Hey all, I'm Greg, the developer of Watchflows. I'm excited to launch today on Product Hunt, and more excited to get some great feedback. Watchflows is an n8n style automation app for macOS. At almost a year old Watchflows should behave like a mature and trusted app on your mac. It's powerful, meant to set and forget, runs in the background when triggering events occur and run whatever logic you've set up.
You can fully configure every flow manually, or attach your own LLM (local, claude, codex, api key or use ours via Watchflows Subscription) and let Flow Builder build your flows for you. That same LLM setup can also power the AI or Agent nodes for deeper coding or classification work. Need a script to accomplish something specific, no issue, Flow Builder will write it for you. Some nodes will also pause flow execution to collect information from you (via a form node, palette picker, or AI chat interface Watchflows provides.)
I believe Watchflows is the best automation app on MacOS right now, not in tenure or seniority, those are earned and have incumbents, but for modern automation, Watchflows offers a clean UX, powerful automation engine written natively in Swift for the best performance on your Mac.
We launched on Setapp this week also, and are excited to share the launch here. Watchflows is available via:
Direct download at https://watchflows.app 14 day trial / 2K Free Sparks (ai credits) / $49 one time purchase ($10 off offer on the product hunt launch)
Subscribe for monthly app access, refilling monthly allowance of Sparks (ai credits) and access to Watchflows Relay (public webhook infra).
Setapp as part of the normal Setapp subscription
We know there are a lot of apps on here competing for your attention, and I'm grateful for yours. Thanks for taking a look, and don't forget to like the product launch, download the app and take full advantage of the two week trial and free 2K spark credits!
Hey Product Hunt 👋
I'm Greg. I've been building software for 25+ years, and Watchflows is the Mac tool I always wanted and could never find.
Mac automation has always forced a choice: something simple but rigid, or something powerful that turns you into a programmer. When AI showed up, most tools bolted it on as a chatbot in the corner. I wanted AI as a building block, a node in the flow that reads, classifies and decides right next to your triggers and actions.
What's in the app today:
A canvas. Drag triggers, conditions, actions and AI nodes, wire them up, press Run. 80 nodes cover files, folders, Calendar, Reminders, Notes, scripts, webhooks, Linear and more.
A Flow Builder. Describe the flow in plain English and it builds the nodes, wires them and tells you what changed. Edit anything it made. Bring your own LLM or subscribe to ours. Use your Claude or Codex accounts to power the AI.
Flows that ask you. Forms, choosers, chat windows and notifications with buttons, so a flow can stop and wait for a sentence or a choice.
Your own data. A flow can keep rows in a local SQLite database, with a SQL workbench to look at them.
AI that admits uncertainty. Jev decision nodes give a confidence score, and the flow routes on it. Requires a TypeSafe AI key.
Clean up your existing spaces. Switch a folder flow on and it asks what to do with the files already there. Preview the sweep, commit, or undo.
Community Flows. 21 finished automations you add in a click. They arrive switched off. Tweak as you like. Submit your own to help the community grow! All Community Flows are reviewed for safety, by both an AI specializing in security as well as human review.
Local-first, for real. No account needed, and your flows and data stay on your Mac. Bring Ollama, LM Studio, Apple's on-device model, your Claude or ChatGPT subscription, or your own API keys. If you'd rather skip setup, Watchflows AI comes with 2,000 free Sparks.
Pricing: free 14-day trial, then $49 once and it's yours. Or $12 a month if you want hosted AI included. Already a Setapp member? It's in there too, with Setapp AI built in.
What would you want your Mac to do for you automatically? I'm here all day. 🙏
One Setapp member's first week: "For decades I have wanted to grab monthly statement PDFs automatically… within 4 hours I had it all working."
The launch coupon takes $10 off the one-time $49 license and runs through 11/30.
@greg_goforth Hey, congrats on the launch. It does look impressive.
Nowadays, when I want some kind of automation, I ask Claude, running in a harness like OMP, to come up with a solution and to be honest, I don't think it has ever failed to deliver some kind of script to get to my desired outcome, but I'm probably reducing the problem space to the things I know or can remember.
What are the benefits of using Watchflows instead of going direct with a tool like Claude?
@alexandre_carvalho3 Great question. So I've found that with most routine based automations, Claude isn't very granular, so something like a check every minute on something isn't possible. Second is price, Claude is my daily driver for coding as well, but for the price it's often WAY more expensive than I need in desktop automations, so having options like open router where I can pick the best suited model for my task is beneficial, and no vendor lock. Use something local. Don't let big frontier LLM have access to your data or the tasks you're automating with them. Lastly, Watchflows has control surfaces that allow you to extend your flows to you, the user. Pick from list UX is great for app launchers, clipboard managers, in your face meeting reminders, etc...your creativity is really the limit!
the pause and ask nodes stand out here sometimes u want the boring parts automated and the final choice left to a person
@saad_el_gueddari I started building Watchflows to scratch my own itch, and those control surfaces are a great way to replace some apps you might be paying for in other apps today.