This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Jakub Jabłoński
The project is called NotiFast. It's designed as a versatile bot that will send you notifications if something changes on the websites you follow. It aims to work with the majority of websites. NotiFast comes with a visual creator so you don't need any technical knowledge to use it.
It was based on my previous open-source project webscraper-bot.
What can it do?
NotiFast can notify you about:
New items being added (e.g., shop items, blog posts, videos, comments, or any list of items from a website).
Content updates (e.g., "Out of stock" notifications or price changes).
All of this is achieved using a (somewhat) simple visual creator.
Currently, sites that require authentication or any user action before seeing the content are not supported.
Why Discord bot form factor?
There are several reasons why Discord was the perfect choice for this application:
- Universal Notification Delivery: Works seamlessly across all mobile devices.
- No Authentication Worries: No need for managing user credentials.
- Spam Protection: Inherent spam protection provided by Discord.
- Integrated Payment System: Easy handling of payments.
- Developer-Friendly SDK: Discord.js SDK is really good and easy to use.
All of the above significantly speed up development. The end goal is for it to be a web application with adapters for all major communicators like Slack or Signal, but for now, Discord makes things a lot easier.
Motivation
This is the second version of this bot. The first approach was webscraper-bot, which I built because I needed to be notified about new rental apartments quickly (more about that in this post). Some people started discovering the bot, and after a few months, I had around 100 users, but there was one big problem. Over 90% of the users didn't manage to create a single scraping bot because it required a query selector to be inserted. So how I interpreted it was:
- There are people looking for this kind of service.
- It needs to be way easier and detect which items you want to track automatically.
So, I gave it a try.
How did it go?
The biggest challenge was to make it versatile and work even on pages it was not prepared to work on. The goal was to ensure that NotiFast functions reliably regardless of the website format or structure.
Try it out
At this moment, I'm running a free beta for the first 100 users who want to try the app (Live counter at the top of the website notifast.me). After that, and a period of bug-fixing and improvements, subscription tiers will be released. Try it out yourself and see if it's working for your website!
Learn more
Join community
Install to your server directly
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Jakub Jabłoński
Jakub Jabłoński | Sciencx (2024-06-23T01:22:26+00:00) I built my first SaaS – NotiFast. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2024/06/23/i-built-my-first-saas-notifast/
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