ProductEngineering

How Activepieces replaced the need for many micro SaaS

By
on

There have been many times when I've found myself searching for simple tools like "PDF to PNG converter," "Sign PDF online," and "Crop image."

These tools work great if you're doing it manually or one time task. But when you are building workflows that needs these tasks, you encounter friction because these tools aren’t built in automation tools.

Which leaves you as user with two options: build your own APIs / script or pay for external SaaS services that provides an API for each small feature.

The Problem with Automation Tools

All other automation tools in the market focus on building integrations between applications, but they usually lack utility tools. To build any of this within these automation tools, users have to host their own APIs and write specific formats, such as JSON or XML, or vanilla JavaScript to access those APIs. This obviously is inefficient and limits the use cases that can be supported. It also cannot be crowd sourced as someone will need to deploy these APIs to an external server and maintain them.

At Activepieces, we took a different approach to building automation blocks (pieces):

  1. Developers can write TypeScript (Node.js) and use the large npm ecosystem, which has over 2 million packages and libraries. This flexibility led to strong developer adoption and allow for infinite number of use cases.

  2. We are open source, and developers can contribute. Over 60% of the pieces are contributed by the community.

  3. The simple yet powerful piece framework we have at Activepieces makes it easy to create the UI interface for these pieces, and eliminates the need to host external APIs.

You can create a piece in under 30 minutes, upload it to Activepieces, or publish it on npm. Just think about the many tools you can build using npm packages!

Here is couple of examples:

  • QR Code Generator: Generate QR codes by providing text, perfect for tickets, links, or other information, and send them via email.

  • Image Manipulation: Use the npm package Jimp to compress, resize, or crop images directly within Activepieces.

  • PDF OCR: Extract text from PDFs using npm OCR libraries, automating tasks like processing scanned documents or invoices.

  • CSV to/from JSON: Easily convert CSV to JSON and vice versa with the CSV converter plugin.

Conclusion

Activepieces replaces the need for many micro SaaS tools. With TypeScript and npm, users can automate tasks like QR code generation, PDF text extraction, and CSV conversion—all within the platform, making it more powerful and versatile.