If you've ever looked at Zapier's pricing and winced, you're not alone. At $600/year for a meaningful plan, automation has quietly become a luxury for businesses that can afford monthly SaaS fees. And the self-hosted alternatives like n8n? They require Docker, a VPS, and a fair amount of DevOps knowledge just to get started.

Avtomate was built specifically for the gap between these two worlds.

What Is Avtomate?

Avtomate is a self-hosted workflow automation engine written in PHP. It installs on standard shared hosting — the kind that millions of small businesses and freelancers already have. No VPS. No Docker. No MySQL database required. If your hosting runs PHP (and virtually all shared hosting does), Avtomate runs on it.

The interface is a visual drag-drop workflow builder. You create workflows by connecting nodes: a trigger node (like a website form or a webhook) connects to action nodes (send an email, message on Telegram, call an AI API, log to Google Sheets). The logic is visual, not code.

How It Connects to Your Website

One of the more clever features is the proxy-based form integration. Instead of requiring you to modify your website's code, Avtomate can load your existing pages inside a proxy, let you click on a form to select it, and then intercept that form's submissions automatically. Your site's code stays untouched.

This makes it particularly useful for client sites — you can add automation to a site without touching the backend or getting access to the codebase.

What You Can Automate

Avtomate includes 30+ node types covering the integrations that actually matter for small businesses and web professionals:

Real Examples

Here are a few workflows that take under 10 minutes to set up:

Lead qualification: Contact form → GPT-4 classifies the enquiry type → routes to appropriate team member on Telegram → logs to Google Sheets

AI customer support bot: Telegram bot trigger → Claude reads the message → AI reply node responds in your brand's tone of voice

Automated receipts: Order webhook → condition checks order type → sends custom email with invoice PDF → posts to Slack channel

Who It's For

Avtomate is built for freelancers who manage client websites, agencies who want to offer automation as a service, small businesses that need automation but can't justify Zapier's pricing, and developers who want self-hosted automation without the infrastructure overhead.

The interface is deliberately non-technical by default. Raw template syntax and API details are hidden behind a "developer" mode — the normal view shows human-readable summaries of what each node does.

Get Started

Avtomate is available now at ityjcomp.au/avtomate. You can explore the workflow builder, see the available integrations, and get it running on your hosting today.

If you have questions about whether it fits your use case, get in touch — I'm happy to walk you through it.