What do you like best about the product?

Used to love Zapier disappointed recently

What do you dislike about the product?

First some bullet points so you can decide if I am a Zapier expert and my statements should or should not carry any weight.

I have spent approximately $14,434 over the lifetime of me and your product.
Zapier Teams account Holder since Aug 2017
Largest single month bill was $1120 July 2019 which i was happy to pay at the time.
Highest month of usage was 350,000 tasks
Convinced 7 other companies to adopt Zapier.
273 Zaps on my account
COO at a company and pressed hard for adoption within the company

So for this open letter it is like telling an old friend that I think he is going down a bad path and wish he would've made better choices.I choose to distance myself from this old friend and downgrade my account.

Two areas of weakness
Technology: (this was the prompting event)
Here is why I can't recommend zapier for any company looking to put it in production environment.
As you add more and more services there becomes a higher likely-hood that you will have an app that has an outage. I understand that there are some outages you can't avoid but what zapier does is they have webhooks that stop receiving information this means things get lost permanently. I have seen it multiple times and it takes hours to try and repost those data if it is even possible. Sometimes the data was simply lost. This was due to not having logs we can rerun zap hooks. After experiencing this for multiple months I made a decision that I could use Zapier for Prototyping but not in a production environment.
Customer Service:
I was on a "legacy" account so I wasn't able to use the portal to downgrade in the same way. I asked customer service what to do. They said just confirm by email. I did. They then asked by email we just need to confirm you want to downgrade (again). I did again. Eventually 2 weeks later they got the backend system corrected and they then had me downgrade on the portal. This resulted in me getting charged additional fees even though I asked in writing to downgrade as the portal would not allow me to do it though the established means.
During my cancelation of the team plan I was confused as no one asked me "what is the reason for the downgrade" "is there anything we could've done better?" I would have been happy to send a response. Instead the Customer service decided to fight me on the small amount of money that I feel they had taken unjustly from me based on a limitation of your system. Check the email correspondence your customer service agent could have asked hey what could we have done better. You can look at my email transcript back and forth with your customer service. I asked for an escalation and that was flatly denied. I asked to speak with someone by phone that was denied. I would expect a customer with the lifetime value of myself you would want to hear feedback both good and bad.

In conclusion. I now can no longer recommend Zapier to anyone moving forward.
I can understand the growth of the company may have strained how you operate but in my situation due to the bad customer service and lacking technology that I feel is unjust taking money from my pocket you have moved me from being a raving fan to actively recommend people don't use zapier in a production environment. You have turned a raving fan into a voice of decent against your product.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Used to utilize them for everything

What do you like best about the product?

Zapier is easy to use. I'm technical oriented but I'm not a developer. Zapier allows me to easily create simple and complex marketing automation workflows with the tool I use for our marketing, and our clients'.

What do you dislike about the product?

Zapier can get expensive in some cases. For example, when you are just between one plan and the following one and are a few days away before the billing cycle resets. This pushes you to upgrade but you end up paying a lot more money than what you'll use.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I can easily create marketing automation workflows with Pirsonal's personalized video software, either for internal use or for our clients. Our Professional Services use Zapier a lot, our clients do as well.

We are also able to create our own apps within the ecosystem and adapt our app to clients' requirements using the Zapier Developer Platform.

What do you like best about the product?

What's best about it: the huge number of app available AND the ease of use to create a Zap between all of them. AND a stellar support that don't give up on you until you successfully achieved want you wanted to! Honestly, when I review a new app now, integration with Zapier is a must.

What do you dislike about the product?

Not much, really. Maybe sometimes, when you get into deep multi-step Zaps, things can get a little confusing… but I wouldn't put the blame on them only :) Also, the UX could I guess be a bit refined, I sometimes I'm confused with terms.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I needed a way to have my CRM, payment platform, landing pages, accounting software all talk together so that when someone clicks and buys, it automatically creates/updaters the customer in the CRM, creates the invoice in the accounting software and mark it as paid with infos from the payment gateway. It works perfectly, sparing me hours per week. I also use it to keep everyone's projects in the company up to date.

What do you like best about the product?

I save so much time by not worrying about the silly mundane tasks that a robot should be doing instead of me. It's one of the most intuitive pieces of software I've ever used, and makes our work lives so much better.

What do you dislike about the product?

The API authentication is lacking - when using webhooks, better authentication would be appreciated. Unless that already exists, in which case I love everything about Zapier.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Zapier save us so much time it's absurd. Zapier is without a doubt the best tool we've implemented in our marketing department. With the app integrations, and a basic understanding of APIs/webhooks, the potentials for what you can do are just about limitless.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Get to it! It's seriously worth the time and cost (which are both not very much).

What do you like best about the product?

I like that I can automate steps like sending emails, updating spreadsheets or sending data to some other website where I have an account. There are many different applications that it plugs into to automate tasks such as Gmail, ActiveCampaign, Twitter and even Facebook.

There are conditional tasks that you can set up so you can change the action based on some element.

All this is free for the first 5 zaps . Works as a great alternative to other paid marketing and automation software

What do you dislike about the product?

There is a limit to the number of tasks and zaps that a free account can have. But for a small operation this should not pose a problem.

There aren't statistics available for exactly what is done over a time period. This can be set up I suppose, as another zapp, but no available statistics for say, how may persons signed up in a month.

Sometimes when I'm working in the third party app, it's not very clear which zap in Zapier I'm working with, this can be very confusing.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It provides email automation on a budget. Large email marketing apps require you to have a company linked email address, so I can't use Gmail, Yahoo and other free email addresses with those. With Zapier I can send automated emails from these free accounts and I don't need to maintain a company email to do this and I can easily send emails when someone signs up on a form and get those benefits.

What do you like best about the product?

I absolutely love Zapier and use it for all kinds of automations like sales notifications on slack chats, like automated posts on social media, like automated email follow-ups for sales. I probably save around £2K a month in labour and SaaS tools due to Zapier.

What do you dislike about the product?

I don't like it when they allow a integration that provides very limited triggers. I prefer it if there was a minimum number of triggers required for any integration. Also, any tool that provides no integrations should not be allowed on Zapier.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Multi-Social Media Publishing
Better Client Communication
Better Lead Chasing

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Review your whole operation and implement it in as many ways as you can. Be Creative!

What do you like best about the product?

Which provide a development techniques so you can create your own software app and integrated with more then 500 different apps like google drive , google spread sheet , wordpress, gamil. salesforce etc

What do you dislike about the product?

In this software you have operations to run any zap. You have only 750 operations in free account. If you need more then once you need to buy different packages which price is very high. So its a dislike feature of cost.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I have integrated my software with other software's like salesforce using this zapier. Also i have integrated more different software with other apps.

What do you like best about the product?

It's Automation is very fast and always accurate.

What do you dislike about the product?

Not free for Facebook leads. We can't select the rows to fetch the data. It automatically fetch data from first row.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I'm saving my time with zapier. As here I don't have to waste my time in uploading the leads on my excel sheet.

What do you like best about the product?

So many integrations! It's rare that I find a piece of technology that can't connect to Zapier.

What do you dislike about the product?

Sometimes filtering can be a little wonky but often its easily remedied with a secondary path.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We're able to pass information from system to system automatically with minimal set up and no need for custom development.

What do you like best about the product?

The way we as an user or developer can add tasks for automations and the user interface is also quite good. There are some quite good apps which we can easily integrate using zapier. instead of going thorught the documentations for such apps and trying to integrate them

What do you dislike about the product?

I don't think there are any downfall for zapier . But if we are integrating apps in zapier so that they can be used later for automation then it's quite difficult to debug the issues . I faced some issues when I was trying to integrate my project with zapier , there are some errors when I try to add some APIs but they are not quite useful in debugging the issues .

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I ' m easily able to automate certain tasks so that I can send data to dashboard to view the data as maps and graphs . I am able to integrate different apps quite easily instead of going throught their documentations and checking all the api details .

Recommendations to others considering the product:

I would like to recommend others to use zapier as it's quite easy to use and simple . Even anyone without programming knowledge can wasily and efficiently integrate different apps togather . Those without programming knowledge can check zapier docs for reference and create zaps in few minutes at max . If there are some issues you can check the doc or ask for help and zapier members will reply.