Personal · Weekend build
Build your own IFTTT
If this happens, then do that. For your life, not your company. IFTTT charges $2.99–$14.99 per month — that’s $36–$180 a year — for something you can replace with focused software of your own. Here is the honest scope, the honest timeline, and the exact prompt to hand your coding agent.
Who this replacement is for
This build targets one person automating a handful of personal digital chores. The goal: run simple two-step automations for the feeds, calendars, and alerts of daily life. If you need more than that, keep paying — the point of building it yourself is owning a tool shaped exactly like your workflow, not re-implementing a venture-funded roadmap.
How long it actually takes
One number would be a lie, so here are three. Each tier is a real, usable product — pick the one that matches how much of IFTTT you actually use.
| Estimate | What you get |
|---|---|
| 8 hours | five personal triggers, email and webhook actions |
| 3 days | polling connectors, run history, retries, quiet hours |
| 1 month+ | hundreds of services, oauth zoo, mobile apps — the part you should probably skip |
What a minimal IFTTT alternative needs
- two-step applets pairing one trigger with one action
- polling triggers for RSS items, weather changes, and calendar events
- actions for email, push-style notifications, and outgoing webhooks
- per-applet run history with skipped, succeeded, and failed states
- quiet hours and per-applet pause without losing configuration
Data model
Applet, Trigger, Action, Run
Integrations
RSS feeds, Cloudflare Cron Triggers, transactional email
Capability context
Astro, Workers, D1
The guardrail
Deduplicate trigger events so restarts and repeated polls never fire the same action twice, and store third-party credentials encrypted.
Deliberate non-goals
Do not build multi-step workflows, a service marketplace, smart-home device control, or team features — the site’s Zapier entry covers work automations.
The complete build prompt
Copy this into your coding agent of choice. It is scoped for a useful v1 — journeys, screens, business rules, data model, security, tests, and acceptance scenarios included. Pick your stack:
You are building a production-ready software product named “Ifso”, a deliberately focused alternative to IFTTT. Build a complete, usable vertical slice—not a landing page, static mockup, or disconnected collection of components. WORKING AGREEMENT Before writing implementation code, produce a short technical plan that names the routes or pages, server actions or endpoints, data tables, important state transitions, authorization boundaries, background jobs, and external adapters. Resolve contradictions in favor of the narrow audience and non-goals below. Prefer a small, legible architecture over speculative abstraction, but do not omit persistence, validation, error handling, or tests. PRODUCT BRIEF Primary user: one person automating a handful of personal digital chores. Primary outcome: run simple two-step automations for the feeds, calendars, and alerts of daily life. Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of IFTTT. A first-time user should understand what to do from the interface itself, without a tour or documentation. END-TO-END USER JOURNEYS Implement all of these flows through the real interface and persistent data layer: 1. The owner creates an applet pairing an RSS trigger with an email action, tests it with a dry run, and enables it. 2. Overnight the poller finds two new feed items, sends two emails, and the owner reviews both runs in the morning history. 3. The owner sets quiet hours, pauses a noisy applet before a holiday, and re-enables it later with its configuration intact. SCREENS AND INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE Build these as coherent responsive views. Each screen must specify its primary action, secondary actions, visible status, validation feedback, empty state, loading or pending state, success confirmation, and recoverable failure state. 1. Applets: each applet with trigger, action, enabled state, last run result, and create, pause, and delete controls. 2. Applet editor: trigger picker with per-trigger settings, action picker with templated fields, a dry-run tester, and save. 3. Run history: chronological runs with trigger payload summary, action outcome, skip reason, and retry action for failures. 4. Settings: quiet hours, notification email, encrypted credential management, and per-service polling intervals. CORE CAPABILITIES 1. two-step applets pairing one trigger with one action 2. polling triggers for RSS items, weather changes, and calendar events 3. actions for email, push-style notifications, and outgoing webhooks 4. per-applet run history with skipped, succeeded, and failed states 5. quiet hours and per-applet pause without losing configuration DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES Treat these as server-enforced product requirements, not interface suggestions: 1. Record a durable cursor or seen-item set per trigger so each event fires exactly once across restarts and repeated polls. 2. Run actions idempotently with a per-run deduplication key, and retry transient failures with backoff before marking a run failed. 3. Suppress action delivery during quiet hours by queuing, not dropping, and deliver or expire queued runs explicitly when the window opens. 4. Poll third-party services politely with per-service intervals, timeouts, and backoff on repeated failures. DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE Design a small relational schema centered on Applet, Trigger, Action, Run. Before implementing it, document: 1. Each table’s purpose, primary key, ownership or tenant boundary, timestamps, status fields, and important attributes. 2. Foreign keys, uniqueness constraints, check constraints, indexes needed by the named screens, and transaction boundaries for multi-record changes. 3. The allowed lifecycle or state transitions, who may trigger each transition, which transitions are terminal or reversible, and what audit history must remain immutable. 4. Archive, retention, and deletion behavior, including what happens to dependent records and external files. 5. Idempotency strategy for submissions, jobs, imports, notifications, webhooks, or retries where applicable. Use migrations rather than ad-hoc schema creation. Store time instants consistently and retain named timezone context whenever local schedules or dates matter. Never rely on a counter, disabled button, or client-side check to preserve a business invariant. USERS, AUTHENTICATION, AND PERMISSIONS Implement only the roles required by the stated audience. Make the ownership and visibility model explicit before coding. Enforce authorization in every server-side query and mutation, including search, exports, attachments, live updates, and guessed URLs—not merely by hiding controls. Use secure session defaults, protect state-changing requests, and provide an understandable signed-out, expired-session, and forbidden state. Seed distinct users when multiple roles are required so permissions can be demonstrated and tested. INTERACTION AND VISUAL DIRECTION The product should feel fast, calm, focused, and credible rather than like a generic admin template. Use a clear visual hierarchy, restrained color, readable typography, generous hit targets, and consistent placement for primary actions. Start with server-rendered HTML and progressively enhance only the interactions that benefit from it. The core workflow must remain understandable if enhancement fails. Start with server-rendered Astro pages and ordinary HTML forms. Use HTMX for form submissions, partial navigation, and server-driven updates, then Alpine.js only for small local browser state. The core workflow must remain understandable if either enhancement layer fails. Design mobile layouts intentionally instead of simply stacking desktop panels. Support keyboard navigation, visible focus, semantic landmarks, explicit labels, useful page titles, reduced-motion preferences, and screen-reader announcements for asynchronous results. Never use color alone to communicate state. Destructive actions require clear scope and confirmation; safe repeated actions should be idempotent. TECHNICAL DIRECTION Build this version with the AHA stack: Astro for routing, layouts, and server-rendered pages; HTMX for interactions that benefit from HTML fragment responses; and Alpine.js for small, local interface state. Prefer Cloudflare D1 for relational persistence, R2 for object storage, Workers for server endpoints and scheduled work, Durable Objects only for coordinated real-time state, and Workflows or Queues for durable background jobs—but only when the product requirements call for them. Keep domain rules in testable server-side modules instead of route handlers or UI components. Separate persistence, external providers, and background work behind small interfaces without building a framework. Prefer ordinary HTML forms and URLs for durable navigation; use optimistic interaction only when failure can be reconciled clearly. The product brief currently identifies Astro, Workers, D1 as capability context. Preserve any required native, browser-only, edge, storage, real-time, or background-processing capability through a narrow adapter appropriate to the selected framework. If the core workflow genuinely requires native or browser APIs, keep that runtime as the primary execution surface rather than simulating inaccessible capabilities or inventing an unnecessary web surface. Integrate with RSS feeds and Cloudflare Cron Triggers and transactional email. For every integration: - List required environment variables in an .env.example without real secrets. - Add a small adapter with timeouts, normalized errors, and a deterministic local fake or development path. - Verify inbound signatures and deduplicate provider events where supported. - Keep credentials server-side, encrypt long-lived provider tokens at rest, and redact secrets and sensitive payloads from logs. - Define retry, backoff, and idempotency behavior for any side effect that can be repeated. SECURITY AND PRIVACY Deduplicate trigger events so restarts and repeated polls never fire the same action twice, and store third-party credentials encrypted. Validate, normalize, and length-limit all untrusted input on the server. Escape rendered content by default, sanitize any intentionally accepted markup, rate-limit public or abuse-prone actions, and use private object storage plus short-lived authorized URLs for sensitive files. Collect the minimum personal data necessary for the named workflow. Document retention and deletion behavior. Add specific protections for the riskier surfaces in this app, such as uploads, redirects, outbound requests, email delivery, OAuth, webhooks, CSV import or export, and real-time connections. ACCEPTANCE SCENARIOS Automate these app-specific scenarios at the most appropriate level: 1. Given a feed that republishes an old item with the same identifier, the applet does not fire a second time. 2. Given an action that fails twice with a network error and succeeds on the third retry, history shows one run with its retry trail. 3. Given quiet hours from ten to seven, an overnight trigger queues its action and the email arrives after seven with the queue reason noted. TESTING Add focused unit tests for state transitions, authorization predicates, normalization, date or money calculations, and other risky domain rules. Add integration tests for persistence constraints and each external adapter’s success, timeout, retry, and rejection paths. Add at least one browser-level test for every end-to-end journey above, including one small-screen viewport. Tests must use isolated data and run through a documented single command. OPERATIONS AND FAILURE RECOVERY Add structured server logs with request, job, or event correlation IDs but no secrets or unnecessarily sensitive data. Make failures actionable in both the interface and logs. Background work must expose pending, succeeded, failed, and retrying states where relevant; do not silently swallow errors. Include safe database migration and rollback guidance, seed data, backup and restore notes, external-data cleanup behavior, and a basic health or diagnostic path appropriate to the stack. DELIVERABLES Ship the working application, migrations, representative seed data, tests, .env.example, and a concise README. The README must cover prerequisites, local setup, environment variables, migrations, seed and test commands, deployment, integration setup, backup and restore, security decisions, and known limitations. Seed data should exercise the happy path plus at least one empty, failed, overdue, expired, archived, or permission-restricted state relevant to the product. DEFINITION OF DONE The app is complete when a fresh developer can follow the README, create and migrate the database, run the app, sign in as each relevant role, complete every named journey using real persisted data, refresh without losing state, recover from common failures, and use the core interface on phone and desktop. All acceptance scenarios pass, permission boundaries are covered by tests, and no core screen is left as a placeholder. NON-GOALS Do not build multi-step workflows, a service marketplace, smart-home device control, or team features — the site’s Zapier entry covers work automations.
You are building a production-ready software product named “Ifso”, a deliberately focused alternative to IFTTT. Build a complete, usable vertical slice—not a landing page, static mockup, or disconnected collection of components. WORKING AGREEMENT Before writing implementation code, produce a short technical plan that names the routes or pages, server actions or endpoints, data tables, important state transitions, authorization boundaries, background jobs, and external adapters. Resolve contradictions in favor of the narrow audience and non-goals below. Prefer a small, legible architecture over speculative abstraction, but do not omit persistence, validation, error handling, or tests. PRODUCT BRIEF Primary user: one person automating a handful of personal digital chores. Primary outcome: run simple two-step automations for the feeds, calendars, and alerts of daily life. Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of IFTTT. A first-time user should understand what to do from the interface itself, without a tour or documentation. END-TO-END USER JOURNEYS Implement all of these flows through the real interface and persistent data layer: 1. The owner creates an applet pairing an RSS trigger with an email action, tests it with a dry run, and enables it. 2. Overnight the poller finds two new feed items, sends two emails, and the owner reviews both runs in the morning history. 3. The owner sets quiet hours, pauses a noisy applet before a holiday, and re-enables it later with its configuration intact. SCREENS AND INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE Build these as coherent responsive views. Each screen must specify its primary action, secondary actions, visible status, validation feedback, empty state, loading or pending state, success confirmation, and recoverable failure state. 1. Applets: each applet with trigger, action, enabled state, last run result, and create, pause, and delete controls. 2. Applet editor: trigger picker with per-trigger settings, action picker with templated fields, a dry-run tester, and save. 3. Run history: chronological runs with trigger payload summary, action outcome, skip reason, and retry action for failures. 4. Settings: quiet hours, notification email, encrypted credential management, and per-service polling intervals. CORE CAPABILITIES 1. two-step applets pairing one trigger with one action 2. polling triggers for RSS items, weather changes, and calendar events 3. actions for email, push-style notifications, and outgoing webhooks 4. per-applet run history with skipped, succeeded, and failed states 5. quiet hours and per-applet pause without losing configuration DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES Treat these as server-enforced product requirements, not interface suggestions: 1. Record a durable cursor or seen-item set per trigger so each event fires exactly once across restarts and repeated polls. 2. Run actions idempotently with a per-run deduplication key, and retry transient failures with backoff before marking a run failed. 3. Suppress action delivery during quiet hours by queuing, not dropping, and deliver or expire queued runs explicitly when the window opens. 4. Poll third-party services politely with per-service intervals, timeouts, and backoff on repeated failures. DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE Design a small relational schema centered on Applet, Trigger, Action, Run. Before implementing it, document: 1. Each table’s purpose, primary key, ownership or tenant boundary, timestamps, status fields, and important attributes. 2. Foreign keys, uniqueness constraints, check constraints, indexes needed by the named screens, and transaction boundaries for multi-record changes. 3. The allowed lifecycle or state transitions, who may trigger each transition, which transitions are terminal or reversible, and what audit history must remain immutable. 4. Archive, retention, and deletion behavior, including what happens to dependent records and external files. 5. Idempotency strategy for submissions, jobs, imports, notifications, webhooks, or retries where applicable. Use migrations rather than ad-hoc schema creation. Store time instants consistently and retain named timezone context whenever local schedules or dates matter. Never rely on a counter, disabled button, or client-side check to preserve a business invariant. USERS, AUTHENTICATION, AND PERMISSIONS Implement only the roles required by the stated audience. Make the ownership and visibility model explicit before coding. Enforce authorization in every server-side query and mutation, including search, exports, attachments, live updates, and guessed URLs—not merely by hiding controls. Use secure session defaults, protect state-changing requests, and provide an understandable signed-out, expired-session, and forbidden state. Seed distinct users when multiple roles are required so permissions can be demonstrated and tested. INTERACTION AND VISUAL DIRECTION The product should feel fast, calm, focused, and credible rather than like a generic admin template. Use a clear visual hierarchy, restrained color, readable typography, generous hit targets, and consistent placement for primary actions. Start with server-rendered HTML and progressively enhance only the interactions that benefit from it. The core workflow must remain understandable if enhancement fails. Render with React Server Components by default. Use Server Actions for authenticated form mutations and add Client Components only for interactions that genuinely require browser state, browser APIs, drag-and-drop, or live updates. The core workflow must remain understandable before client-side JavaScript finishes loading. Design mobile layouts intentionally instead of simply stacking desktop panels. Support keyboard navigation, visible focus, semantic landmarks, explicit labels, useful page titles, reduced-motion preferences, and screen-reader announcements for asynchronous results. Never use color alone to communicate state. Destructive actions require clear scope and confirmation; safe repeated actions should be idempotent. TECHNICAL DIRECTION Build this version with Next.js, the App Router, and TypeScript. Use Server Components by default, Server Actions for authenticated mutations, and Route Handlers for public APIs, OAuth callbacks, webhooks, feeds, uploads, and downloads. Use PostgreSQL through Drizzle ORM with versioned migrations and an isolated test database. Access S3-compatible object storage through a server-only adapter, and run slow or retryable work in a real job or workflow system instead of the request lifecycle. Keep domain rules in testable server-side modules instead of route handlers or UI components. Separate persistence, external providers, and background work behind small interfaces without building a framework. Prefer ordinary HTML forms and URLs for durable navigation; use optimistic interaction only when failure can be reconciled clearly. The product brief currently identifies Astro, Workers, D1 as capability context. Preserve any required native, browser-only, edge, storage, real-time, or background-processing capability through a narrow adapter appropriate to the selected framework. If the core workflow genuinely requires native or browser APIs, keep that runtime as the primary execution surface rather than simulating inaccessible capabilities or inventing an unnecessary web surface. Integrate with RSS feeds and Cloudflare Cron Triggers and transactional email. For every integration: - List required environment variables in an .env.example without real secrets. - Add a small adapter with timeouts, normalized errors, and a deterministic local fake or development path. - Verify inbound signatures and deduplicate provider events where supported. - Keep credentials server-side, encrypt long-lived provider tokens at rest, and redact secrets and sensitive payloads from logs. - Define retry, backoff, and idempotency behavior for any side effect that can be repeated. SECURITY AND PRIVACY Deduplicate trigger events so restarts and repeated polls never fire the same action twice, and store third-party credentials encrypted. Validate, normalize, and length-limit all untrusted input on the server. Escape rendered content by default, sanitize any intentionally accepted markup, rate-limit public or abuse-prone actions, and use private object storage plus short-lived authorized URLs for sensitive files. Collect the minimum personal data necessary for the named workflow. Document retention and deletion behavior. Add specific protections for the riskier surfaces in this app, such as uploads, redirects, outbound requests, email delivery, OAuth, webhooks, CSV import or export, and real-time connections. ACCEPTANCE SCENARIOS Automate these app-specific scenarios at the most appropriate level: 1. Given a feed that republishes an old item with the same identifier, the applet does not fire a second time. 2. Given an action that fails twice with a network error and succeeds on the third retry, history shows one run with its retry trail. 3. Given quiet hours from ten to seven, an overnight trigger queues its action and the email arrives after seven with the queue reason noted. TESTING Add focused unit tests for state transitions, authorization predicates, normalization, date or money calculations, and other risky domain rules. Add integration tests for persistence constraints and each external adapter’s success, timeout, retry, and rejection paths. Add at least one browser-level test for every end-to-end journey above, including one small-screen viewport. Tests must use isolated data and run through a documented single command. OPERATIONS AND FAILURE RECOVERY Add structured server logs with request, job, or event correlation IDs but no secrets or unnecessarily sensitive data. Make failures actionable in both the interface and logs. Background work must expose pending, succeeded, failed, and retrying states where relevant; do not silently swallow errors. Include safe database migration and rollback guidance, seed data, backup and restore notes, external-data cleanup behavior, and a basic health or diagnostic path appropriate to the stack. DELIVERABLES Ship the working application, migrations, representative seed data, tests, .env.example, and a concise README. The README must cover prerequisites, local setup, environment variables, migrations, seed and test commands, deployment, integration setup, backup and restore, security decisions, and known limitations. Seed data should exercise the happy path plus at least one empty, failed, overdue, expired, archived, or permission-restricted state relevant to the product. DEFINITION OF DONE The app is complete when a fresh developer can follow the README, create and migrate the database, run the app, sign in as each relevant role, complete every named journey using real persisted data, refresh without losing state, recover from common failures, and use the core interface on phone and desktop. All acceptance scenarios pass, permission boundaries are covered by tests, and no core screen is left as a placeholder. NON-GOALS Do not build multi-step workflows, a service marketplace, smart-home device control, or team features — the site’s Zapier entry covers work automations.
You are building a production-ready software product named “Ifso”, a deliberately focused alternative to IFTTT. Build a complete, usable vertical slice—not a landing page, static mockup, or disconnected collection of components. WORKING AGREEMENT Before writing implementation code, produce a short technical plan that names the routes or pages, server actions or endpoints, data tables, important state transitions, authorization boundaries, background jobs, and external adapters. Resolve contradictions in favor of the narrow audience and non-goals below. Prefer a small, legible architecture over speculative abstraction, but do not omit persistence, validation, error handling, or tests. PRODUCT BRIEF Primary user: one person automating a handful of personal digital chores. Primary outcome: run simple two-step automations for the feeds, calendars, and alerts of daily life. Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of IFTTT. A first-time user should understand what to do from the interface itself, without a tour or documentation. END-TO-END USER JOURNEYS Implement all of these flows through the real interface and persistent data layer: 1. The owner creates an applet pairing an RSS trigger with an email action, tests it with a dry run, and enables it. 2. Overnight the poller finds two new feed items, sends two emails, and the owner reviews both runs in the morning history. 3. The owner sets quiet hours, pauses a noisy applet before a holiday, and re-enables it later with its configuration intact. SCREENS AND INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE Build these as coherent responsive views. Each screen must specify its primary action, secondary actions, visible status, validation feedback, empty state, loading or pending state, success confirmation, and recoverable failure state. 1. Applets: each applet with trigger, action, enabled state, last run result, and create, pause, and delete controls. 2. Applet editor: trigger picker with per-trigger settings, action picker with templated fields, a dry-run tester, and save. 3. Run history: chronological runs with trigger payload summary, action outcome, skip reason, and retry action for failures. 4. Settings: quiet hours, notification email, encrypted credential management, and per-service polling intervals. CORE CAPABILITIES 1. two-step applets pairing one trigger with one action 2. polling triggers for RSS items, weather changes, and calendar events 3. actions for email, push-style notifications, and outgoing webhooks 4. per-applet run history with skipped, succeeded, and failed states 5. quiet hours and per-applet pause without losing configuration DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES Treat these as server-enforced product requirements, not interface suggestions: 1. Record a durable cursor or seen-item set per trigger so each event fires exactly once across restarts and repeated polls. 2. Run actions idempotently with a per-run deduplication key, and retry transient failures with backoff before marking a run failed. 3. Suppress action delivery during quiet hours by queuing, not dropping, and deliver or expire queued runs explicitly when the window opens. 4. Poll third-party services politely with per-service intervals, timeouts, and backoff on repeated failures. DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE Design a small relational schema centered on Applet, Trigger, Action, Run. Before implementing it, document: 1. Each table’s purpose, primary key, ownership or tenant boundary, timestamps, status fields, and important attributes. 2. Foreign keys, uniqueness constraints, check constraints, indexes needed by the named screens, and transaction boundaries for multi-record changes. 3. The allowed lifecycle or state transitions, who may trigger each transition, which transitions are terminal or reversible, and what audit history must remain immutable. 4. Archive, retention, and deletion behavior, including what happens to dependent records and external files. 5. Idempotency strategy for submissions, jobs, imports, notifications, webhooks, or retries where applicable. Use migrations rather than ad-hoc schema creation. Store time instants consistently and retain named timezone context whenever local schedules or dates matter. Never rely on a counter, disabled button, or client-side check to preserve a business invariant. USERS, AUTHENTICATION, AND PERMISSIONS Implement only the roles required by the stated audience. Make the ownership and visibility model explicit before coding. Enforce authorization in every server-side query and mutation, including search, exports, attachments, live updates, and guessed URLs—not merely by hiding controls. Use secure session defaults, protect state-changing requests, and provide an understandable signed-out, expired-session, and forbidden state. Seed distinct users when multiple roles are required so permissions can be demonstrated and tested. INTERACTION AND VISUAL DIRECTION The product should feel fast, calm, focused, and credible rather than like a generic admin template. Use a clear visual hierarchy, restrained color, readable typography, generous hit targets, and consistent placement for primary actions. Start with server-rendered HTML and progressively enhance only the interactions that benefit from it. The core workflow must remain understandable if enhancement fails. Start with server-rendered Blade views and ordinary forms. Use Livewire for focused server-driven interactions and Alpine.js only for small local interface state. The core workflow must remain understandable without relying on a client-side application shell. Design mobile layouts intentionally instead of simply stacking desktop panels. Support keyboard navigation, visible focus, semantic landmarks, explicit labels, useful page titles, reduced-motion preferences, and screen-reader announcements for asynchronous results. Never use color alone to communicate state. Destructive actions require clear scope and confirmation; safe repeated actions should be idempotent. TECHNICAL DIRECTION Build this version with Laravel, PHP, Blade, Livewire, and Alpine.js. Use controllers and Blade forms for durable navigation, Livewire for focused interactions, Form Requests for validation, Policies and Gates for authorization, and small application actions or services for domain transitions. Use Eloquent with migrations, database constraints, and transactions; Laravel Storage for private S3-compatible files; queued Jobs for retryable work; the Scheduler for recurring work; and Notifications or Mail for email. Keep domain rules in testable server-side modules instead of route handlers or UI components. Separate persistence, external providers, and background work behind small interfaces without building a framework. Prefer ordinary HTML forms and URLs for durable navigation; use optimistic interaction only when failure can be reconciled clearly. The product brief currently identifies Astro, Workers, D1 as capability context. Preserve any required native, browser-only, edge, storage, real-time, or background-processing capability through a narrow adapter appropriate to the selected framework. If the core workflow genuinely requires native or browser APIs, keep that runtime as the primary execution surface rather than simulating inaccessible capabilities or inventing an unnecessary web surface. Integrate with RSS feeds and Cloudflare Cron Triggers and transactional email. For every integration: - List required environment variables in an .env.example without real secrets. - Add a small adapter with timeouts, normalized errors, and a deterministic local fake or development path. - Verify inbound signatures and deduplicate provider events where supported. - Keep credentials server-side, encrypt long-lived provider tokens at rest, and redact secrets and sensitive payloads from logs. - Define retry, backoff, and idempotency behavior for any side effect that can be repeated. SECURITY AND PRIVACY Deduplicate trigger events so restarts and repeated polls never fire the same action twice, and store third-party credentials encrypted. Validate, normalize, and length-limit all untrusted input on the server. Escape rendered content by default, sanitize any intentionally accepted markup, rate-limit public or abuse-prone actions, and use private object storage plus short-lived authorized URLs for sensitive files. Collect the minimum personal data necessary for the named workflow. Document retention and deletion behavior. Add specific protections for the riskier surfaces in this app, such as uploads, redirects, outbound requests, email delivery, OAuth, webhooks, CSV import or export, and real-time connections. ACCEPTANCE SCENARIOS Automate these app-specific scenarios at the most appropriate level: 1. Given a feed that republishes an old item with the same identifier, the applet does not fire a second time. 2. Given an action that fails twice with a network error and succeeds on the third retry, history shows one run with its retry trail. 3. Given quiet hours from ten to seven, an overnight trigger queues its action and the email arrives after seven with the queue reason noted. TESTING Add focused unit tests for state transitions, authorization predicates, normalization, date or money calculations, and other risky domain rules. Add integration tests for persistence constraints and each external adapter’s success, timeout, retry, and rejection paths. Add at least one browser-level test for every end-to-end journey above, including one small-screen viewport. Tests must use isolated data and run through a documented single command. OPERATIONS AND FAILURE RECOVERY Add structured server logs with request, job, or event correlation IDs but no secrets or unnecessarily sensitive data. Make failures actionable in both the interface and logs. Background work must expose pending, succeeded, failed, and retrying states where relevant; do not silently swallow errors. Include safe database migration and rollback guidance, seed data, backup and restore notes, external-data cleanup behavior, and a basic health or diagnostic path appropriate to the stack. DELIVERABLES Ship the working application, migrations, representative seed data, tests, .env.example, and a concise README. The README must cover prerequisites, local setup, environment variables, migrations, seed and test commands, deployment, integration setup, backup and restore, security decisions, and known limitations. Seed data should exercise the happy path plus at least one empty, failed, overdue, expired, archived, or permission-restricted state relevant to the product. DEFINITION OF DONE The app is complete when a fresh developer can follow the README, create and migrate the database, run the app, sign in as each relevant role, complete every named journey using real persisted data, refresh without losing state, recover from common failures, and use the core interface on phone and desktop. All acceptance scenarios pass, permission boundaries are covered by tests, and no core screen is left as a placeholder. NON-GOALS Do not build multi-step workflows, a service marketplace, smart-home device control, or team features — the site’s Zapier entry covers work automations.
You are building a production-ready software product named “Ifso”, a deliberately focused alternative to IFTTT. Build a complete, usable vertical slice—not a landing page, static mockup, or disconnected collection of components. WORKING AGREEMENT Before writing implementation code, produce a short technical plan that names the routes or pages, server actions or endpoints, data tables, important state transitions, authorization boundaries, background jobs, and external adapters. Resolve contradictions in favor of the narrow audience and non-goals below. Prefer a small, legible architecture over speculative abstraction, but do not omit persistence, validation, error handling, or tests. PRODUCT BRIEF Primary user: one person automating a handful of personal digital chores. Primary outcome: run simple two-step automations for the feeds, calendars, and alerts of daily life. Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of IFTTT. A first-time user should understand what to do from the interface itself, without a tour or documentation. END-TO-END USER JOURNEYS Implement all of these flows through the real interface and persistent data layer: 1. The owner creates an applet pairing an RSS trigger with an email action, tests it with a dry run, and enables it. 2. Overnight the poller finds two new feed items, sends two emails, and the owner reviews both runs in the morning history. 3. The owner sets quiet hours, pauses a noisy applet before a holiday, and re-enables it later with its configuration intact. SCREENS AND INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE Build these as coherent responsive views. Each screen must specify its primary action, secondary actions, visible status, validation feedback, empty state, loading or pending state, success confirmation, and recoverable failure state. 1. Applets: each applet with trigger, action, enabled state, last run result, and create, pause, and delete controls. 2. Applet editor: trigger picker with per-trigger settings, action picker with templated fields, a dry-run tester, and save. 3. Run history: chronological runs with trigger payload summary, action outcome, skip reason, and retry action for failures. 4. Settings: quiet hours, notification email, encrypted credential management, and per-service polling intervals. CORE CAPABILITIES 1. two-step applets pairing one trigger with one action 2. polling triggers for RSS items, weather changes, and calendar events 3. actions for email, push-style notifications, and outgoing webhooks 4. per-applet run history with skipped, succeeded, and failed states 5. quiet hours and per-applet pause without losing configuration DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES Treat these as server-enforced product requirements, not interface suggestions: 1. Record a durable cursor or seen-item set per trigger so each event fires exactly once across restarts and repeated polls. 2. Run actions idempotently with a per-run deduplication key, and retry transient failures with backoff before marking a run failed. 3. Suppress action delivery during quiet hours by queuing, not dropping, and deliver or expire queued runs explicitly when the window opens. 4. Poll third-party services politely with per-service intervals, timeouts, and backoff on repeated failures. DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE Design a small relational schema centered on Applet, Trigger, Action, Run. Before implementing it, document: 1. Each table’s purpose, primary key, ownership or tenant boundary, timestamps, status fields, and important attributes. 2. Foreign keys, uniqueness constraints, check constraints, indexes needed by the named screens, and transaction boundaries for multi-record changes. 3. The allowed lifecycle or state transitions, who may trigger each transition, which transitions are terminal or reversible, and what audit history must remain immutable. 4. Archive, retention, and deletion behavior, including what happens to dependent records and external files. 5. Idempotency strategy for submissions, jobs, imports, notifications, webhooks, or retries where applicable. Use migrations rather than ad-hoc schema creation. Store time instants consistently and retain named timezone context whenever local schedules or dates matter. Never rely on a counter, disabled button, or client-side check to preserve a business invariant. USERS, AUTHENTICATION, AND PERMISSIONS Implement only the roles required by the stated audience. Make the ownership and visibility model explicit before coding. Enforce authorization in every server-side query and mutation, including search, exports, attachments, live updates, and guessed URLs—not merely by hiding controls. Use secure session defaults, protect state-changing requests, and provide an understandable signed-out, expired-session, and forbidden state. Seed distinct users when multiple roles are required so permissions can be demonstrated and tested. INTERACTION AND VISUAL DIRECTION The product should feel fast, calm, focused, and credible rather than like a generic admin template. Use a clear visual hierarchy, restrained color, readable typography, generous hit targets, and consistent placement for primary actions. Start with server-rendered HTML and progressively enhance only the interactions that benefit from it. The core workflow must remain understandable if enhancement fails. Start with server-rendered Rails views and ordinary forms. Use Turbo for navigation, submissions, and server-driven updates, then Stimulus only for small browser-side behavior. Do not turn the product into a client-side SPA, and keep the core workflow usable when enhancement fails. Design mobile layouts intentionally instead of simply stacking desktop panels. Support keyboard navigation, visible focus, semantic landmarks, explicit labels, useful page titles, reduced-motion preferences, and screen-reader announcements for asynchronous results. Never use color alone to communicate state. Destructive actions require clear scope and confirmation; safe repeated actions should be idempotent. TECHNICAL DIRECTION Build this version with Ruby on Rails and Hotwire: Turbo for navigation, form submissions, and server-driven updates, and Stimulus for small browser-side behavior. Use RESTful controllers with strong parameters and explicit authorization, with domain transitions in testable models or small application services. Use Active Record migrations plus database-level constraints and transactions; Active Storage with an S3-compatible service for private files; Active Job with a durable queue backend for retryable work; Action Mailer for email; and Action Cable only when live updates are required. Keep domain rules in testable server-side modules instead of route handlers or UI components. Separate persistence, external providers, and background work behind small interfaces without building a framework. Prefer ordinary HTML forms and URLs for durable navigation; use optimistic interaction only when failure can be reconciled clearly. The product brief currently identifies Astro, Workers, D1 as capability context. Preserve any required native, browser-only, edge, storage, real-time, or background-processing capability through a narrow adapter appropriate to the selected framework. If the core workflow genuinely requires native or browser APIs, keep that runtime as the primary execution surface rather than simulating inaccessible capabilities or inventing an unnecessary web surface. Integrate with RSS feeds and Cloudflare Cron Triggers and transactional email. For every integration: - List required environment variables in an .env.example without real secrets. - Add a small adapter with timeouts, normalized errors, and a deterministic local fake or development path. - Verify inbound signatures and deduplicate provider events where supported. - Keep credentials server-side, encrypt long-lived provider tokens at rest, and redact secrets and sensitive payloads from logs. - Define retry, backoff, and idempotency behavior for any side effect that can be repeated. SECURITY AND PRIVACY Deduplicate trigger events so restarts and repeated polls never fire the same action twice, and store third-party credentials encrypted. Validate, normalize, and length-limit all untrusted input on the server. Escape rendered content by default, sanitize any intentionally accepted markup, rate-limit public or abuse-prone actions, and use private object storage plus short-lived authorized URLs for sensitive files. Collect the minimum personal data necessary for the named workflow. Document retention and deletion behavior. Add specific protections for the riskier surfaces in this app, such as uploads, redirects, outbound requests, email delivery, OAuth, webhooks, CSV import or export, and real-time connections. ACCEPTANCE SCENARIOS Automate these app-specific scenarios at the most appropriate level: 1. Given a feed that republishes an old item with the same identifier, the applet does not fire a second time. 2. Given an action that fails twice with a network error and succeeds on the third retry, history shows one run with its retry trail. 3. Given quiet hours from ten to seven, an overnight trigger queues its action and the email arrives after seven with the queue reason noted. TESTING Add focused unit tests for state transitions, authorization predicates, normalization, date or money calculations, and other risky domain rules. Add integration tests for persistence constraints and each external adapter’s success, timeout, retry, and rejection paths. Add at least one browser-level test for every end-to-end journey above, including one small-screen viewport. Tests must use isolated data and run through a documented single command. OPERATIONS AND FAILURE RECOVERY Add structured server logs with request, job, or event correlation IDs but no secrets or unnecessarily sensitive data. Make failures actionable in both the interface and logs. Background work must expose pending, succeeded, failed, and retrying states where relevant; do not silently swallow errors. Include safe database migration and rollback guidance, seed data, backup and restore notes, external-data cleanup behavior, and a basic health or diagnostic path appropriate to the stack. DELIVERABLES Ship the working application, migrations, representative seed data, tests, .env.example, and a concise README. The README must cover prerequisites, local setup, environment variables, migrations, seed and test commands, deployment, integration setup, backup and restore, security decisions, and known limitations. Seed data should exercise the happy path plus at least one empty, failed, overdue, expired, archived, or permission-restricted state relevant to the product. DEFINITION OF DONE The app is complete when a fresh developer can follow the README, create and migrate the database, run the app, sign in as each relevant role, complete every named journey using real persisted data, refresh without losing state, recover from common failures, and use the core interface on phone and desktop. All acceptance scenarios pass, permission boundaries are covered by tests, and no core screen is left as a placeholder. NON-GOALS Do not build multi-step workflows, a service marketplace, smart-home device control, or team features — the site’s Zapier entry covers work automations.
Build just one piece
Not ready to replace all of IFTTT? Fine. These are the peculiar sub-problems hiding inside it — the parts that are actually interesting to build. Each one is a standalone prompt, scoped to an evening, no strings attached to the full build.
Fire exactly once, even after a restartThe cursor that remembers which feed items already triggered.
Build exactly-once trigger detection for a personal automation tool that polls sources like RSS feeds and fires an action per new event. Persist a durable memory per trigger: a seen-item set keyed on stable identifiers, or a cursor where the source supports ordering, written in the same transaction as the decision to fire, so a crash between poll and action never causes a double-fire after restart. The identifier choice carries the weight: for feeds, prefer the guid, fall back to the link, and treat a republished old item with the same identifier as already-seen even when its date changed, because feeds love re-dating their archive. First poll of a brand-new applet is a policy decision: mark everything existing as seen and fire only on genuinely new items, or the user gets fifty emails about old posts the moment they enable it. Cap the seen-set's growth by expiring entries well past the feed's window, and make the whole poll idempotent so overlapping runs (a slow poll meeting the next cron tick) don't race to fire the same item. Done when: killing the process at any point never produces a duplicate action, a re-dated republished item stays silent, and enabling an applet on a fifty-item feed fires zero actions.
Quiet hours that queue instead of dropThe 3 AM trigger politely waits until 7.
Build quiet hours for a personal automation tool: during a configured window, triggers still fire and are recorded, but action delivery holds until the window opens. The verb is queue, never drop: an overnight RSS item creates a run in a queued state with its payload intact and a reason attached, and when quiet hours end, a scheduler delivers queued runs in order. The window math has teeth: quiet hours usually cross midnight (ten PM to seven AM), so get the wraparound comparison right, evaluate it in the owner's timezone, and decide DST edges deliberately, a spring-forward night where 2:30 AM doesn't exist must not wedge the queue. Give queued runs an expiry policy per applet: a weather alert from six hours ago may be worthless by morning, so let applets choose deliver-late or expire, and record expired runs explicitly with their reason rather than deleting them. Batch the morning flush politely, spacing deliveries so the owner doesn't get nine emails in one second. Done when: an overnight trigger delivers after the window opens with its queued reason in history, a midnight-crossing window computes correctly across a DST change, and expired runs appear in history as expired, never as vanished.
Retries that leave a paper trailOne run, three attempts, zero duplicate emails.
Build the retry machinery for an automation tool's actions, where transient failures recover silently and the history stays honest. Model each trigger firing as one run owning multiple attempts. When an action fails, classify before retrying: network errors and rate limits are transient and earn exponential backoff with jitter over a bounded schedule; a rejected address or a 4xx from a webhook target is permanent and fails the run immediately, because retrying a permanent error is just harassment. Guard every attempt with the run's deduplication key so the ugly case, a timeout where the email actually sent but the response died, cannot produce a duplicate send on retry: check with the downstream or make the send conditional on the key. History shows one run per trigger event, expandable into its attempt trail with per-attempt timestamps and errors, so a run that failed twice and succeeded third reads as one success with a story, not three mysterious rows. Cap total attempts and mark the run failed with a manual retry button. Done when: a third-attempt success shows one run with a three-attempt trail, a permanent error skips the backoff schedule entirely, and the timeout-but-delivered case produces exactly one email.
The dry run that touches nothingSee exactly what the applet would do, without it doing anything.
Build a dry-run tester for a two-step automation tool, so the owner can verify an applet before trusting it overnight. A dry run executes the trigger side for real, actually poll the feed, actually read the calendar, because fake trigger data tests nothing, then stops at the boundary: it renders the action fully (the templated email subject and body, the exact webhook URL and payload) and displays the result without sending anything. Three rules keep it safe. First, no side effects anywhere: no email, no webhook call, no notification. Second, no state changes: the trigger's cursor and seen-set stay untouched, so items observed during a dry run still fire for real later, the subtle bug being a dry run that quietly marks items seen and eats the real run. Third, template rendering uses the same code path as production, because a tester that renders differently from reality builds false confidence. When the poll finds nothing new, say so and offer to render against the most recent seen item as a sample. Done when: a dry run followed by enabling the applet fires real actions for the same items the dry run showed, zero external deliveries occur during testing, and the previewed payload is byte-identical to what production would send.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to build your own IFTTT?
A basic version — five personal triggers, email and webhook actions — takes about 8 hours. Roughly 3 days gets you a solid v1 with polling connectors, run history, retries, quiet hours. Matching everything IFTTT really does (hundreds of services, oauth zoo, mobile apps) is closer to 1 month+, which is exactly why you should scope down instead.
How much does IFTTT cost if I keep subscribing?
IFTTT runs $2.99–$14.99 per month on public paid plans, which is $36–$180 per year. A focused self-built replacement costs your build time plus close-to-zero hosting.
What stack should I use to build a IFTTT alternative?
The build prompt on this page ships in four flavors: the AHA stack (Astro, HTMX, Alpine.js), Next.js, Laravel, and Ruby on Rails. The capability context for this product is Astro, Workers, D1. Pick the stack you already know — the scope matters more than the framework.
What features does a minimal IFTTT replacement need?
A useful v1 needs: two-step applets pairing one trigger with one action; polling triggers for RSS items, weather changes, and calendar events; actions for email, push-style notifications, and outgoing webhooks; per-applet run history with skipped, succeeded, and failed states; quiet hours and per-applet pause without losing configuration. Everything else is scope creep until you personally miss it.
What should I deliberately not build?
Do not build multi-step workflows, a service marketplace, smart-home device control, or team features — the site’s Zapier entry covers work automations.