Is there a way to send a POST from a "Code by Zapier" Zap to MailChimp to add a subscriber to a list and have it reliably complete in less than 1.00 second?
I spent the weekend at a volunteer hackathon for non-profit organizations. My non-profit client needs some data parsed out of an email and used to add a subscriber to a list in MailChimp (the Commerce portion of SquareSpace emails the data but doesn't allow setting storage on the purchase form to MailChimp -- even though that works in SquareSpace if you're not in the Commerce area). We found we could do that with Zapier -- except we ran up to the limits of what one can do with a free account on Zapier and the non-profit couldn't purchase a paid account right now (the Zapier discount for non-profits is a 15% reduction).
The first limitation was we couldn't do a 3-step zap (maximum 2 steps for free accounts) to go from (1) a Gmail trigger to (2) "Code by Zapier" to parse the email contents and then (3) to MailChimp. The workaround we came up with was to delete step #3 and send to MailChimp directly via http POST to the MailChimp API from a Python script in "Code by Zapier". This worked in test mode in Zapier.
But once the Zap was turned on and we ran an end-to-end test with the site, the Zap failed. There is a 1.00 second runtime limitation to free Zaps: after that Zapier kills the job. The POST to MailChimp took long enough that the Zap timed out.
I used "Code by Zapier" with Python to send the post. They use Python 2.7.10. I was able to import requests to do the post, and I found several other modules worked too, such as json, httplib, and urllib.
What I'm wondering is whether there's a way to get the POST to happen reliably in under 1 second. For example, is there a way to use an async send and then not wait for the response. And I'm constrained to Python 2.7.10 and the Zapier environment. Zapier also allows JavaScript as an alternative to Python, so that might be another path to investigate if there's no solution in Python.
David here, from the Zapier Platform team.
I can't speak to the speed of Python specifically, but I know that javascript can fire off requests without waiting for a response. We've got a basic example here, which you'd modify to send the request and the immediately end execution (by calling the callback function). This won't be a great experience because errors will happen silently, but it'll almost certainly fit in the 1 second window.
Separately, the whole python stdlib is available, as well as the requests module (docs)