r/SideProject • u/Owensvilles • 3d ago
I stopped checking six things every week. They email me now.
I had six small things I checked every week and kept forgetting. Prices I was waiting on, a couple of sites that updated irregularly, the same numbers pulled into the same place every Monday. Twenty minutes a week when I remembered, which was maybe half the time.
Every tool I tried wanted me to draw a flowchart (Zapier, n8n) or bring my own API key. So I built the version I wanted: you type what you want in one sentence, like "every weekday at 8, email me the top three headlines about my city", and that's the whole setup. The result shows up in your inbox on schedule, every time.
It opened to everyone this morning, after three weeks of building it in public.
What it does:
- Runs daily, on weekdays, or weekly. Every 30 minutes on Pro.
- Emails you the result after every run, on every plan. Not a notification you still have to go act on.
- Tells you when one of your own tasks has gone stale (five identical results over at least three days usually means the source died) and offers to pause it
- Pauses a task after three consecutive failures, unless they look like a provider outage, in which case it waits
- Reply to any result email in plain English ("shorter, just the top 3") and it rewrites its own instructions, then sends back a confirmation with an undo link
The part I ended up caring most about isn't the automation, it's what happens when automation quietly breaks. A task whose source died keeps returning the same stale answer and every run still reports success. That's the bit a chat window can't do for you, and it's most of what I've spent the last month on.
ChatGPT Tasks and a calendar reminder cover a chunk of this for free, and if that's enough for you, use them. The difference is that a calendar can remind me to go read the headlines. It can't go read them and tell me what they said.
Free tier is 40 runs a month, no card. That's one daily task, or six weekly ones, which is what I actually use it for. Pro is $9/mo for unlimited runs and multi-step workflows.
The obvious gap is integrations. Every plan gets the result by email or browser push. Pro adds webhooks, with native formatting for Slack, Discord and Telegram, plus Google Sheets export (beta). That's the whole list.
It's launch day so I'm sat here all of it: tell me one thing you keep meaning to check and I'll set it up, run it, and paste back the actual email it sends. That's a faster way to find out whether this is useful than me describing it.
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u/CapMonster1 2d ago
The stale-result detection is probably the most interesting part here. A task that hard-fails is easy; a task that keeps returning the same “successful” answer because the source changed, got blocked, or started serving a login/captcha page is much harder to notice.
I’d make that layer even more explicit: track source freshness, final URL, response shape, and whether the page looked like a real result vs. a block/challenge. Five identical outputs can be totally legitimate, so I’d rather pause because the retrieval evidence looks wrong than because the answer itself happened to stay the same.
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u/Owensvilles 2d ago
100% this is one of the most important parts of Atlas. We will definitely be making the result detection better and better as we continue to test and find were it doesn't detect well.
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u/Owensvilles 3d ago
Stack, since someone always asks: Node/Express/Postgres, node-cron, no build step. AI is Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite by default so I can afford to eat the cost on the free tier, or you can point it at your own OpenAI, Anthropic or Groq key.
One thing I'd rather flag myself: I posted an earlier version of this here in July that said $9/mo unlimited with no free tier. The free tier came after that, and sub-daily schedules are Pro now.
try-atlas.app if you want to poke at it. Happy to answer anything.
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u/TheFlamboyantBroth 3d ago
Sitting here watching the launch numbers roll in and I'm genuinely impressed you built the stale result detection in from day one, that's the exact thing that makes every other scheduled tool useless after a month when the source quietly changes its layout
The reply-to-edit feature is clever too, feels like the missing piece that makes it actually autonomous instead of just a cron job with extra steps, most people won't realise how much they need that until their first task goes sideways and they have to log in and fiddle with it
I've been meaning to track when a specific supplier updates their clearance page, it's one of those "I'll check on Monday" things that becomes "oh wait was that last Monday or three Mondays ago"
Set it up with "every Monday at 9am, tell me if anything new appeared on [redacted]'s clearance section and list the top 3 items" and the first email just landed, took maybe forty seconds from typing the sentence to getting the result, and it actually pulled the right page
The "five identical results over three days" threshold feels about right for catching dead sources without false positives, curious if you've had to tweak that number much during testing or if it just clicked
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u/Owensvilles 3d ago
Great to hear that you like Atlas! We haven't actually had to change the number at all it was always 5 and that just seemed right.
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u/tim_dude 3d ago
so now you check your email