A few weeks ago I asked Claude to explain to me what workflow automation platforms are, and what kinds of problems businesses solve using them. A workflow automation platform is a surface of a kin...
I've onboarded over 200 people across four companies in 18 years. The worst one happened in 2019. A senior engineer showed up on Monday morning to an empty desk. No laptop. No email account. No Sla...
I migrated 47 Zaps last year. Took me three weeks, about 40 hours of actual work, and I broke two production workflows along the way. One was a Stripe webhook that silently stopped firing for 36 ho...
Automation just crossed a line. For fifteen years, every workflow tool on the market asked the same question: what should happen when this trigger fires. The builder defined the rules. Mapped every...
I spent two years manually processing invoices for a consulting business. Every Friday afternoon looked the same: download PDFs from email, retype line items into QuickBooks, cross-check amounts ag...
Zapier built the automation category. For most of the last decade, "Zapier" was a synonym for "connect two apps." That era is ending. The platform still holds 7% of the iPaaS market, processes 1.5...
Every infrastructure tool you depend on will eventually be acquired, merged, or taken private. This isn't pessimism. It's pattern recognition. The history of enterprise software follows a rhythm a...
The automation market has a visibility problem. Zapier owns the brand. n8n owns the open-source narrative. Make owns the visual builder segment. Activepieces sits in the gap between all three. Almo...
I self-hosted n8n on an $8 VPS last month. The whole thing took about 45 minutes, and I'm not a sysadmin or someone who runs servers for a living. I just got tired of watching my n8n Cloud bill gro...
Most businesses pick their automation platform the same way they pick a restaurant on vacation. They go with the name they recognize. Zapier has the brand, Make has the marketing, and n8n has the G...