Few months ago I had a problem of booking a service that could have weeks/months of wait, and ended up crafting a 10-15 lines script in Powershell that monitored the underlying API used by that service for the specific thing I needed every few min and notify me via ntfy.sh on my phone.
When I shared this with colleagues they joked with me suggesting to sell this as a service. I briefly thought about it but discarded the option as I don't believe this would be really remunerative considering this is specific for the country I am living which is quite small (also it will be highly dependent of that specific web application and its API). Still, I believe it would be a nice thing to try to build a simple app (probably web rather than mobile) and share it with the local users. A dev would probably take a weekend to do the bulk of it, but I am not a dev :) and unfortunately family and work take enough time.
The way I see it would be something like:
- users will be able to simply register/login (or at least I need a way to map their choice to their notification "address" and avoid they spam others / allow them to modify/cancel a monitor - could be using some social login or magic links or classic user with mail.. )
- they will be able to select what they need to monitor (they type some word / site fetches options based on a list that is built by querying that remote site API and they select), specify few options (checkboxes or similar)
- a background process will run and check the availability based on the list of the users requests, see if anything has changed and notified the appropriate users when a slot is freed up (I used ntfy.sh for myself but it's probably not ideal for users to expect them to install the app so maybe I will have to use email or similar methods)
As Powershell is one of the thing that I know quite, I had thought about using Azure Functions (which I never used) as it can run Powershell, but I am open to other options as long as it doesn't mean becoming a full stack dev..
I am often lurking on HN and reading about automation tools, no code products, languages and such. Many nocode tools that I have seen discussed in HN are for internal apps/dashboards (budibase etc.) and bubble.io and similar might be expensive for running a free application (I would need to review what they offer and their tiers). Would products like n8n.io help or they would be useful only for the backend/integration part but not for building a user facing interface? What would you suggest to use to develop such app?
thanks
then plan on at least one of said sites blocking your service.
think over whether you want to be invested in an arms race, or if you have any interest talking directly with the companies whose services you would monitor.
tl;dr think about the non-code parts very carefully before taking any architectural advice you get here and running with it.