Bottom line: almost every automation a small business runs is one event causing one notification. You need three patterns: "when X happens, tell me", "every N minutes, do Y", and "when I press the button, do Z". A tool that does only those, well, costs a dollar.
The 90% pattern
I have reviewed a lot of automation accounts for clients and the same shape shows up every time: a handful of flows, each with one trigger and one action, most of them sending a notification somewhere. The complex multi-branch workflows exist, but they are rare and they are usually broken.
Flow Automator is built for the common shape. Three triggers, three actions, structured forms instead of JSON.
Pattern 1: when something happens, tell me
Trigger: webhook. Action: email or Slack.
A webhook is a URL that other software can call. When you save a workflow with the webhook trigger, you get a unique URL. Paste it into the "notify this URL" box of whatever tool has the event: a payment processor, a form tool, a calendar app. When the event fires, the workflow runs and the payload is included in the notification.
Typical uses: new order placed, new lead submitted, a form on a client site filled out, a booking made.
Pattern 2: every N minutes, do something
Trigger: schedule. Action: webhook.
Scheduled workflows run on an interval you set, minimum five minutes. The webhook action POSTs JSON to a URL of your choosing. That is enough to ping a service that needs a periodic nudge, kick off a report, or hit an endpoint that regenerates a cache.
The scheduler is deliberately simple. If you need cron expressions and time zones, you have graduated.
Pattern 3: when I press the button
Trigger: manual. Action: anything.
Some flows should only run when a human says so: "send the weekly summary", "notify the team", "resync the thing". A manual workflow is a button on your dashboard. It records the run count, the last run time, and the last error, so you know whether the thing happened.
Why only three actions?
Because email, HTTP POST and Slack cover the receiving end of nearly every integration. If a service can accept a webhook, the HTTP action reaches it. If a human needs to know, email or Slack reaches them. Adding 5,000 native integrations is what makes the big tools cost $30 a month; the HTTP action is the universal adapter that makes them unnecessary for most people.
Safety
Outbound requests go only to public HTTPS addresses, never to private networks, and they never follow redirects. The email action sends only to your own account address, so a leaked webhook URL cannot be used to spam anyone. Webhook URLs are rate-limited and can be regenerated by switching the trigger off and on.