Speaking only for us (trigger.dev founder here): In our last X products we've used two different solutions for accomplishing two tasks together: event-driven architecture and integrating 3rd party APIs. We noticed that these two concerns were intertwined, and weren't happy with how the existing solutions only solved for just 1 (leaving us to build the other). We also noticed how well tools like n8n and Zapier solved these problems, but at the UI layer, and we wanted something like those tools but in code. Hence the creation of trigger.dev.

Cause Zapier is a business that doesn't have a moat.

As a coder, I think the "API integration" is one of the easiest things to code up and if one is disciplined about things like "where do I keep the configuration files?" and "how do I write a command line program in Java?" so you waste very little time with accidental complexity, it is easy to maintain.

Zapier did appeal to business people for reasons that baffle me (e.g. I think how every "enterprise search" product boasts that it has 300 integrations to other products but not about relevance which might not be too good -- the integrations are easy but the search quality is very hard)

Insofar as people have any friction around Zapier they are going to find other ways to scratch that itch.

Spot on.

The only thing I could think of to make a moat would be to become some sort of “compliance plumber”. Get FedRAMP High and some other capabilities and it could become the “enterprise” way to transport and transform data between cloud or other systems.

Lots of .gov and contractors struggle with this. But it’s a very different business.

As a founder of a specific type of the Zapier alternatives, the open source category, this is the thought process we had at Activepieces:

We used Zapier for a long period of time and ran into many issues that we weren’t able to fix by ourselves because of the closed app ecosystem, and had to pay increasing bills for simple tasks that could cost literally zero if we do them in code.

Later, we came across many people with similar problems and more; like not being able to process their data on their own machines, and that’s were we got inspired.

This is not the answer to your question, the real answer imo is that there is a rising movement for open-source alternatives that are loud about being alternatives to proprietary software, that’s why you read it every week very explicitly.

To clarify this, if you go to all of the other proprietary tools like Make, Tray, Workato, Automate and so, you won’t see “Zapier alternative” in their headline.

So the trend is about open source alternatives rather than Zapier alternatives.

A quick search for open source alternatives to Notion, Airtable, Retool, Google Analytics, Tableau, Amplitude will put this before your eyes!

> founder of a specific type of the Zapier alternatives, the open source category

And what is your business model?

We make money out of our cloud version and enterprise edition, I mentioned it in my original post but here is our original plans page on the website: https://www.activepieces.com/plans

I think the market for automation and workflow building for non-coders has just grown tremendously. Zapier at this point is probably also focused on winning enterprise customers leaving plenty of room for others to steal users for specific use cases on the low end. Finally I believe Zapier raised their prices at the end of last year (or at least many people got an email to that effect).

The problems they solve are growing more common.