Launch HN: Paragon (YC W20) – Visually Build API Workflows

[fooly_wk]

We're Brandon and Ishmael, co-founders of Paragon (https://useparagon.com) - we're working on a platform for visually building API workflows.

As a frontend engineer and product manager, I've always wanted a way to quickly build out backend services without having to manually spin up a server, manage database connections, or write a ton of code. We wanted to create Paragon to make it easier to build and manage some of these services without being an expert backend engineer.

Paragon is a visual workflow builder that provides "steps" like API requests, database queries, and conditional logic that you can drag and drop to build microservices or integrations. Many workflows can be built without writing code, but we also provide Cloud Functions as a native step type in case you need to add some custom logic to your workflow. You can deploy workflows in one click and visualize the flow of data through each execution for easy debugging.

Today, we're focused on helping build integrations between your product and 3rd party APIs. We know there is a history of visual programming tools that promise more than they deliver. Paragon isn't designed to build your core product or replace your API, but we do hope to make it easier to extend functionality and microservices that integrate your product with other services (especially if you're not a backend engineer).

For example, our users have built workflows that sends weekly Twilio messages to their Firebase users, or that parses user file uploads via an OCR API and saves them to MongoDB. Here's an example workflow that finds your inactive users in Postgres and sends them re-engagement messages with Twilio or Sendgrid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVU8GCBMZj4

We launched Paragon in beta about a month ago and we charge a monthly subscription based on usage, starting at $30 for 1,000 tasks per month. If you're interested in trying Paragon, you can sign up on our website and and I'll fast-track you to the top of our waitlist!

We'd love to hear your experience building API integrations. Thanks, and looking forwards to your thoughts and feedback in the comments!

Edit: We don't currently offer a free tier or trial. The reason is that we currently provide custom onboarding for every user where we help setup your workflow(s) over a Zoom call, then add you a Slack channel where we provide realtime support. We invest a lot of time and effort to ensure each user is successful and are happy to offer a full refund if we can't. That said, we do plan to add some free version of Paragon in the future. I hope this clarifies some people's comments about our pricing, thanks!

[breytex]

Waiting for BaaS solutions to become mature for a long time now.

Big fan of the direction Hasura is taking. Maybe this could also cover some of the BaaS aspects? E.g. enabling frontend devs to deliver fully-fledged products without much knowledge about backend and databases?

One thing which disturbs me: I have to fill out an entire typeform just to get told that there is no free-tier and I have to pay 30$/month before even testing if this thing covers my most trivial needs. I think that's a dark pattern, I am out, sorry.

[fooly_wk]

Absolutely - our vision is that one day frontend devs will be able to spin up entire backends on Paragon, and just need to plug in their database / email provider / etc. of choice.

Appreciate your feedback on our onboarding flow, you're right and I apologize for any misunderstanding. We'll update our flow to better reflect our pricing.

[toomuchtodo]

Congrats on the launch! What would you say differentiates you from competitors in the space, such as Integromat, Tray, n8n, and Zapier?

Also, if I may offer you a piece of advice based on my experience at an org offering a similar product: make it frictionless to bring in/import snippets/templates for Cloud Functions (think code snippet search function you'd have on your workstation as a dev). Your users are likely to be non-technical, and the more hand holding you can perform, the better.

Wishing you much success, I love this sort of tooling!

[fooly_wk]

Thank you and great question! Zapier is great for simple tasks like sending data from one app to another, but isn't well designed for more complex operations like handling large arrays of data, or writing custom code. More broadly, Zapier and other tools like Tray and Integromat are more focused on RPA, which typically means automating internal business processes.

Our focus is specifically on developers and product teams, and on helping build integrations between their core product and 3rd party services. Paragon is designed to handle use cases like building custom endpoints, fanning out arrays, and writing custom cloud functions - we even expose access to npm, so developers can do some pretty heavy lifting if they need to.

I love your suggestion to allow importing cloud functions. One of our goals is to eventually allow you to sync functions directly from a Github rep - another example of how we aim to cater more to developers.

[weft_digital]

No Code / Low Code skeptic here.

I fail to see how using this GUI mixed with raw code approach would make my development workflow any faster.

For example, I've posted below a Node.js implementation of what you created in the YouTube demo linked in the OP, and it took me less time to write than it did for you to create the same "workflow" using the GUI in the video demo.

And the best part is I can run this JS code on my own server, or as a cloud function on AWS Lambda, etc. I retain complete control and avoid vendor lock in. And there is no way you and your team can compete with AWS on cloud function pricing. So where is the value for developers in your offer?

It seems like you are offering a managed compute service at a much higher price point than AWS, and then trying to justify that price point by tacking a GUI onto it. At best the GUI will be able to abstract away a little bit of boilerplate code, but inevitably the interface it exposes will not be as flexible, fully-featured, expressive, or IMO, as easy to reason about, as the interface exposed by any modern programming language.

const { Pool } = require('pg'); const pool = new Pool(); await pool.connect(); const accountSid = 'ACXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX'; const authToken = 'your_auth_token'; const twilioclient = require('twilio')(accountSid, authToken); const sgMail = require('@sendgrid/mail'); sgMail.setApiKey(process.env.SENDGRID_API_KEY);

const res = await pool.query(`SELECT * FROM USERS WHERE "lastSeen" < (now() - INTERVAL '4 weeks')`) res.rows.forEach(row => { let message = `Hi ${row.name}, we haven't seen you in a while`; if (row.phone) { twilioclient.messages.create({ body: message, from: '[phone]', to: row.phone }) .then(message => console.log(message.sid)); } else { const msg = { to: row.email, from: '[email protected]', subject: 'Come back', text: message, }; sgMail.send(msg) .then(() => {}, error => { console.error(error);

                if (error.response) {
                    console.error(error.response.body)
                }
            });
    }

}) await pool.end()

[ishmaelsamuel]

Writing the code yourself is always going to give you the most flexibility. This comes at the cost of complexity and domain expertise.

If you wanted to run something like this on a schedule, monitor execution results step by step, ensure your credentials are stored securely, etc, the barrier to entry to building this in terms of time and expertise suddenly jumps significantly, as well as the services / infrastructure required. We provide all of this out of the box with Paragon.

However, if you have all the domain expertise of the variety of languages, services, etc and prefer to spend the time writing the code yourself and managing the infra, that's okay. If you prefer to code, no code's just not for you and it doesn't have to be ^__^

[fooly_wk]

Good point - many experienced engineers like yourself can build things like this quickly without Paragon. However, many of our users are frontend engineers or semi-technical product managers who may not be as comfortable spinning up their own service as you are. For backend engineers who do use Paragon, they can handoff workflows to other, less technical team members who then don't have to rely on engineering every time they need to make a small change. We've gotten feedback from customers who've told us this is well worth the $30/mo we charge for Paragon.

[toinbis]

10 questions' animated form just to learn there is no free tier nor free trial? not too cool.

[iMuzz]

Agreed.

I went all the way to Question 9 and then closed it out.

It's fine to ask for money — but this felt misleading :(

[fooly_wk]

Appreciate the feedback. We mention in the post that we charge for Paragon and that it starts at $30/mo. I've added another edit to clarify why we don't offer a free trial, although we plan to in the future.

[stingraycharles]

Who are your audience here? I’m trying to figure out whether this is some Zapier/Integromat type of tool, but the emphasis on more “high volume” integrations and scenarios is interesting.

I’m personally just doing some simple workflows with Gitlab-to-Telegram etc, and I have to say that I find it quite difficult to accomplish that what I consider “medium complexity” stuff: one Gitlab push event has multiple commit messages, I want to iterate over them for formatting, and then collect all of them in a single Telegram message.

Unfortunately, the sheer fact that I’m not “allowed” to write any code makes the solution so much more complex; debugging what’s wrong is a nightmare, and generally it all just leaves a bad feeling behind.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m paying for this service because I get value out of it, but it feels as if the devil is in the details if you want to pull this off.

[fooly_wk]

Our focus is on helping developers and product teams build integrations between their core product and 3rd party services. "Medium complexity" is a good way to describe it - you can accomplish a good amount on Paragon without writing code, but if you need to write a custom function to go the last mile, you can.

[khashnejad]

Try https://devscore.com

It allows you to code and do this type of automation very quickly. let me know [info @ devscore] if you are interested to learn more.

[rgbrgb]

Congrats on the launch, neat idea!

You guys have thoughts on automated testing? My experience with visual programming in the wild (zapier, iterable, mailchimp) is that you end up with a lot of orphan and broken "scripts" deployed only to the production environment by well-meaning operators who can't really test or maintain them. It's interesting that this is geared towards devs, but I worry that you'd have a bunch of the same problems as the system grows unless there's a good way to rig up functional/e2e/integration tests the way we usually with cypress, capybara, etc.

Seems like there must be a solution, but my first idea of just setting up a "test" environment that points to other test services seems really costly if it's running on every commit that gets pushes like we often do with CI.

[ishmaelsamuel]

Heya! We have given some thought to implementing CI, reviews, and a sandbox environment.

We've built out some testing functionality that allows users to test their workflows and steps, and we're going to continue down this road to eventually provide our users version control and sandbox environments. It's currently seen as a "nice-to-have" for even our production users, so the timing of when it's implemented is still unclear.

[dopeboy]

Brandon and Ishmael are awesome people, y'all. I remember sitting down with them in the early days; excited to see all the progress made since.

[ishmaelsamuel]

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[samblr]

Looks promising and a neat landing page.

Have to agree with others that $30 is pricey for 1000 tasks. On lambda you can do thousands of them for free.

How do you plan to standout and survive as so many others are in this space ?

[fooly_wk]

Thanks, edited our post to clarify why we're charging $30/mo - we do plan to offer a free version or trial in the future.

I think that most other "low-code" players are focused on RPA (helping ops automate internal business processes) whereas we're focused on helping product & engineering build integrations between their product and other services.

[amerf1]

Firstly congrats on the launch! I am super excited about this I just signed up hoping to get my hands on it and experiment on different things

At $30/month I think its a steal the reason I say this is because for someone to do this with no-code they would probably have to hire a freelancer who would charge them way more than $30 for setting it up and probably no/little support. Love the idea I really think it fills a gap here.

There are several side projects I'm going to try with this

[nagarjun]

Great product! I was part of a team that wanted to rapidly test different marketing approaches using data in Salesforce etc. My colleagues were mostly non-technical so I had them try out Zapier and they loved it! I can see how Paragon can be useful to them.

Quick question - are you using some kind of UI library to power the graphical builder? I recall coming across a JS library in the past that looked very similar but I can't remember what it was called.

[ishmaelsamuel]

Thank you! We built it ourselves in React, though we used the styled-components and react-beautiful-dnd packages for building the components and helping with the dragging functionality. - https://styled-components.com - https://github.com/atlassian/react-beautiful-dnd

[curo]

Would this be something I could use to facilitate integration between my SaaS and 3rd party tools used by our end-users? I.e., they provide the key through an admin panel and then we can 2-way sync with SalesForce? Or does that require additional auth steps that require native integration?

[fooly_wk]

Great question! Not yet, but this is very much on our roadmap and something we're looking to support soon!

[RocketSyntax]

Love it. I dream about this all the time. Hook them up w Kafka? How is Swagger/OpenAPI used? Airflow?

[ishmaelsamuel]

Hey! We're not exposing anything like Kafka to our end users. We think all of the underlying technical infrastructure should be abstracted so the users can focus on their core logic.

We're also not currently exposing any external Swagger / OpenAPI docs for a similar reason, but it's simple to integrate and we've considered generating it for our more technical users.

If you're interested in joining the team as an engineer, we're hiring! https://www.notion.so/Paragon-is-Hiring-ab5739dac1c4490db920...

[RocketSyntax]

Fintech.

[shirazdole]

Congrats on the launch! The product looks amazing and I can't wait to get my hands on it.

[jonnydubowsky]

Congrats on launch. Looks like a great platform. I went through the typeform and would consider paying $30/month but not without a free trial. Have you considered offering a free trial, even for a very limited time frame?

[fooly_wk]

Thanks, we've edited our post above to clarify why we aren't offering a free trial right now, although we do plan to in the future.

[bcheung]

This looks promising. The pricing seems like it only works with tasks that are very rare and high value though. Do users have the ability add their own building blocks?

[transitivebs]

Congrats on the launch.

RPA & low/no-code tools are a very crowded market right now and I don't believe that focusing on selling to developers will get you very far.

Best of luck tho.

[fooly_wk]

Luckily, many other people believe this too which is why we think there's a big opportunity no one has addressed here.

[rpm33]

Love your landing page -- was it designed by a professional?

[ishmaelsamuel]

Thank you! Our cofounder @fooly_wk did it himself. We've built everything in house.

[gerhardi]

Quickly this looks like something similar to Azure Logic Apps - you probably know about it too. Why should I use Paragon instead of Logic Apps? Educate me! :)

[factsaresacred]

Looks similar to https://pipedream.com/, which is a pretty neat tool.

[andrea_s]

No pricing and no self-hosting option (either/or would be fine of course). A pretty neat tool for hobbies, maybe...

[cuchoi]

This looks great! How do you define a "task"?

[fooly_wk]

Thank you! We consider a task to be an "action" that's performed in your Paragon workflow, e.g. a function execution, database query, or API request.