Hi everyone - I'm the founder of Dexter (@danielilkovich) and am excited to share it with the Hacker News community.
We're a platform that enables users to quickly connect several third party APIs and custom code via a visual interface. Some people have called us Yahoo Pipes on steroids. A couple things that really set us apart:
- We're a completely open platform. Modules can be contributed to us via a `git push` and are subsequently made available to the community to use. We currently support NodeJS packages, but are planning to open up Python support soon. Docs here: http://docs.rundexter.com
- We have a marketplace where you can share your creations and collaborate with the rest of the community.
- Everything is deployed on our infrastructure. Your hacks no longer have to live on that old laptop in your closet.
- We support OAuth across 20+ providers with more on the way. Native OAuth support makes it easier to share your creations. Also, no more sifting through API docs to find out which flavor a third-party supports.
I don't mean to come across too harshly, looks like you've built a great product and it is an open platform. Something about seeing it called completely open, while an open source competitor was being downplayed, rubbed me the wrong way.
Yes, this seems like more of an issue of semantics. It's true, that you can't set this up on your own hardware. Though, that may be something we are open to in the future. Our definition of open in this context is being able to contribute/share modules.
Thanks for making this. However, I've been burned by some other services like this shutting down. This looks like IFTTT for devs, and my only concern is about you shutting down.
We're also using a very open development model - most of the code that runs our apps is MIT licensed and easy to use elsewhere: https://github.com/rundexter
Having some loose set of code repos up that claim to "run your apps" is no excuse for not having a sustainable and publicly scrutinized revenue model for the project. Without a model in place, savvy users (like those here on HN) will realize that your model may change later (because the VCs require you to exit for example) and that will affect how we get along holistically with your product later.
Other community-oriented services out there are built on top of a completely free platform, which makes it very difficult to pay the bills and why you see so many of them shutdown.
While we're in beta, our services are totally free, but we will have to find the right pricing model down the line.
Yes! Eventually we will support paid modules (the building blocks of the apps you see in the marketplace) that allow developers to define a price and a license. That will in turn dictate how much an app would cost a user to use.
For example, you can imagine a Twilio module that costs a penny to use, so the end user of the app would be charged a penny per use.
Put plainly, this is a platform that allows you to connect web services. So yes, it is a linking tool for third party APIs. But there's a lot more than that here. The differentiator is in how that manifests itself. So with something like IFTTT, you're given the option to connect X to Y, with finite versions of X and Y to connect. So while it fits a number of use cases, there's a lot that's left to be desired. Dexter gives you the ability to connect X to Y, but since you can deploy your own code, the developer / user and the API endpoints they are using are what effectively limits the number of permutations. Additionally, you can connect far more than two endpoints, can switch based on expressions, can fetch from a data store, can wait for user input and more. Hope that helps!
We're a platform that enables users to quickly connect several third party APIs and custom code via a visual interface. Some people have called us Yahoo Pipes on steroids. A couple things that really set us apart:
- We're a completely open platform. Modules can be contributed to us via a `git push` and are subsequently made available to the community to use. We currently support NodeJS packages, but are planning to open up Python support soon. Docs here: http://docs.rundexter.com
- We have a marketplace where you can share your creations and collaborate with the rest of the community.
- Everything is deployed on our infrastructure. Your hacks no longer have to live on that old laptop in your closet.
- We support OAuth across 20+ providers with more on the way. Native OAuth support makes it easier to share your creations. Also, no more sifting through API docs to find out which flavor a third-party supports.
Looking forward to hearing everyone's feedback!