IFTTT is offering “set your own price per month for life”. I’m wondering who Pro is for and whether this is something useful or not…
It’s not “for life”; only the first year…
I believe they just changed that, locking in the price you set for life:
For a limited time, you may set your price for IFTTT Pro and we will honor it indefinitely. All subscriptions are in US$ and renew monthly
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Oh, they indeed changed that!
It was this when I subscribed (emphasis mine):
“Our introductory set your own price subscription allows you to choose your monthly payment for the first year of Pro.”
I subscribed to check out the Pro features (and because I have way more than 3 custom applets), but I’m still considering writing a Node.js application to run on a Raspberry Pi instead of IFTTT.
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Me too on the Pi running node.
I bought into emusic.com with a lifetime price guarantee. It lasted about five years then they raised it. Nobody has a sufficient interest to litigate so those promises meant nothing 
.
Note that the word they use is “indefinitely”:
For a limited time, you may set your price for IFTTT Pro and we will honor it indefinitely. All subscriptions are in US$ and renew monthly.
The definition of that word is supremely vague: “for an unlimited or unspecified period of time.”
So it can either mean “forever” or “until we don’t”.
I am quite sure that their lawyers would say they meant the latter.
Given that they are not offering annual subscriptions, only monthly, they could change this next month.
(Yes, those who were promised “the first year” could try to sue. But we all know how that would end up.)
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Because of that I wouldn’t want to go for this offer. “Frog boiling” on the price, with it slowly being raised, is not something I’d be keen on.
Three comments:
- I’m not prepared to build much automation around this uncertainty.
- This smells of a need for them to show some recurring cash flow all of a sudden to someone.
- This is actually a terrible PR situation.
I’m interested in seeing how people are using IFTTT Pro. They don’t have much info without subscribing (though I might just subscribe at $1.99 for a month just to check it out) but it sounds like it’s a Zapier/Integromat competitor?
Most of my Applets in IFTTT (Pro) use an RSS feed as input and create a new task (to update a particular application) in Remember The Milk (my trusted GTD system) based on new feed entries. MacUpdater probably catches most of these updates as well… (so I might even be able to drop IFTTT without writing my own replacement in Node.js?)
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Meanwhile I’ve got my Pi running a node web server that can issue both POST and GET requests. (I tested them both with Pushcut.) So what more do I need?
I found out yesterday I was going to loose many of my automations if I didn’t upgrade to pro or find another solution for some of mine.
If you go to my applets and look at an applet and it says by ____ and it’s your username, you can only have a max of 3 of these once they make the transition if you aren’t paying. If you use one of their pre-built rules, it doesn’t count against the limit.
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If it’s not for you then it’s not for you. But I’m trying to figure out if it’s for me.
For what it’s worth, most of my web API automations are done via Python and JavaScript running on AWS scheduled with Cronyo. It does exactly what I need because I program it to do exactly what I need. I’m just trying to figure out if IFTTT Pro can make things easier for me in a way that Integromat’s free tier can’t.
Today I received an email from IFTTT saying:
Upgrade to Pro before October 7th to set your own price and we’ll honor it forever.
Now, again, could they change that later and get away with it? Sure. The only way to fight it would be some kind of a lawsuit which is probably forbidden somewhere in their TOS where you agree to arbitration that takes place at 3am on the 5th Tuesday in February and is presided over by the owner’s mom.
However, I did want to note that they were being a bit more explicit on at least claiming that this isn’t “an unknown amount of time” but is, at least at this point, mean to be “forever”.
Given that they’re offering as low as $2/month, I’ve gone ahead and signed up for it. I’m not using it a lot right now, but I like the idea of having it available, especially now that they have a business model beyond “Let’s get a lot of users and figure it out later.”
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I saw the word “forever” in my email this morning.
The only worry I have is whether service/capabilities will be divided into tiers, depending on what you’re paying.
I think I will, after all, go for the 3.99 level and create a new userid. (I have two, each with few automations, and am now totally confused between them so this is a good time to press the “reset” button.)
Yeah, I’ve had the same sense… that I wonder if there’s going to be a catch later on, like if you’re paying $2/month you get X, $5/month you get Y, but for everything you need to be on the $10/month plan.
Maybe I just have an overdeveloped sense of game theory.
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I’m afraid it’s a trust issue. Probably badly thought out PR rather than any untrustworthiness. So I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt - and try to use IFTTT more concertedly at the 3.99 level.
(Personal mantra: Buy nice stuff and use the heck out of it.)