Put Workflow Automation Platforms on your radar

[Travoli]

This is a new interest for me. Maybe it'll be interesting to others.

Workflow automation platforms are software tools that automate repetitive tasks and processes, streamlining workflows and improving efficiency by minimizing manual work and human errors.

There are a couple of tools that are recently generating significant interest. Specifically, n8n and make.com. (I have no affiliation.)

In a nutshell, you can integrate hundreds of different systems to complete tasks. LLMs, email, Google sheets, databases, http requests, social media platforms, wordpress, shopify, rss feeds, home automation, etc...

These two tools require minimal or no coding and allow you to schedule and automate complex tasks. Entrepreneurs are building and selling custom tools for small and medium size businesses to automate customer service and personal assistant functions. Others are using the tools to create completely automated social media content farms.

These tools will replace human labor and there will be a large market for custom agents, IMO. I think there are income opportunities and I'm going to spend some time exploring their utility.

It's only been a couple days, but I built a basic chatbot that pings my database and uses the returned data to build a natural language answer informed by my content. Pretty neat.

[ergophobe]

Those are new to me.

I've been using Zapier for years. It may not be the most advanced anymore (or may be, I don't know). There's a lot more capability than what I've been using, but as they integrate AI, complex tasks like text processing become more and more approachable.

For me it's mostly a matter of automating rote data entry that used to drive me nuts. I keep thinking I need to take up another notch.

[ergophobe]

https://th3core.com/chat/index.php?topic=9009.msg58860#msg58860

>> More generally, services like this seem to be breeding like rodents lately.

That was 2018 and workflows had not yet integrated LLMs

[rcjordan]

Subscription? Pay with credits?

[ergophobe]

Most are a freemium model.

The Zapier free tier gets you decent volume, but limits complexity. Others will limit volume, but give you the full feature set.

The n8n one has a pretty cheap first tier.

[Travoli]

>Zapier  yes them also, I believe that is the OG platform.

>Subscription? Pay with credits?

Make is freemium cloud-hosted only. n8n is cloud or free self-hosted version. I believe Make charges per node (step) executed, whereas n8n (cloud version) charges per workflow executed, regardless of number of nodes. So the more complex your task, the more you'd want n8n. Also, Make is simpler. n8n allows you to write custom code, but has a steeper learning curve.

You connect external services via API credentials. They all seem to work off tokens and "pay per use" models, too. I've put $5-10 into each to check them out. LLM API tasks run $.05-.$10 each, so far.