RunShield — Reliability Control Plane for Automations
10/10
Demand Score
Failed or duplicate runs cause lost revenue, double charges, and SLA breaches—executives notice immediately.
8/10
Blue Ocean
Competition Level
$499-3k
Price/Month
Predicted customer spend
6 days
Time to MVP
Difficulty: Moderate
The Problem
RunShield hardens unreliable automations with exactly-once semantics, smart retries, and verification. It sits between your triggers and actions to provide idempotency keys, deduplication, adaptive co
Competitor Landscape
- Temporal.io (workflow engine)
- Workato/Tray reliability features
- Zapier error handling
- AWS Step Functions
- BullMQ/Celery (queues)
Must-Have Features for MVP
Idempotency keys and dedup store with TTLs
Adaptive retry policies with jitter and backoff per connector
Circuit breakers and fallbacks per endpoint
Rate-limit budgeting and backpressure across flows
Post-action verification and compensating actions
Dead-letter queues with automated triage and owner routing
Run SLOs with credits and incident alerts
SDK and proxy connectors for Zapier/Make/Workato
⚠️ Potential Challenges
- Mapping idempotency to third-party APIs that lack native support
- Complex rate-limit policies across vendors
- Ensuring verification steps don’t exceed quotas
- Backward compatibility with existing iPaaS flows
- Educating teams on reliable patterns without heavy change
Risk Level: Low
🎯 Keys to Success
- Immediate drop in failed or duplicate runs
- Simple drop-in integration; no rewrite required
- Visibility: per-flow reliability score and trendlines
- Provable guarantees for auditors and customers
- Scales with traffic bursts without melting down
- Tunable policies for each vendor’s quirks
Ready to Build This?
This moderate-difficulty project could be your next micro-SaaS success.