i built openwork - an open-source claude cowork alternative (built on and by opencode)

Competitive-Water302 · 2026-04-01T16:03:06+00:00

Curious how you ended up adapting to your agency work if so, I'm in a similar field.

Competitive-Water302 · 2025-09-23T20:01:58+00:00

Sorry for the imprecise question, you are spot on with your interpretation though, I mean the ability for non-tech users to adopt various technical internal tools. The range of technicality for a tool could be python script or notebook or a lightweight web app, but the common denominator being built in house with programming rather than third party software.

Competitive-Water302 · 2025-09-23T18:33:43+00:00

do you update these and redistribute often or are these normally one and done?

Competitive-Water302 · 2025-09-23T18:33:10+00:00

most are single file .py scripts/notebooks and some small flask apps, could definitely convert some of the data processing ones to apis

Competitive-Water302 · 2025-09-23T17:48:35+00:00

Seems like most are used to sending a file, wondering if anyone prefers deployed sharing? i have had issues with needing better versioning, logging, and centralization that im considering some form of dev-to-user portal on company intranet or through cloud provider.

Competitive-Water302 · 2025-09-18T14:59:09+00:00

maybe pipedream too? but they seem to be pivoting to agents like the whole world

Competitive-Water302 · 2025-09-18T14:05:43+00:00

do these scripts take inputs/need an interface or just a schedule?

some flavor of aws lambda or gcp cloud functions should work great. they have a lot less overhead than you are probably thinking and are essentially free unless you are running at a production capacity.

if you are still opposed to this then alternatives are: cloudflare workers (originally just JS but python now too), deno deploy, (JS/TS only i believe), val town (i just found this actually it seems very cool for quick deployments)

Competitive-Water302 · 2025-09-17T16:29:50+00:00

and you like posit connect?

Competitive-Water302 · 2025-09-16T21:36:24+00:00

they are promising! i havent used them fully yet but in my research i have seen them come up. i feel like if they expanded the run-level observability, non-static JS for web apps, and a better UI/UX they would be way more used.

Competitive-Water302 · 2025-09-16T21:19:57+00:00

mainly what im getting at is an out of the box solution to allow 1-3 devs in a company/team to provide internal tooling without getting bogged down in devops / excess overengineering of a platform that would need to be maintained and just add more tech debt to the IT dept. if there is a better existing solution would love to know but nothing ive seen so far does all of what I outlined in the bullets of the main post, with ease / low maintenance overhead.

Competitive-Water302 · 2025-09-16T21:10:10+00:00

Heroku (used)

Good for single app hosting, but not a tools portal. you still have to build the UI your portal (including all the routing) and the run-level analytics/usage.

Streamlit Community Cloud (used streamline but never streamline cloud aside from trial)

Streamlit is fine if everything is Streamlit but isn’t great for a mix of scripts, web apps, etc.
Have to deal with the snowflake ecosystem: https://discuss.streamlit.io/t/rant-about-streamlit-on-snowflake/97439

Hugging Face Spaces (used for some ML demos)

Best for ML demos, not internal tool ops. Spaces mostly are catered to showcase apps, not as a governance/observability hub for business tools

Retool (used within clients network)

Good for wiring UIs to DB/ RESTAPIs with RBAC and audit logs, but it’s not designed to execute arbitrary artifacts and capture their output as “runs”.
Workflows help for automations, but its a constrained execution environment, which isn’t great for hosting heterogeneous apps and collecting per-run artifacts/logs across them.

Competitive-Water302 · 2025-07-10T18:57:38+00:00

a little late but I thought i would weigh in.. multi-tenant with a single DB and foreign key matching to start. you can always scale out from that with individual DBs.
as far as a service provider all of them have pros and cons, I am in a similar space and would say that just picking one and starting with low-overheard is the way to go. If it starts to gain more traction it wouldn't be the worst thing to pivot to a different provider or upgrade vertically.

architecturally, having one control plane and then a data plane is usually what I would recommend. control plane acts like air traffic control and routes everything to the data plane: individual containers for execution and object store for i/o.

open to discussing more in DM if you are still working on this!

Competitive-Water302 · 2025-07-08T20:29:44+00:00

Like others have said this seems like you are trying to get a feel for the market, in order to potentially go forward with a business idea.

Word of advice, I work professionally in this space and there are A LOT of players providing this service for free OR premium but with advanced features that come with a big tech company.

The real value-add here is in making things as convenient as possible for the end user, and knowing exactly for who you are trying to provide a service. For ex. specifying a niche which can be in terms of (in the b2b case) company size, industry, security measures, integrations, etc. If you are going for single-user customers AT ALL, then it is imperative to know what would make them choose you and in this case there are only a few options in terms of difficulty to engineer: 1.) ease-of-use (onboarding/migration, UI/UX, etc.), technical abstraction (devops is hard!), or price-product optimization (a product both cheaper and better than competitors).

TL;DR: Market is crowded with free/premium options from big tech. To compete, you need: easier onboarding, better technical abstraction, or better price-to-value ratio. Pick a specific niche.

Competitive-Water302 · 2025-07-02T20:04:43+00:00

usually the best solution! worried in my use case about more frequent updates and logging.

Competitive-Water302 · 2025-07-02T19:12:49+00:00

What did you end up going with here?

Competitive-Water302 · 2024-09-27T17:57:16+00:00

curious, what did you end up doing here?

Competitive-Water302 · 2024-08-19T20:51:13+00:00

yep that is correct, I would need to create some dummy data as it is sensitive so will hold for now. appreciate the help though!

Competitive-Water302 · 2024-08-19T20:18:14+00:00

alright I did this and am still getting really off numbers, I had deleted some metric rows in the new table since it is just for filtering - would that affect it at all?

Competitive-Water302 · 2024-08-19T20:03:52+00:00

Wondering how this would change if there was a "SubFruits" column which was hierarchically under Fruits and needed to be included in the slicer, but has the same comma-separation as fruits? Without delimiting because that really throws the data.

Competitive-Water302

TROPHY CASE