Triggers and schedules
The trigger is what wakes an automation up. It can run on a clock in your own timezone, watch a page or feed and run only when it truly changes, listen on a private webhook URL, read a private email address, or fire the moment another automation finishes. You describe when you want it to happen; the assistant sets the right trigger.
Five ways to fire
| Trigger | Fires when | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Schedule | A time on the clock arrives | Digests, reports, recurring pulls and pings |
| Watch | A page or feed genuinely changes | Change alerts, new-item feeds, price and stock moves |
| Webhook | JSON is POSTed to a private URL | Form submissions, events from other software |
| A message lands at a private address | Forwarded receipts, inbound requests, document intake | |
| Chaining | Another automation finishes | Multi-stage pipelines split into focused parts |
On a schedule
For anything you want on a rhythm rather than in reaction to an event.
You describe the cadence in words and the assistant sets it. The options cover everything from once a month to every few minutes.
| Say something like… | You get |
|---|---|
| “every morning at 8” | Daily at 08:00 in your timezone |
| “every Monday at 9” | Weekly on that weekday and time |
| “first of the month” | Monthly at a set time |
| “at 9 and again at 5” | Several fixed times a day |
| “every 15 minutes” | A fixed interval, from every 5 minutes up to once a day |
| “only on weekdays” | Skips Saturday and Sunday |
Timezones, done right
A schedule set to 9am means 9am where you are — through daylight saving and all.
Clock-time schedules run against your wall clock, not a server’s. When you say “8am,” the automation fires at 8am in your timezone, and it stays at 8am across daylight-saving changes rather than drifting by an hour twice a year. If the assistant doesn’t already know your timezone, it asks before setting a clock-time schedule, so “every morning” is never ambiguous.
When a source changes
Point it at a page or a feed and it runs only when something real happens.
A watch checks a web page or a feed on an interval you choose — as often as every five minutes, hourly by default — and runs your “on change” steps only when the source actually changes. It is deliberately picky about what counts as a change, so you are not pinged every time a view counter ticks or an item is re-ordered. That pickiness is configurable and important enough to have its own page: see Watching for changes.
Watches can also read pages that only assemble their content in a browser, rendering the page the way a visitor would see it before comparing. And because change detection remembers what it last saw, the very first check is a silent baseline — it establishes “this is normal” and does not fire.
On an incoming webhook
Give other software a private URL to poke, and each poke starts a run.
Ask for a webhook automation and you get back a private webhook URL. Anything that can send an HTTP request — your contact form, another app, a service’s outgoing hooks — can POST JSON to it, and each POST starts a run with that payload available to the recipe. The assistant hands you the URL directly on creation.
| Property | Behavior |
|---|---|
| Private | The URL contains a secret token; only someone who holds it can trigger the automation |
| Payload-aware | The JSON body is passed into the recipe, so steps can read the submitted fields |
| Duplicate-safe | Identical repeat deliveries are recognized and ignored, so a retrying sender never double-fires |
| Rate-limited | A burst of events is capped per minute; excess is turned away politely rather than run |
| Saved first | The raw payload is stored before the recipe runs, so any run can be reproduced later |
On an email
A private address that turns anything you forward into a run.
An email automation gives you a private intake address. Anything sent there starts a run, with the sender, subject, body, and attachments all available to the recipe. It is the natural fit for “forward your receipts here” or “email requests to this address and file them.” Image attachments are handed straight to the image-reading capability, so “email your receipts to this address and pull the vendor, date, and total into a sheet” is a single automation.
When another automation finishes
Let one automation hand off to the next.
An automation can be set to fire the moment another one finishes. You choose whether it runs only when the first one succeeds or on any outcome, and the finishing automation’s result is passed along so the next one has something to act on. This lets a big job be split into focused parts — one automation gathers, the next decides, a third delivers — each simple, testable, and repairable on its own. The platform guards against loops, so a chain can never accidentally circle back on itself.