Frequently Asked Questions

Who can use Untangly?

Untangly is a platform that is designed to be used by software engineers. We are building the service so that it can be used by both small and large companies

How much does it cost to use Untangly?

The first version of Untangly will launch in Q2 of 2010 and we haven’t announced our pricing yet. Pricing will likely be based on:

• How many pages you want to read from, and write to,
• How often you need to hit these pages,
• How much error handling support you require.

Please contact us for additional information, and join our mailing list if you’d like to participate in our beta trials.

Will Untangly work with any website? Really? Any website?

That is our goal. We will likely only support simple integrations (HTML & JavaScript) in early versions and will support more complex ones (flash sites, image parsing) as we build out the product.

How do you access password protected websites?

Individuals share their own credentials and we log in and manipulate websites directly on their behalf, with their permission.

Isn’t that a privacy issue – using people’s passwords?

No. With Untangly users freely share their usernames and passwords and give permission to read and write information from websites for their personal use. Untangly uses a website the same way a user would.

How are you funded?

Untangly is funded by a customer. Our customer is really large, and they wanted the software we proposed badly enough that they made a strategic investment, paying us to build the product.

How far along is Untangly? When will you launch?

We are just getting started. If you join our team now you’ll be able to make a big impact and influence how things are put together. We are committed to launch a first version of our product in Q2 of 2010 for our first (really big) customer.

How is Untangly different from EAI, XML, SOAP, REST and other APIs?

All of the buzzwords above represent attempts to get developers to build things a specific ways so that systems can easily talk to each other. This works for some people, but most websites are not built using any of these standards.

We’re taking on the hard problem of untangling the web the way it is. Websites aren’t all the same, but they aren’t all that different either: they all send and receive information from web pages that are rendered in browsers.

Untangly is an easy way for developers to create integrations that read from and/or write to any web page. Potentially more important, Untangly provides the infrastructure to easily maintain these integrations indefinitely.

Untangly isn’t an academic exercise in defining and evangelizing standards or a series of recommendations on how to re-factor your code. We are building the plumbing and infrastructure so you can easily and reliably interact with websites that don’t do these things.