Stamplay Limited was incorporated in August of 2012 by Giuliano Iacobelli—right around the time when FileMaker was just settling into its most recent overhaul of the platform with version 12.
An Italian startup with ties to London, Iacobelli probably never imagined his 400 Pound worth of shares in the startup could turn into an acquisition by Apple worth an estimated 12,500 times that in just over six years. It was also probably not on his mind that, in seven years, he would be calling Santa Clara and Silicon Valley his new home and speaking on a stage in front of more than a thousand FileMaker developers at their annual DevCon.
But, as fate would have it, FileMaker Inc., now known as Claris International, has acquired Stamplay. This acquisition has inspired a brand-new product called Claris Connect; it’s poised to hit the market as an evolved, next-generation cloud integration-as-a-service platform in the spring of 2020.
Stamplay pioneered “flow-based” integration. Their interface provided not just an easy way to tie two services together (like what competitors Zapier, Microsoft Flow and IFTTT can do) but it also allowed for a virtually unlimited workflow that can tie many services together with intelligently driven logic. With ease of use in mind, the interface for Stamplay was immediately hailed as powerful, easy to use and robust enough to perform at the enterprise level. This led to high praise and reviews from around the internet.
Recent pricing reports on Stamplay recorded that a “pro” level was $150/month, while a “business plan” was listed at $499/month. An enterprise level offering was also available without any pricing information (which is common amongst web applications). While pricing isn’t available yet from Claris, it should be noted that these prices are historically higher than competitors Zapier ($250 “team” license) and Microsoft Flow ($15/user/month).
However, both Zapier and Flow, and any other similar product in the category, won’t have a direct connector for FileMaker—not like Claris Connect will be able to offer, anyway. This reason alone should excite FileMaker developers. Prior to this, you would have to go through the time-consuming process of creating your own webhook endpoints for each FileMaker path you want to connect in order to connect a flow-based action.
For those developers that attended DevCon, you probably noted that four FileMaker community contributors were recognized for being early testers for Claris Connect. If you caught any of those four speakers’ sessions, recorded and live demos of the early test were shown as a sneak peek of what’s to come.
For me, the excitement lies in the “room to grow” aspect of Claris Connect. Once the framework for building connectors is put in place, we should see a rapid advancement in FileMaker’s ability to connect quickly with outside apps. I’d encourage anyone not at DevCon to watch the Visionary Keynote that Claris released on YouTube.
What are your thoughts on Claris Connect? Comment below to let us know what you think!