[JustTim]

I liked the post.

Yahoo! Pipes a strong argument for building your own tool/buying a paid product, in that if one relies too heavily on a service and it went away, then that [business] process went away as well. The demise of Pipes! caused us a bit of anxiety and made us hustle to find other solutions in a compressed time frame.

The rather quick demise of Yahoo! Groups was also disruptive. Heck, even Hacker News could have worked as a Yahoo! Group. Fortunately, it is not. When Groups went away, so did a lot of discussion groups and even when those groups moved, they lost many members. Groups.io is a nice alternative, but there too much of their platform is free.

There is always a danger when you build critical things on someone else's land, particularly if they allow you on their property for free. Even if they charge you but are not profitable, there is a risk of waking up to read that the service is closing.

We use Zapier in our small business, but work to build out tools for those Zaps! that become mission critical.