Announcing Rulebox

We're very excited to announce Rulebox - the SaaS solution for business rules! 🚀🎉

Rulebox will make flexible business rules available to projects large and small, with a friendly user interface, easy SaaS subscription model, and a combination of power and process that means it'll save your team tons and tons of time.

At the moment we're working on finishing our first version and we'll make it available on a first-come-first-served basis to collect feedback, find embarrassing bugs, and build from there. Hopefully, some of you are interested in that!

For now, you can register to stay informed.

We're bootstrapping this, spending time in the evenings and weekends. I'm very inspired by the many stories here on IH about people building viable (side) businesses from the ground up.

Why Rulebox?

All software needs to be flexible. Configurable. Even basic products offer some levers and dials for users to operate. And more complex software eventually needs you to run different processes in different scenarios, or for different users, clients or accounts.

So you build configuration screens. So far so good. Then you think, maybe I should build a if..then engine, and offer different rules through some advanced configuration. Oh-oh.

The problems with creating flexible rules are many: how flexible is your home-baked rules engine? How fast does it run? How much time do your engineers spend maintaining it? Who writes the rules, users? Account managers? Senior engineers? How do you know the people writing the rules don't make mistakes? How does your QA team test that the software works, if its behaviour is flexible?

Rulebox allows your team members to write the rules, and write the unit tests, and to publish new rule versions, and then audit all of the above. The rules are compiled to native code. You then ask Rulebox to run the rules against your data, and that's audited too - so you can see which rules hit, and which didn't.

Rulebox rules are strongly typed - you first define your data elements, and then you write the rules that act on them. That way, you don't have run-time issues, and we can offer you cool stuff like unit tests and native type-safe code. If you run a rule with bad data, Rulebox will tell you immediately.

First version

We're finalising our first in the coming months. This will include the Rulebox Studio web app, where you author your rules, and the execution API you'll use to run them. We will offer basic pass/fail rules with a JSON-based syntax, and native compilation and high-resolution timers for accurate reporting.

Build in public

We started development in 2021, and discovered the build-in-public movement. We're big fans of this, and it turns out some of our favourite indie projects are listed on IndieHackers, so we decided to join in and share our experiences!

Happy New Year everyone, and I hope to get to know you all a bit better in 2022.... 😍