DecisionRules Reviews

Decision Rules is truly versatile, powerful rules engine that can be applied to a variety of use cases across several industries.

I am only beginning to re-imagine what all can be accomplished through Decision Rules, without using extensive programming.

I also had this same request to the product team like a few others here, that they enable us to use the product faster by means of tutorials and more self explanatory examples. Happy to be told their team has taken our requests into consideration and good onboarding material is on the way!

Overall, this is great value for money, and a rare kind of deal on appsumo, with extensive capabilities to the full, generous limits across tiers and a high value for money ROI.

Strongly recommend!

I'm very impressed by this product and the team behind it. They provided first-class support via a Zoom call to discuss my specific use case and tour me through the product. Not only that, they even followed up with me in a non-spammy way to check-in and see if they could provide any additional support.

What about the product?

Some tools on AppSumo are very new in terms of functionality, design, use case, etc. This is not one of them. The product navigates intuitively, especially for what I would consider a more complex product than your typical AS deal.

What can you use it for?

Well. Anything. The use cases for this are truly limitless. Max stacked.

One of the easiest to understand (not the simplest) use cases for a rules engine like DecisionRules is airline, ticket pricing.

You need the cost of labor, the cost of the plane, the cost of fuel, the the weight of the avg passenger, the weight of their average luggage, the the weight of the freight, the number of passengers on that flight, the fees for each airport, the taxes for each airport, etc., etc.. The idea is easy enough, but WOW, there is a lot that goes into the pricing. If you look at how different unions get paid differently in different states, taxes are different by city, county, state, and country, etc. and you can see how quickly the pricing of a plane ticket can get overwhelming.

This is a classic use case for a rules engine. Even a perfect use case for having different permissions for different users, and different parts of the rules for each rule owner. So, the tax specialist has access to the tax rules, the fuel department can access the fuel rule, etc..

Because there are SOOOO many moving parts in an airline, you can see why you might want a simplified way to manage a complex model with tens, and maybe hundreds of moving parts.

Right about now you are going "But Dave I don't have an airline,, this sounds neat, but why do I need a rules engine?" well I am verbose so let me answer that :-)

Do you sell widgets,? (widgets, the generic word for any physical good). If so, you have to buy them, assemble them, package them, sell them, ship them, manage different vendors, some stores who sell your widgets, and your own Shopify store. Guess what? At a few of those steps, a rules engine could help a TON to drive efficiency, and optimize your costs. Pricing, shipping, discount/coupons, and loyalty programs can all have rules built for them. Do you think Amazon is using a spreadsheet for everything?

If you'd like to scale you need to organize your processes, and in many case a rule engine could go a long ways towards you being able to automate more, and more of your processes, decision-making, and organization.

Another great use case for the SMB is to clean up some of your current automations. Do you have a Zap or Integromat automation flow from hell that you are afraid to touch? Well, sketch it, out, and then build it, piece by piece in DecisionRules.

Want to optimize your paid ad spend? Build out your different rules for different platforms, and ad types, and you can combine them for maximum efficiency.

So, what am I working on? Primarily two things: 1-make some of my automations a lot more efficient, and 2-valuation models for different asset classes with different valuation methods. Eventually I will try some of the other stuff, like lead scoring, but finance is my wheel house.

Decision Rules is a fantastic rules engine. I dug in, and read up on the major competitors and they are all ridiculous in their own way (price and/or complexity). DecisionRules otoh is powerful, clean, and an incredible value.

This product is of immense value, if you have a business that has a lot of business rules. This is the one for you.

The saas by itself is quite intuitive, and although the founders state that you as a business owner can manage the business rules yourself, it does require you to understand how the decisions tables work.

What the tool does simplify is the process of creating it and testing it out. You might need to make that one off change to your site/product to work with an api that calls this decision table to get the rule to apply, but once you do that, everything else can be self managed.

I just stacked it to the moon, frankly i might not go beyond three spaces, but i do like to back innovative founders who make an extremely complex process simple and legible.

If you have meta api, you could marry of the two and create potent babies that can be plugged into multiple sites and you can manage all the rules from a single console.

hypothetical use case: Say you operate 100 stores selling an item, and decide to incorporate a coupon code, if you have a traditional set up or even different payment processors, and if you handle the coupons in the payment processor, you would need to get into each one of them and add it.
If you change your flow such that the get price button of all the websites relies on this api call to get the final price from the rules engine, you can just enable or disable the rule and voila, zero touch website rule updates, also applies in cases where a region suddenly introduces a vat or a tax, just add the rule, enable it for the region and all set.

I love the simplicity that the tool offers, and its really commendable of the founders to have made it to appsumo and provide this tool at this insane price point. I would highly recommend this one.

Congratulations on the launch, hope you guys meet the targets you set out for yourselves.

I tried the free app in recent days on their website and tried to connect it to my simple application. I made 2 rules for calculating the price of a virtual product. On appsumo, I bought a plan that will probably be enough for my project, or I can upgrade my plan later.

A few observations ...

Creating a rule
I have 6 values, which I insert into the rule about 45 "Excel" rows in the table. It takes a little practice, but the idea behind the "decision table" is simple.

Integration
I have some experience with the API, so connecting was easy for me. I only got stuck once for a few minutes, but I found a solution in the documentation.

Change rule settings
I quite like the application that I am able to change the behavior of the calculations without changing my application. Some might call this a "no-code" approach. At least knowing what Excel means is probably a necessity.

MC