IFTTT Review

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Quick one. This one this school IFTTT which means if this then that.

It’s a super super cool, super powerful. These are small apps that have already been created by other people and that allow you to automate stuff on your phone or with different apps that you have. OK so let me see.

You can see some applet that people already made.

So, for example, you sink your new Instagram to your Pinterest board.

So without you having to do anything, when I post something on Instagram it’s going to post it on my Pinterest.

Other cool automations I have:

• If someone tags me on a Facebook post or something, it will save that photo on my dropbox.
• If I like a photo on Instagram it’s going to save it and dropbox
• Same for video and stuff like that.

We have all sorts of like super cool apps you can choose from and you can actually use that on your phone.

I have an app that allows me to stop my Wi-Fi whenever I leave my house.

Your Wi-Fi is the one thing that you forget to turn off all the time that drains or battery.

all you have to do is define the radius on the house. And basically, as soon as you leave the radius it will stop your Wi-Fi.

Then as soon as you come back it will start the Wi-Fi.

It’s pretty cool. So there are hundreds of applets that people have already made and that are ready to use.

Here you can just go and add them to your phone.

It’s actually very easy. You click on it and it will ask if you want to use it and turn it on.

You know it’s super cool to automate a lot of things and have a lot of fun.

I don’t know if you have an event on Facebook maybe you can put it in your calendar straight away or whatever.

ust go in there and have fun and automate your life.

All right. See you guys.

What IFTTT Is, And What It Is Not

IFTTT is a trigger and action tool. One thing happens, so another thing happens. That is
the whole idea, and the name is the instruction: if this, then that. You pick a trigger from
one app, you pick an action in another, and the connection runs on its own from then on.

What it is not is a workflow builder. There is no branching logic worth the name, no real
error handling, no place to loop over a list of records. If your automation has an “unless”
or an “otherwise” in it, you have already outgrown this tool. I say that as someone who still
keeps a handful of applets running, because the simple ones are the ones that never break.

That distinction matters because most people meet IFTTT first and then judge all automation
by it. They try to build something conditional, it does not hold, and they conclude automation
is fragile. Automation is not fragile. They picked a screwdriver for a job that needed a drill.

The honest framing is this. IFTTT is the tool you use for personal plumbing, the small
connections between the apps on your phone. It is cheap, it is quick, and the setup cost is
about ninety seconds. For anything that touches money or a customer, you want something with
retries and a log, and I will come back to what that means further down.

Where IFTTT Fits In A Real Automation Stack

I have built automation for twenty years, including workflows for Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and
eBay, and the stack I recommend to a solo operator has four rungs on it. Most people try to
do all four jobs with whichever tool they met first. That is where the frustration comes
from, not from the tools themselves.

The rungs are not a ladder you must climb. Plenty of businesses live happily on the second
one forever. The point is to match the tool to the shape of the problem, and IFTTT has a very
specific shape: single event in, single event out, no memory of what happened last time.

The wider numbers say the direction of travel is settled. Zapier’s roundup of
business automation statistics reports that 60% of businesses have
already implemented automation solutions, 80% of marketers actively use marketing automation,
and 90% of small businesses are considering AI and automation services. The question stopped
being whether to automate. It is now only which rung you start on.

Start on the lowest rung that solves your actual problem. If IFTTT solves it, use IFTTT
and spend the saved afternoon on something that earns.

The Applets I Would Turn On First

The video above shows my own set. If you want a shortcut, here is the order I would switch
them on in, chosen because each one removes a decision rather than adding a feature.

• Save what you are tagged in. Anything you are tagged in gets filed to
  cloud storage automatically. You stop screenshotting things you will need later.
• Cross-post one channel to one other channel. Not all of them. One. Pick
  the pair where the formats genuinely match, and let the rest go.
• Location-based phone settings. The Wi-Fi applet in the video is the
  example. Leave the radius, the setting flips. You never think about it again.
• Calendar capture. Anything you mark as attending lands in the calendar
  you actually look at, rather than the one inside the app you never open.
• A daily digest instead of live alerts. One summary at a fixed hour beats
  forty interruptions. This is the applet that buys back the most attention.

Notice what none of those do. None of them touch a customer, take a payment, or make a
promise on your behalf. That is deliberate. When a personal applet fails, you lose a
convenience. When a customer-facing automation fails silently, you lose the customer, and
you usually find out weeks later.

Turn on two. Live with them for a fortnight. Automation only sticks when you feel the
absence of the work, and you cannot feel that on day one with fifteen applets running.

Setting Up Your First Applet Without Regretting It

Most people switch on eight applets in one sitting, get a week of strange notifications, and
switch the lot off. Here is the sequence that avoids that, and it takes about ten minutes.

Write the sentence first. Before you open the app, finish this out loud:
“When X happens, I want Y, so that I stop doing Z.” If you cannot name the Z, the manual task
you are removing, you are automating for the pleasure of automating. Close the tab.

Connect only the two accounts you need. IFTTT will happily ask for access
to everything you own. Give it the two services in your sentence and nothing else. Every extra
connection is a permission you have to remember you granted.

Test with something disposable. Trigger it deliberately with a throwaway
post, photo or file, and watch the result land. Do not wait for real life to be the first test,
because when it fails on real life you will be dealing with the consequence rather than the bug.

Check it in seven days. Put a note in your calendar. Open the applet’s
activity view and confirm it has actually been firing. Silent failure is the failure mode of
every trigger-based tool, and seven days is short enough that nothing has piled up.

Then, and only then, add the next one. One applet per week is not slow. It
is the pace at which each automation gets tested by your actual life before the next one lands
on top of it.

The two mistakes that account for nearly everything going wrong: chaining an applet to a
service you are about to stop using, and automating a decision rather than a task. Automate the
filing, the copying, the moving, the reminding. Keep the judgement calls for yourself, because
a trigger cannot tell the difference between a good week and a bad one.

I break down the same decision process across bigger tools in my
Substack archive, where the workflows get pulled apart step by step.

When IFTTT Stops Being Enough

There are four signals, and once you see two of them together it is time to move up a rung.

You start wanting an “if not”. Post it, unless it already went out. Send
it, unless they replied. IFTTT does not think in exceptions, so the moment your rule has an
exception, the rule stops being expressible.

You need to know whether it ran. A personal applet that quietly stops is
an annoyance you notice eventually. A business process that quietly stops is a hole in your
revenue. Business-grade tools give you a run history and a failed-run alert, and that visibility
is most of what you are paying for.

You are handling more than one record at a time. Anything that starts with
“for each” belongs in a tool with loops.

The same manual task keeps reappearing. This is the one worth taking
seriously, because it is measurable. Asana’s Anatomy of Work research
found that workers move between 10 apps per day and that 62% of the workday goes to repetitive,
mundane tasks. Nearly two thirds. That is not a scheduling problem you fix with a better
morning routine. It is a systems problem, and the fix is a tool that can hold a whole process
rather than a single hop.

I go through how I decide which rung a given process belongs on, with the workflows in front
of me, on my YouTube channel, and the longer business reasoning behind the
stack sits in the Freedom By Choice podcast archive.

My Verdict On IFTTT

I recommend it, with a boundary drawn around it.

Use IFTTT for your own life. The phone settings, the personal filing, the small connections
between apps you already pay for. It is the fastest way I know to feel what automation does to
a day, and feeling it is what makes people stick with it. Nobody was ever converted by a diagram.

Do not use IFTTT for anything a customer depends on. Not the order confirmation, not the
onboarding email, not the invoice. Those need retries, logs and alerts, and they need to be on
a tool built for business processes. That is not a criticism of IFTTT. You would not run payroll
through a kitchen timer either.

The mistake I watch people make is treating the first automation tool they meet as a verdict
on automation itself. It is not. Zapier’s data has 40% of total US wages sitting in activities
that are automatable, which is the size of the prize whichever tool you use to go and get it.
IFTTT is a doorway. Walk through it, take the ninety-second wins, and move up when your
automations start needing to think.

If you want the longer version of how I built a business that runs while I am not in it,
the whole story is on my story page.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does IFTTT stand for and do?

IFTTT stands for if this then that. It is a free automation tool built from small applets that connect your phone and apps so actions happen automatically. When one trigger fires, IFTTT runs the action you chose, like saving a photo or posting to another platform, with no manual effort.

What are some useful IFTTT automations?

Popular IFTTT applets include automatically posting your new Instagram photos to a Pinterest board, saving photos you are tagged in to Dropbox, and turning off your home Wi Fi when you leave the house. Many applets are already made by other users, so you simply switch them on.

Is IFTTT free to use?

Yes, the core IFTTT service is free and gives you access to a large library of ready made applets. You can connect your apps and phone and start automating everyday tasks immediately without paying, which makes it an easy first step into automation for beginners.

Can IFTTT help save phone battery?

Yes. One handy applet turns off your Wi Fi automatically once you leave a defined radius around your house. Wi Fi is the setting people forget to switch off, and leaving it on drains the battery, so this small IFTTT automation quietly saves power for you every day.

About the Author

Martin Ebongue is the founder of martinebongue.com, an online business and lifestyle design blog focused on helping aspiring entrepreneurs build location-independent businesses. Since 2014, he has been creating and scaling online ventures across multiple niches, from digital products and affiliate marketing to SaaS and content platforms, while traveling the world. He shares the real-world strategies, tools, and systems that work, with a particular focus on AI-powered automation for solopreneurs. Follow him on YouTube, X (Twitter), and Instagram.

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