IFTTT is one of the best action trigger and logging options on Android. It’s been around for a very long time, does its job and does it well. As a result of this reliability, there are a lot of users — myself included — who rely on it to complete actions automatically. This leads in turn, to increasing numbers of applets or “recipes” in your account. If you’ve got more than three of those and want (or need) to keep them, listen up!
IFTTT has made the business decision to move away from the free, to a subscription-based model for heavy users. As mentioned, users with three or less custom applets are fine: Continue as you are and if you use applets that are not customisable, you’re safe also. But users with more than three, you fall into their customer base that will need to pay a subscription or find an alternate option.
As a user myself, I find it a little aggravating to have a once free service now require me to pay to play. I do, however, understand the business decision behind the change. I know I’m not alone in that either, services like Evernote has done this in the past and Lastpass increased their pricing with no increase in functionality or service. As a result, those services did lose some customers over the change.
The premium tier for IFTTT does have some advantages though including:
- Faster applet execution in real time situations
- Multi-step applets allowing significantly more complex actions
For the time being, they’re offering users the chance to set your own price for the premium tier. The full price is going to be US$9.99 per month — I will be looking for other options at that price — but you can choose to pay as low as US$1.99 per month for the first year.
Will you be paying the premium for continued access, or will you be finding other automated options for your IFTTT applets?
Luckily, I’m just starting to get my OpenHAB server to a point where it can take over the things I used to use IFTTT to do (poorly), and do them much better, thanks to being able to build rules using combined facts. IFTTT has always been a pretty brain-dead service.
Bye, IFTTT!
the price seems high but the 3+ applet kick in threshold on the other hand seems reasonable. get a couple of really fantastic workflows happening and you save a tonne of time and effort on tasks that are a chore to do manually
What other options are there?
It depends what you’re trying to achieve mate.
What’s your use case scenario?