Hey y'all.
It's been a long time since I've left a review in the store, but ZeroWork deserves one from me, so here we are, with one day left before the price increase. I see a lot of polarizing reviews; some great and some terrible, some from folks who've used RPA tooling in the past, and some who haven't.
As those who've hung out with me in The Sauce know, I'm a dev and I'm also familiar with RPA tooling. As y'all also know, I'm familiar with writing userscripts, too - some of them for the Appsumo store itself. 😉
Y'all know I'm super picky when it comes to buying software because I build it for a living. ZeroWork passed my own due diligence.
It's excellent.
The product is being persistently improved, the community is actively inspired by the founder and is full of curious, talented and helpful people of all ages. The founder is probably one of the best founders to ever do the Appsumo thing within at least the last 5 years. It's obvious the founder enjoys customer service work, as is evident in both the Q & A here, as well as the Discord community. Tbh, I'm not exactly sure how she's able to be everywhere at once and still get regular product releases done, but I won't press a fellow magician for details.
If I ever cave and finally tell y'all Sauce members what my favorite Appsumo deal of all time is, ZeroWork will give it a run for its money. I built my first automation with ZeroWork within ~30 minutes of redeeming the deal.
Y'all know I don't give product praise lightly but imo, you should buy this product, even if you don't know anything about automation and are just curious about its rumored ability to help you with your daily work.
X, if you read this, thanks again for the recommendation, my friend - drinks are on me. I'm buying a few more Tier 2s because I'm almost sure this product won't ever come back to the store with the same kind of deal again.
Don't let the simple UI fool you - what you're seeing is rare. There are enterprise use cases here, and I highly doubt once they start being shown, the same deal will ever be on the table again. Once people like myself start show-and-telling what we're using it for, it's probably game over for the deal that's currently in the store.
This product takes some effort to learn if you've never used RPA products before and the docs and videos will definitely help if that's you. Devs will feel right at home without either, especially those who write end to end (E2E) integration test suites. (That extra effort was for you, David. 😉 ) Business owners who understandably don't have the time to learn but need to automate their operations will benefit from the community, which not only offers a ton of free help, but also consultants building paid E2E automations. Don't worry, I'm not one of those consultants - that would be a weird conflict of interest as I'm writing this that I'm not interested in. Corporate employees can automate the mundane away with this product and still get their bonuses. Your employer will never know - the you'll-never-catch-me anti-bot options are cool af.
If you employ a VA, save yourself some money - buy ZeroWork and have your VA work themself out of a job. If you're a VA, ZeroWork is the silver spoon you've been waiting for - buy it and make more money.
The marketplace of E2E bots is now deprecated, but the community has picked up where that left off with a community-led library of helpful blocks they freely share, which is growing by the day, and is the closest thing to real open source in the paid RPA space I've ever seen.
Bots can be as simple or as encompassing as necessary - automating multiple sites to work together within one workflow is common.
The founder is clearly following the same steps as some of the most successful open source framework creators and it shows.
I'm here for it.
One thing not enough people talk about is the maintenance that comes along with this space. When the sites you automate change (and devs will make sure they do), you'll need to fix what breaks.
ZeroWork mitigates maintenance burden that other products do their best to pretend isn't there by encouraging you to learn about the websites you use in your daily work.
The learning curve is real, but it's more like a bell curve representing a very worthwhile tradeoff that results in less overhead because your automation is more robust, and you, along with others, gain knowledge that frees you from being dependent on devs.
As a dev, I wouldn't have it any other way.
The real answer to 90% of questions in the Q & A is yes. 👋 Greg, ZeroWork can do your whole list.
I could go on about this week's brand new features, like the one that allows you to pass data into and between bots, but yet again, as is the usual thing I'm known for among my friends in The Sauce, I've made this too long. 😘
I'll be in The Sauce if you want to pick my brain on whether ZeroWork is a product that can help your day to day, but you probably already know what I'm going to say.
Best wishes.