Bots and automation, done right

Build bots that people actually want to talk to.

A vendor-neutral hub for developers who build chat bots, AI agents and automations: step-by-step platform guides, hosting and security playbooks, a curated directory and client-side tools that never see your tokens.

13in-depth guides
6browser tools
80curated resources
2languages

Guides

Platform and engineering guides

From your first token to a production bot with queues, retries, monitoring and a security review.

All guides →
Basics

Getting started

What a bot is, how to pick a platform, polling versus webhooks, and the minimum production checklist.

Telegram

Telegram bots

Create a bot with BotFather, handle updates with polling or webhooks, add inline keyboards and stay within limits.

Discord

Discord bots

Register an application, choose Gateway intents, ship slash commands and buttons, and verify HTTP interactions.

WhatsApp

WhatsApp Cloud API

Send and receive WhatsApp messages through Meta's official Cloud API with templates, webhooks and opt-in.

Slack

Slack bots

Create a Slack app with a manifest, choose scopes, receive events over HTTP or Socket Mode and verify requests.

AI

AI chatbots and agents

Add language models to a bot with tool calling, retrieval and MCP while controlling cost, latency and prompt injection.

Automation

Automation workflows

Design trigger and action workflows, self-host n8n, handle errors and know when to move to code.

Webhooks

APIs and webhooks

Build webhook receivers that verify signatures, acknowledge fast, deduplicate and retry correctly.

Scraping

Web scraping ethics

When automated collection is acceptable, how to be a polite crawler, and the lines you should not cross.

Hosting

Hosting bots

Pick the right runtime for polling, Gateway and webhook bots, and run it with restarts, logs and backups.

Serverless

Bots on Cloudflare Workers

Deploy a webhook bot at the edge with secrets, storage, background work and scheduled jobs.

Security

Bot security

A threat model and checklist for bots: secret management, least privilege, signed webhooks, SSRF, injection and leaks.

Reliability

Reliability and rate limits

Keep a bot fast and correct under load: respect 429s, queue work, deduplicate, time out and alert.

Principles

What makes a bot legitimate

"Bot" is not a dirty word. The difference between a useful bot and abuse is consent, transparency and restraint.

  1. It says what it isUsers know they are talking to software, and who operates it.
  2. It is invitedPeople opt in to messages; servers and workspaces choose to install it.
  3. It follows the platform rulesOfficial APIs, published rate limits and terms of service, not scraped sessions.
  4. It takes only what it needsMinimal scopes, minimal data, short retention, a way to delete.
  5. It protects its credentialsTokens in a secret store, signed webhooks, rotated keys.
  6. It has an off switchStop commands, unsubscribe, a human fallback and an owner who answers reports.