Outages
Yea, they had an attack on the new Make platform, the Integromat side of things wasn’t hit as far I know. It didn’t last too long.
It happens to the best of us, par-for-the-course.
The biggest & most painfully long issue with them was not the attack but the outage with their Webflow module.
It’s hard to know if that was on Webflow’s end (totally could have been) or Make’s end, or both. Nobody is talking, at least to me.
But that lasted for a full 1 month.
I didn’t even notice it until my email inbox got flooded with folks telling me about it.
Why?
Because my live, production sites were not effected. I wasn’t using Webflow with the built-in Webflow module. I usually make the raw connections.
Make (Integromat) is for Advanced Uses
With Make, there traditionally hasn’t been a good reason to (mostly) rely upon the built-in modules for a 3rd party service.
Instead, the winning approach has been to use their raw connection modules for ingoing and outgoing requests. Not for everything, but many things.
At a hight level, that would be HTTP and Webhooks (though it get’s more nuanced than just that).
Also, recent updates to Make turn many of their built-in modules into Webhooks so a line is beginning to get blurred.
Technical Users
Make just isn’t well suited for non-technical beginners.
Technical is NOT defined as those of us who know how to write scripts or engineer large scale software. So being technical and not an absolute beginner covers a wide swath.
Zapier is for Non-Technical Beginners
Sure it has a few advanced features that are easier for technical minded folks to grok.
But…
If someone wants to stay in the non-technical, beginner category (and there is 100% absolutely nothing wrong with that in any way whatsoever) then you have to pay the high tax for saving your own time + effort to skill up.
And that makes sense for a lot of people.
Focusing on your job as an employee. Focusing on driving revenue as a founder. And so on…
Some options:
Try services like:
Regardless of the platform, you’ll always have issues with the pre-built integrations.
Always.
- They break.
- They become abandoned.
- They don’t get fixed fast enough.
- They don’t fully support the latest API released.
- They don’t fully support the APIs they do implement.
- The service has no desire to make those updates (even though they claim they do).
So on, and so on, and so on…
This is why dire hard software engineers (mostly) hate, dare I say despise “no code”.
Lack of control.
And this why non-software engineers (mostly) hate, dare I say despise the thought of “hey! just learning how to code!”.
Difficult. Time consuming. The drawbacks outweigh the benefits.
You can mitigate these issues, to some degree, by paying for the higher priced services (a.k.a. Zapier).
It genuinely takes a lot of work hours to maintain and update those integrations - even if you do offset that to the 3rd party service to create.
But then you rely upon individual 3rd party services themselves to keep their own integration up-to-date and in working order. See above for examples of that not working.
But even the high priced Zapier it’s frustrating with their lack of support for Webflow, along with many others. I can count by number of years I’ve been waiting on Zapier to update some basic Webflow integrations.
Simple fact: They won’t.
You have to weigh the costs & benefits of going:
- Full custom
- Full hand holding
- Something in-between
…and that’ll be different for most everyone.
Maybe someone else can chime in with the exact service that meets your specific needs, though.
