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Show HN: Cptn.io – open-source integration platform

by kc10 on 5/8/23, 5:45 PM with 41 comments

Hi, I am Krishna Thota. I am building an open source integration and data platform(https://cptn.io). The product is MIT licensed and the repo is at https://github.com/cptn-io/el-cptn.

I have started on my startup journey an year ago and launched a monitoring platform called DevRaven. Unfortunately the product did not takeoff as expected. That story is for another day.

But during the course of building the product, I have built several integrations leveraging MQs and Cloud Functions. While building and deploying Cloud Functions for happy paths is easy, I had to monitor logs for failures, build retry mechanisms or manually process failed events, keep instances running to prevent cold start timeouts. It can also get expensive with charges for MQs, server time for running cloud functions etc and costs can be unpredictable.

I thought of building a platform where I can build integrations quickly, have the ability to look at incoming/outgoing events, look at logs, retry any failed events etc. And finally, predictable costs for running the infrastructure. cptn.io provides all these capabilities and more. You can build pipelines to integrate with any cloud services, send data from your backend to data warehouses, listen to web hook events etc. The platform can be integrated into any stack by sending events to HTTP end points.

Instead of trying to build a business first or launch an open source product under restrictive licenses, the platform will be available under MIT license so any user or customer can use it. There is no ee folder or complex dual licensing and I am also committing to releasing SSO under MIT. The plan is to offer a managed service in the cloud at a later time, accept sponsors for prioritizing features for enterprise customers and charge for enterprise support.

It should take less than 5 minutes to get the platform running on your machine. Welcome any feedback, feature requests, PRs and bug reports.

  • by henricourdent on 5/8/23, 7:36 PM

    Hi! In what does this differentiate from Windmill.dev? The license seems to be more permissive (AGPL vs MIT) but there isn't any Python support, and less integrations (for now ?) :)

    Wishing you the best of luck!

    https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill

  • by esafak on 5/9/23, 3:39 AM

    Krishna: From the comments, you can tell everybody is trying to position your product, so I suggest explicitly naming your competitors in your landing page, and explaining how you are better or different. Don't worry about driving prospective customers away; everybody already knows about the competitors.

  • by nico on 5/8/23, 10:38 PM

    Can you buffer requests to Twilio dynamically based on feedback?

    ie. Can the system be fed back number of undelivered messages and adjust throttle accordingly?

  • by novoreorx on 5/9/23, 1:10 PM

    Cptn.io is ideal for quickly prototyping a custom backend for specific tasks. While n8n also offers this capability through its webhooks, Cptn is more lightweight and developer-oriented.

    To illustrate, suppose I want to create an API that saves a Pinboard link and sends it to a Telegram channel when passed notes. In such cases, Cptn is a better choice than n8n.

  • by robertlagrant on 5/8/23, 6:36 PM

    I worked with Software AG webMethods for quite a while and always wondered about building something like this. Nice job.

  • by badrequest on 5/8/23, 6:45 PM

    How does this compare to, say, RudderStack?

  • by SeriousM on 5/9/23, 5:02 AM

    How does it compare to https://n8n.io?

  • by codegeek on 5/8/23, 6:15 PM

    So is this like an Open Source Zapier or at least with similar ambitions if not quite there yet ?

  • by nkmnz on 5/8/23, 6:58 PM

    What differentiates this from n8n?

  • by born-jre on 5/8/23, 7:47 PM

    Hmm.. Gives me early vibes. Which reminds me, maybe I should start promoting my thing[0] too

    best of luck

    [0]: https://github.com/temphia/temphia

  • by culopatin on 5/8/23, 11:35 PM

    We use a platform called Actions Express that I’m not most fond of. Any ideas of integrators with SeviceNow plugins?

    I’m basically doing web calls and parsing data, but the ServiceNow plugin is nice to have.

  • by quickthrower2 on 5/9/23, 5:58 AM

    Another "is it like $thing" question. This time $thing="https://nodered.org/"

  • by dgwight on 5/8/23, 6:10 PM

    Is this an open source Segment Analytics competitor? I liked the idea of segment, but the pricing jumped way up after the free tier and I had to remove it

  • by deevus on 5/8/23, 11:54 PM

    Can this work for building pipelines for specific users? E.g. our customers can connect their CRM to our platform.

  • by gigatexal on 5/8/23, 7:57 PM

    is this a sort of heroku? this gives me pause because i am dubious about building on a platform's PaaS as it is now I have this as an option but they (AWS, GCP, etc) are likely to be around, but you're just you.

    So is this something we can self host or... is there a hostable solution you want to push folks to?

  • by dayeye2006 on 5/9/23, 5:58 AM

    How does compare to airbyte?

  • by lagniappe on 5/8/23, 6:13 PM

    This is pretty cool! The UI example reminds me of Yahoo Pipes (rip).

  • by BionicPimp on 5/8/23, 7:27 PM

    I like the UI. seems pretty straight forward. Best of luck.

  • by replwoacause on 5/8/23, 10:42 PM

    No PowerShell support?