IFTTT

IFTTT is the long-running consumer automation service whose unit of work is the Applet: one trigger in one service wired to an action in another, so a doorbell rings and the lights know it, or an SMS to a lost phone turns the ringer up. The catalogue is the product — the site advertises more than a thousand services, including the smart-home brands that work-focused automation ignores — and the site's own framing is a minute or less per connection. Two recent layers keep it current: automations can be created from a prompt through a chat assistant, and an MCP server exposes IFTTT services and automations to AI tools.

It suits the home and the tail of consumer habits, and it suits people who want a working automation without learning a builder. It suits less well anything that has to branch, transform data across records or drive business systems: the site describes delays, queries, filter code and multiple actions on paid tiers, which is more than a single wire but still not a workflow engine, and the automation ceiling is stated per plan — up to twenty automations on the paid Pro tier, unlimited on Pro+. Third-party device support rises and falls with each vendor's API, so the quiet integrations age without notice.

Not verified: the pricing page was not opened, so the tier names are taken from the marketing page and the actual prices are unknown. The service count and the per-applet setup time are the vendor's claims on its own site, not something measured here. Whether the free tier still allows only a few applets could not be confirmed from the pages read, and no applet was built or run, so reliability was not observed.