[alberth]

What do you use Zapier for?

I feel like I live in a cave. Over the past 10+ years, I’ve yet to understand what use cases people use for things like IFTTT/Zapier/etc. I clearly must for alone I’m not understanding.

Can someone please help me understand their specific use case. I’m genuinely curious.

[crisnoble]

I am a software developer, have a paid professional plan, and am almost out of my "zaps".

Here are a two of my favorites:

* Non profit community organization wants to sell event tickets. Paypal Order -> Add row to spreadsheet for simple reporting -> Add/Update user in mailchimp with a tag so they don't get future emails asking to buy tickets again.

* Small client wants a gated webinar signup. Wordpress Contact Form -> Zapier Endpoint POST -> Add user to Zoom Registration -> Add/Update to mailchimp with a source tag -> Add row in spreadsheet

Could these be done without zapier? Sure. But using zapier we can create that within 30 minutes without a server, or even dealing with serverless. Even if someone had those workflows as a one click install for lambda workflow, I would rather use zapier than deal with any AWS overhead.

To everyone who thinks that "a webform to google docs" is the most common use case you are probably right. If you think that you could create the infrastructure to do that consistently with automatic retries, logging, error handling, keep on top of API changes from both ends, across dozens of clients, proper authorization and secret management, for cheaper than $50/month, then you are kidding yourself.

[mauricio]

A popular use case for SaaS companies isn't even in utilizing Zapier themselves, but rather adding their API to the list of integrations. This can really speed up onboarding for customers -- especially if they already use Zapier.

[contravariant]

I'm not sure we're the target audience to be honest. My experience with bundled 'integrations' tends to be that you spend about as much effort fixing the mismatch between the provided integration and what you want as it would take to write an integration from scratch.

In one case it took a bit longer, but in the end it was still necessary to write the whole thing from scratch in order to comply with the terms of use of the API. Which kind of proves my point.

[tomatowurst]

if you have to ask you are not in the need to know, this is an automation tool for non-developers at various organizations

[Forgeties79]

>if you have to ask you are not in the need to know

Does it really need to be said that we don't all know about every program/service available to us that we could use, and thus could occasionally use someone telling us about them?