How Zapi Makes Building Internal Tools Less Painful
- Founders
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Thomas Jiang
Jonathan Low
Building custom internal tools can feel like pulling teeth - especially if you're not a developer. Thomas Jiang and Jonathan Low built Zapi to bridge the frustrating gap between detailed product requirement documents (PRDs) and working prototypes. Now, Zapi acts like a co-pilot for product managers, taking teams from PRDs to functional apps quickly and painlessly.
From Landing Pages to Zippy Prototypes
Thomas and Jonathan first tried their hand at building tools to help teams make landing pages, but after a ton of experimentation and customer conversations, they realized something bigger was broken. Non-technical teams and product managers were getting stuck turning PRDs into actual apps. Spotting this more urgent pain, Zapi pivoted to hard focus entirely on rapidly generating working prototypes from PRDs.
Stateful User Environments Made Simple
Zapi uses Fly Machines to instantly set up stateful project environments in the nearest Fly.io region. Each Machine comes ready-loaded with starter code, dependencies, and everything teams need to start prototyping right away.
"Fly Machines are ridiculously straightforward," Thomas says. "If you've touched Docker even once, you're good. We didn't bother hiring a DevOps team."
Fly Replay: No More Routing Spaghetti
Routing traffic sounds simple until it's suddenly not. Zapi uses fly-replay
to neatly handle traffic, directing users straight to the apps built from their PRDs, zero fuss involved.
"fly-replay erased our routing headaches," Thomas adds. "A few lines of code and it just works."
Zero Waste, Zero Babysitting
Fly Machines automatically scale resources up and down, so Zapi doesn’t waste time or cash managing idle resources.
"Fly handles scaling invisibly," Thomas says. "We're not babysitting servers—we're actually building Zapi."
Infra That Gets Out of the Way
Thomas and Jonathan chose Fly.io for rapid boot times, straightforward filesystem handling, and infrastructure that stays out of sight and out of mind.
"Coming back to Fly.io was a no-brainer," Thomas explains. "We'd already experienced how easy they make things."
Zapi's lean team now spends zero hours fighting infrastructure and every extra hour making prototyping easy for non-technical teams. Just as it should be.