The castomAPI advantage
Steps that exist here.And nowhere else.
Every automation tool connects to other people's applications. So does this one. The difference is what sits behind the step picker when you scroll past the familiar names: a platform of our own, on the same account, with no key to obtain and no integration to keep alive.
castomAPI is the platform layer of the castomo family. It was not built for this product — it was built because a dozen products in the family needed the same reference data, the same event feed, the same media library and the same delivery pipes, and building them once was cheaper than building them twelve times.
castomFLOW is what happens when that platform is exposed as steps. In another tool, validating a postal code means finding a vendor, opening an account, agreeing a rate card and maintaining a key. Here it is a step you drop in, and it does not have a rate card because it is the same platform your workflow is already running on.
Reference data
Thirty-four million rows,
sixty-five endpoints,
no key.
Public reference data, cleaned and served: countries, languages, currencies, 13.4 million populated places and geographic features, 19 million name variants, two million postal codes, airports, seaports, vehicle makes, scripture. Search is trigram-based with a three-character minimum, so a partial name finds the place.
Validate
Is that a real postal code for that city? Is PLN a currency that exists? Is that a country code or a typo somebody made in 2019 and nobody caught?
Normalise
“Warsaw”, “Warszawa”, “Varsovie” and “Варшава” are one place with one identifier. Nineteen million name variants exist so that your data does not have to hold all of them.
Enrich
A city name becomes coordinates, a timezone, an administrative region and a population. An airport code becomes a name and a location. A vehicle make becomes a canonical record.
Other tools connect to a platform.
This one is standing on one.
Live events,
as a trigger rather than a lookup.
A worldwide events feed built from more than 175 provider adapters and refreshed every ten to twenty minutes. Concerts, festivals, expos, sports fixtures and conferences sit beside earthquakes, flood and weather warnings, air-quality bands, aviation delays, cloud and service outages, product recalls and public tenders.
Every event carries a venue, a city, a country and coordinates; a time in UTC and in the venue's own timezone; a price that is free, paid or honestly unknown rather than guessed; translations where the source had them; a source URL; and its licence and attribution.
That last paragraph is the part that matters for a workflow. An event you cannot place on a map, cannot put in a calendar and cannot cite is not something you can safely act on. These you can.
- ⚡TriggerCategory
alert, severity Severe, country PL. - 2Place resolvedVoivodeship boundary matched against crew locations.
- ?ConditionCrews inside the area? Yes — 14 of them.
- !Quiet hoursOverridden for severity Severe. This one is meant to wake people.
- ✉Send SMS14 messages. Delivery states tracked back onto the run.
- 6File a noteSource URL and attribution recorded with the run, for afterwards.
175+ sourcesRefreshed every 10–20 min
- 1Search“autumn market stall”, eleven providers, one result set.
- 2ImportStored locally. Licence CC0. Author and source URL recorded.
- 3UsePlaced in the post the next step publishes, credit line included.
- §Why it holdsThe credit line is generated from the same record as the file, so it cannot go stale.
Eleven providersAttribution travels with the file
Media, paperwork attached.
A royalty-free library that searches eleven providers at once and imports what you pick, keeping the licence and attribution attached to the file rather than in somebody's memory.
This matters the moment a workflow is producing something people will see. The picture arrives with its credit line already written, and because the credit line is generated from the record the picture came from, it stays correct when the file is copied into a newsletter, a landing page or a printed sheet six months later.
The rest of the shelf
Sending, booking,
charging, shortening.
The family's services are steps too, authenticated by the same account, billed from the same wallet, with no integration for you to maintain.
Send
E-mail, SMS, push notifications and printed letters, with one shared vocabulary for delivery events, so a bounce means the same thing whichever pipe it came from.
Book
Offer a slot, hold it, confirm it, and publish the result as a calendar feed the customer's own software can subscribe to.
Pay
Take a payment, wait for the webhook, and continue the run when it lands. Two per cent plus twenty-five cents, and the money goes to your account.
Links
A short link per recipient with counted redirects and a QR code, so you can measure a campaign without putting a tracker on anybody's browser.
Utils
Company lookup from public sources, and URL fetching that is guarded against being pointed at your own internal network.
Assets
Somewhere for the files a workflow produces to live, with links that expire when you want them to.
Chat
A chatbot and live chat that a workflow can hand a conversation to, and take one back from.
Sites
The website database behind the family's generators, for the workflows whose job involves somebody's web presence.
All of it is optional.
A large share of workflows here never touch any of it. They read a customer's own systems over HTTP, decide something, and write back — and that is a complete and respectable use of the product.
The honest comparison: if your job is “when a row appears in a spreadsheet, post to a channel”, every tool in this category does it, including this one, and you should pick on price and habit. The reason to be here is the second half of the job — the address that needs validating, the picture that needs a licence, the alert that needs watching and the message that needs sending.