Yahoo! Pipes a strong argument for building your own tool/buying a paid product, in that if one relies too heavily on a service and it went away, then that [business] process went away as well. The demise of Pipes! caused us a bit of anxiety and made us hustle to find other solutions in a compressed time frame.
The rather quick demise of Yahoo! Groups was also disruptive. Heck, even Hacker News could have worked as a Yahoo! Group. Fortunately, it is not. When Groups went away, so did a lot of discussion groups and even when those groups moved, they lost many members. Groups.io is a nice alternative, but there too much of their platform is free.
There is always a danger when you build critical things on someone else's land, particularly if they allow you on their property for free. Even if they charge you but are not profitable, there is a risk of waking up to read that the service is closing.
We use Zapier in our small business, but work to build out tools for those Zaps! that become mission critical.
August 2014 I was taking suitcases out of a vehicle and a few days later found myself in so much pain that I threw up while trying to get out of bed. Went the physical therapy and steroid route. Not very much results. To the point that three months later I bent down to pick up a piece of paper and could not get up. After 45 minutes of laying on the floor swearing in pain my daughter called 911 and I took the first ambulance ride of my life. I walk 5 miles a day, but for two months could not walk from my bedroom to the kitchen.
I have collapsed disk at L2/L3 and to a slightly lesser extent L4. Four doctors said surgery was the only answer. I went to that many trying to find a different answer as I had heard so many stories of failed back operations. Plus a few years ago a 25 year old kid that worked for me went in for “minor” back surgery. He left St Francis Hospital in a hearse. They cut a blood vessel, did not realize it and he internally bleed to death.
Instead of surgery I went with steroid injections in my back and a chiropractor. Both helped somewhat. The chiropractor suggested I try Yoga. Weird thing for a socially conservative midwestern kid (who is now 60), but at that point I’d try anything.
Yoga saved me. I started with restorative and now do mixed level. I can now keep up with many of the guys 20 plus years younger than me. A friend had a bad back since a car accident a decade ago. I convinced him to try Yoga and he has had similar positive results.
Is my back perfect now? No, but probably close to what it was before I realized it was damaged
"I think the consensus in the grown-up business world is 'fire immediately for cause.'" Concurring that this is the correct answer.
I make this statement from the perspective of having employees since 1979 in multiple concurrent businesses. If they have no respect at the beginning they will have less respect next week.
You must choose between your business and the new guy. In a year, you will have one or neither.
Comcast is on my list today for a different reason. We have Comcast Business Class service at one of our FL locations.
Tuesday we could not access VNC nor our remote database services from that location. All port 80 traffic was fine. I had one of the staff call, wait on hold for an hours.
Just as I suspected Comcast had implemented port blocking on a high priced business account. It took the guy a second to release it. It put our company down for two to three hours.
Also the speed of Comcast service drops to 15-20% of advertised from 2:30 to 5 PM when kids arrive home from school.
Once the contract is up we are moving the service to someone who understands "business class"