Teams reach for a new tool when the answer is often already in the tools they pay for. Google Apps Script runs JavaScript directly across Sheets, Gmail, Docs, Forms, Calendar, and Drive, for free, with no servers to manage at all. For a huge class of business automation, it's the simplest thing that actually holds up.
What it's genuinely good at
- Scheduled jobs, pull data, summarize it, and email a report every Monday at 9am.
- Form-driven workflows, route a submission through approvals without leaving Workspace.
- Sheet-as-database, a dashboard your non-technical team can actually edit.
- Glue, wiring Workspace to external APIs (CRMs, payment, AI models) without a backend.
Where it stops
It isn't right for everything: heavy compute, high-concurrency apps, or anything needing sub-second response belongs elsewhere. But for the back-office automation most small teams need, the honest answer is that you probably don't need a new subscription. You need someone to wire up what you already have.
Related reading
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Job description → Keycard → Manager → Probation → Weekly review
Monitoring AI systems like you monitor infrastructure
Most AI features ship with no observability at all. You find out they're broken when a customer complains, which is the same as not monitoring your servers.
Log in and out → Cost per request → Latency tail → Weekly sample → Eval cases → Named owner
Continues · Got a workflow like this?