Author: David
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Why External Automation Tools Weaken Your Product
Think about where your user actually “builds” their process of using your product. Not where they click buttons, but where they decide what should happen next, what connects to what, what runs automatically. If that place isn’t directly inside your product, you’ve got a problem. External automation tools like Zapier are useful for a reason.…
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Why Workflows Create “Natural” Upgrade Pressure in SaaS
A lot of SaaS products rely on pushing users toward upgrades in ways that feel a bit forced. You hit a limit that doesn’t quite match how you’re using the product, or a feature is locked behind a higher plan even though it’s not something you use often. In those cases, upgrading feels like a…
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Should SaaS companies build or buy a workflow feature? A complete guide
At some point, growing SaaS products hit the same fork in the road: users start asking for “automations,” “workflows,” or “integrations.” Or, in a similar scenario, managers start looking for ways to enhance the product’s feature set to compete with more complex competitors, and land on “add workflows” as the answer. Watch out – this…
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Will There Ever Be a 10x Prompt Engineer?
The best experience I’ve had with AI code generation is when I’m “piloting the plane,” so to speak, occasionally putting it on autopilot, but never leaving the cockpit. Always monitoring, ready to take over when needed. Writing code with AI assistance will 10x your productivity. That’s what everyone says. And sure, in many ways they’re…
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Why AI Made Buying SaaS More Dangerous
Building SaaS used to be hard. Really hard. Building SaaS meant months of work on authentication systems, scalable databases, and APIs with proper documentation, rate limiting, and idempotency. You needed compliance frameworks, security audits, billing systems, payment processing, invoice generation, admin dashboards, and support tools. And that was just some of the infrastructure, before you’d…
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How to Use Sensitive Placeholders in Embed Workflow
Typically, you use {{ name }} to insert a placeholder. For sensitive data, use {% token %} instead. Dynamic placeholders power our workflows. Sometimes, the workflow creator sets the values for these placeholders, so displaying the values is expected. However, some placeholders are sensitive information like passwords and tokens. These must remain private! Typical placeholder: {{ name }}…
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How to enable actions in your workflow
Embed Workflow has multiple action types, from Slack notifications to Open AI requests. However, sometimes not all action types make sense to your product users. If that’s the case, you can enable only the ones you need. 1. Navigate to Enabled Actions Log into Embed Workflow and open enabled actions section. By default, each type is…
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Alternatives to Tray.ai (Tray.io) for embedding workflows
Note: We’ve just updated this article to be accurate as of July 2025. If you’re looking for a simpler, easier-to-use alternative to Tray.ai, give us a try. Embed Workflow lets you drop a visual workflow builder into your SaaS in minutes, allowing your users to automate actions without leaving your platform. Workflows are everywhere: nearly every application…
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The 5 best Cyclr alternatives for embedding workflows
Workflows are everywhere. Just about every application you use offers ‘workflows’. Building and managing a workflow solution will take months and cost over $100,000. Instead, companies use an Integration-Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) like Workato to embed workflow capabilities in their product. In this guide, we’ll break down the pros and cons of Cyclr and 5 Cyclr competitors…
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Why We Built an Embedded Workflow Builder
After my third workflow automation build, I set out to create a third-party embeddable solution. It started in 2017 when I worked as a lead engineer at Brivity, a real estate CRM. It was an exciting time. The company was hiring, the product was improving, and user growth was accelerating. We had a lightweight system to…