Alternatives to Zapier for Sharing Links?

When I initially installed Mattermost (3.0), I was disappointed with the way that URLs pasted into messages are handled. They are not expanded into nicely formatted previews with headlines, images, videos, etc.

At first, I was just manually editing markdown previews for what I was sharing, this eventually led to me creating a set of templates to streamline the process, but still ended up being too labor-intensive to be useful.

With the Zapier integration in 3.4, I can now significantly improve my workflow by creating several zaps like this:

  • Trigger: New Tagged Item in Pocket
  • Action: Post Message to Mattermost
  • Template:
    ### [title](url)
    ![](image)
    excerpt

With variations on tags and the destination channel. This is almost perfect, as all I have to do is click the Pocket button in the browser or save it to Pocket on my phone and tag it appropriately. This lets me format the message how I’d like, but unfortunately doesn’t let me tag each message due to the way that tags are exposed to Zapier from Pocket.

I’m day 2 or 3 of my trial with Zapier, and I’ve already executed 94 tasks. Even if this workflow was perfect, there’s no way my usage pattern would work within a free Zapier account that’s limited to 100 tasks per month, and $20 is too hard for me to justify for something that’s basically a hobby.

Does anyone have a workflow that reduces the friction of sharing links to one or more Mattermost channels that doesn’t also cost $240/year for the privilege?

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