Onu (YC W23) – Turn scripts into internal tools in minutes

Hey HN! Chine and Lindsey here from Onu (https://joinonu.com). Onu lets you write scripts and turn them into internal tools suitable for use by non-technical teammates. We built Onu to help you spend more time coding and less time running scripts for ops or customer support. Unlike no-code/low-code products, we’re code-first and let you use your preferred tools. We take care of the annoying parts for you: most importantly the frontend, but also auditing, permissions, and 3rd party integrations (e.g. Slack, email, Jira, Pagerduty).

We’ve put up a few sample screenshots at https://joinonu.com/examples, and a demo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XMnBRsktsw.

Many engineers lose hours a week fielding requests from other teams. While most companies have a home-grown internal dashboard (or are using a third party tool builder for this such as Retool), there is still a long tail of scripts that engineers have to run regularly for their ops and CX teammates, either locally or by SSHing into prod. Maybe a user’s account got stuck in a weird state, or you have a script to manually onboard new customers to your B2B product, or you have to run a custom provisioning script each time you add a bike to your e-bike fleet (something we experienced at Lyft).

We experienced these problems while working on engineering teams at Lyft and Stripe. Our teams needed internal tooling, but we didn’t have time to build feature-rich dashboards. Stripe had a homegrown tool that allowed engineers to quickly spin up simple internal tools without writing any frontend code. When we started working on Onu with a different idea we immediately felt the pain of not having a similar tool. We pivoted to working on our current product instead because we already knew how powerful it can be for speeding up engineering teams.

Internal tool builders mostly take a no code/low code approach that requires engineers to duplicate a lot of business logic in the browser. This leads to brittle internal apps that are hard to keep in sync with the business logic in your codebase, and difficult to maintain as you scale. In addition, such tools subject you to point-and-click / drag-and-drop workflows that just aren’t the sweet spot for programmers. We don’t like working that way ourselves, so we focus on a code-first approach, allowing you to hand scripts to non-technical teammates to own and run without engineering oversight.

Onu works with your existing dev workflow. You write scripts in your editor of choice—not the browser—and deploy tasks the same way you deploy any other code. We can host your scripts if you prefer, but you can also add Onu to your existing Express server and our frontend will handle routing requests to the correct script. We currently have a Node SDK and are rolling out Python next.

You can try Onu now by heading to https://auth.joinonu.com/signup and signing up for an account. It’s free for personal use cases and for teams of up to 5 people.

We’re looking forward to your thoughts and feedback!