HTTP Callback as a Service?
Would anybody be interested in an HTTP callback as a service?
You register an HTTP callback request to be executed at a particular time in the future, this SaaS would then make sure the callback is executed(with retry config, etc). SaaS can focus on the core components and let this service handle the scheduled communication etc.
To be said differently, this service can be a
Feature use cases:
- If you have a customer sign up for your SaaS, you want to send periodic reminder emails/notifications for them to convert to a paid user, you would need to build something in your SaaS for periodic communication.
- Scheduled purge of free user data
- Abandoned cart notifications
Technical use cases:
- There is code failing with a transient issue, for example, external service is down, and you want to try again later, you can leverage this service to trigger the code path again without blocking the resources.
- Cron replacement.
Would love your feedback on this idea.
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In my day job, around 4-5 months ago, I had built a distributed cronjob system that's being used for scheduling recurring reminder push notifications to users, for doing some jobs periodically, etc. The system itself is generic -- it pushed events to a queue or makes a webhook invocations as per schedule. (The company i work for has a super app with around 50 million MAU. So this was a large scale usecase. This system has around 25 million active scheduled at any time with ~5k schedules being created every minute). The core is based on https://github.com/spy16/delayq
Just 2 weeks back i was planning to build this exact solution as a SaaS to small scale usecases.. but in doing some research found out that cronhooks, gcp cloud task, etc. And decided to drop it.
My conclusion is that for it to be valuable, i think you might need to find a more niche usecase and build for that perhaps.
(I'm new to the saas business as well. So this is only my opinion. I might be wrong.🙂 Just wondering what everyone thinks about this)
This idea has been validated before with products such https://www.webhooks.io/ and https://cronhooks.io, which is good news for you because now you know that the NEED EXISTS.
Good luck.
IMO just because a few competitors exist doesn’t mean that the idea has been validated. For all we know those competitors could be making $200 MRR max. I think it’s important to go a little farther to truly validate an idea before spending lots of time on it.
You are right.
https://cronhooks.io validates this idea. Thank you!
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To be honest, Cronhooks looks really good. One additional feature I can think of is dependent execution. A lot of times, you want something to execute only if some other callback is executed or not. Would this be something you want?
Please do let me know if there are things you would like to add to Cronhooks.
Actually that would be interesting for Shopify apps. Apps ranking can go down if they are returning errors on webhooks calls, such a service would allow to always return a successful response on those calls and retry later when the system is back again.
Interesting use case. Didn't know this one existed. Thanks @BentoumiTech
There’s definitely a market need. This also exists: https://www.zeplo.io/
I think is a cool idea but you can find a solution for that problem with a quick search, if you can add more value go ahead. GOOD LUCK 🍀
I am working one exactly this -> https://scheduly.net.
Companies generally deal with this using Zapier and services like Customer.io, and similar. There's way more in this process than just scheduling an event. You need your Sales/Marketing to be able to edit email templates, track email clicks and a lot more.
There are probably hundreds, if not thousands of tools that deal with this, and generally, majority of hosting provides like e.g. GCP, AWS, etc have cron services which are almost free. For instance, very popular tool amongst infrastructure teams today is Temporal, that allows you to do this on a different level.
Overall, your idea might be good and worth something, but you have to find the use-cases that it can solve in a special way. You need to find a target group for this.
Thank you for the feedback @programmer_network. After thinking about the Shopify issue mentioned earlier, I am also thinking about the "missed webhooks" because of any backend issue. You would need something to help you with retries there.
I actually had a similar idea but using a server client application to run whatever task the web app was scheduling, but talking to APIs seems like a better idea! I like it, I don't know how to market the use cases though.
Agree. Marketing this could be a bit challenging.
When I worked at a bank, we had a service called "Garcon" that would let you define an API call and set a CRON job for how often you'd want it to happen.
It was mostly used as an external scheduler. My team used it to schedule tasks like:
"At 2 AM and 2PM every day, login to FTP server XYZ and grab all the files in a certain folder"
Yes I think it has potential
I'm wondering whether there may be some overlap between what you're proposing and https://www.serverlessq.com/#use-cases (which I read about on IH a month ago)...
Yes. There is an overlap of use cases. What I am proposing is structured around 2 things
ServerlessQ, as I understand it, is a service that helps you make your app async.
HTTP callback as a service is also doing that + helping you with your scheduled tasks + retries etc. Covers broader use cases.
I have built something like this: beew.io
Doesnt that sound like Lambdas? Severless?
Checkout https://cronhub.io (no free plan at the moment but let me know)
Isn't this just background service/scheduled jobs/tasks? You can then offload it to microservice or lambda/azure functions?
Yes. But its a managed service so you don't have to bear the burden of
I am sure there are use cases for it that I am not sure. So... I think I am not qualified to comment on this :)
Genuine question:
Why would I want to use it instead of cronjobs? What's the advantage?
Why would I pay extra for this while i can do this exact thing in my N8N runs on free tier Heroku?
Cronjobs are usually for tasks that you know you want to run beforehand. What if you want to schedule something ad-hoc? An API-based service that helps you schedule something to be executed at a particular time(once or recurring) would help in that case.
Quick search in google found this site https://www.webhooks.io/
I am sure if you check deeply you'd find these services exists.
Now you say "in the future", that means something like cron.
Another google search found this site https://cronhooks.io/#:~:text=Cronhooks enables you to invoke,get instant alerts for failures.
I did not check any of these sites and not recommending anything here. Just that there are probably services like that and it is worth checking their pricing first to see what is the mood in the industry for paying for such services.
I vaguely recall master joda (jason lemkin) saying that less than 9$ license is a not such a good idea, probably more today so another thing to think about...
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.