that's performed in your Paragon workflow, e.g. a function execution, database query, or API request.
Thank you and great question! Zapier is great for simple tasks like sending data from one app to another, but isn't well designed for more complex operations like handling large arrays of data, or writing custom code. More broadly, Zapier and other tools like Tray and Integromat are more focused on RPA, which typically means automating internal business processes.
Our focus is specifically on developers and product teams, and on helping build integrations between their core product and 3rd party services. Paragon is designed to handle use cases like building custom endpoints, fanning out arrays, and writing custom cloud functions - we even expose access to npm, so developers can do some pretty heavy lifting if they need to.
I love your suggestion to allow importing cloud functions. One of our goals is to eventually allow you to sync functions directly from a Github rep - another example of how we aim to cater more to developers.
There's definitely a large subset of the market which expect not to pay for an email client, but there are many email products available now with many paying customers e.g. yesware, streak, sidekick, etc. There are certainly ways of capturing revenue from the email marketing, but I think that Mailbox was too focused particularly on the entire 'Inbox Zero' aspect of the product and never expanded much beyond that.
For those disppointed with Mailbox's abandonment, I'd love to hear your feedback on Polymail (https://polymail.io). We're in private Alpha right now, but we have many similar features to Mailbox like Read Later + some better ones like Email Tracking & Send Later. Feel free to DM me on Twitter (https://twitter.com/foolywk) if you'd like to be added to our next Alpha release!