Day 439: the road to cloud

when i think about where browserflow’s functionality would be most useful — and by useful, i mean providing business value (aka things people would pay for) — the answer keeps coming back to browserflow cloud

i had someone email me asking me how they’d run a flow after they’ve built it. would browserflow spit out selenium code? create an executable binary? expose an API endpoint with the latest results? they were interested in getting data from a website that didn’t have an API and showing the updated value on their company dashboard

when i told him that he would need to run the flow manually in the browser, he balked and said that running the flow manually would be just as much work as just getting the data manually

in his particular case, he’s absolutely right. browserflow wouldn’t save him much time at all

where browserflow does save people time right now is performing actions locally that require multiple steps. but there’s another opportunity here that’s not being addressed: tasks (even super simple ones) that need to run automatically on its own

that’s where browserflow cloud would come in. people can schedule flows, and it would run on its own without someone needing to trigger it manually. it can also expose API endpoints for integration with other webapps or accept webhooks so that it can call other endpoints with the results after it’s done running

i hope i’m not wildly off, but i think i can get a super basic version working in a month (extracting text and writing it to a google sheet). haven’t fully decided yet on committing to it but it is very, very tempting

browserflow cloud is the future