"We believe that Pro’s price of $9.99 per month is money well spent. However, because Pro is new and will evolve in response to your feedback, we wanted to provide some payment flexibility. Our introductory set your own price subscription allows you to choose your monthly payment for the first year of Pro. This special offer expires in 4 weeks, on Wednesday, October 7th."

Interesting approach. I wonder what users will pay on average during this first year.

If they give me a full blown console where I could run lambda-like python code on top of all the existing device integrations they already have, I'd be glad to pay the full $9.99/month. But the product would have to evolve a lot versus where it is today.

I look at IFTTT and Zapier and wonder what people use them for. Don't get me wrong, I think both have a target consumer but they feel expensive for what they appear to offer. I feel like if you're investing in automation the agnostic nature of owning and operating the code is more valuable than building into a walled system that relies on Internet connectivity and a SaaS service. OpenFaaS plus some Python could get you a long way on a $5/month VPS. Or... Pennies in any of the FaaS offerings wired up with cloud native tools. Or Node-RED?

Are there any good OSS orchestration / automation frameworks out there that scratch this itch?

We used Zapier at a previous startup to automate some gsuite tasks. It's really nice because it comes with monitoring and non-developers can edit/re-configure them if needed. It's expensive but headache free.

You can find huginn[1] & n8n[2] interesting.

https://github.com/huginn/huginn https://n8n.io/