cd /news/ai-tools/show-hn-free-text-classification-pie… · home › topics › ai-tools › article
[ARTICLE · art-153414] src=jeffyclassify.com ↗ pub= topic=ai-tools verified=true sentiment=↑ positive

Show HN: Free text classification piece for Activepieces

Nico Brenner released a free community piece for Activepieces that adds 70 pretrained text classifiers to the workflow automation platform, using logistic regression on frozen embeddings instead of an LLM step. The Jeffy piece offers four actions — Classify Text, Batch Classify, List Classifiers and Health Check — and defaults to the free public instance at playground.jeffyclassify.com with no API key or signup, or can be self-hosted via `pip install jeffy-classify` and `jeffy serve --port 8400`. Brenner claims the approach is deterministic and returns valid JSON every run, at roughly 15ms locally and 300ms remotely versus 500ms to 3s per item for an LLM step, with 77 banking intents among the pretrained tasks for support-ticket routing.

read2 min views1 publishedOct 20, 2026
Show HN: Free text classification piece for Activepieces
Image: source

Oct 2026 · Community Piece · Nico Brenner

Activepieces doesn't have a built-in text classifier. If you want to route messages by intent, detect sentiment, or categorize support tickets, you're building it yourself with an LLM step. That means writing a prompt, parsing JSON output, handling the cases where the model wraps its answer in markdown fences or returns something unexpected

Jeffy is a different approach. Logistic regression on frozen embeddings. No LLM, no prompt, no parsing. Same input always gives the same output. The Jeffy piece brings 70 pretrained classifiers into Activepieces as a dropdown

You give it text. It tells you what category it belongs to. 70 pretrained classifiers cover common tasks: customer support routing (77 banking intents), sentiment analysis, topic classification, spam detection, emotion detection, and more

The piece has four actions:

Action What it does
Classify Text Classify a single text against a pretrained task. Returns label, confidence, probabilities
Batch Classify Classify multiple texts in one request. Same output per text, faster than individual calls
List Classifiers List all available classification tasks on the server
Health Check Check if the Jeffy server is running and how many classifiers are loaded

Customer message comes in via webhook. Jeffy classifies it against 77 banking intents. A Router step sends it to the right team: account closures go to retention, lost/stolen cards go to urgent support, everything else hits the general queue

Waiting for input...

This calls the real Jeffy API. Type a message, it classifies against banking77 (77 intent classes), then routes it the same way the workflow does

You can add a Code step or use the AI piece to classify text with an LLM. It works for prototyping. But in production, LLM-based classification has real downsides

LLM step Jeffy
Reliability Output format varies between runs Deterministic, always valid JSON
Latency 500ms – 3s per item ~15ms local, ~300ms remote
Cost LLM API credits per call Free (self-hosted or playground)
API key Required (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) Optional, public playground works
Setup Write a prompt, parse the response Pick a task from the dropdown
Privacy Data sent to LLM provider Self-hostable, data stays local

activepieces-piece-jeffy playground.jeffyclassify.com (free, no key needed) The piece defaults to playground.jeffyclassify.com, a free public instance with all 70 classifiers loaded. No API key, no signup

For production, self-host Jeffy on any machine with a CPU:

$ pip install jeffy-classify
$ jeffy serve --port 8400

Then point the connection to http://localhost:8400. Your data never leaves your network

If you need a classifier that doesn't exist yet, you can train your own with a few labeled examples. Jeffy trains in seconds on CPU, and you can export the model and load it on any Jeffy server

── more in #ai-tools 4 stories · sorted by recency
── more on @activepieces 3 stories trending now
sponsored brought to you by zahid.host 4,200+ EU-deployed projects
reading about agents? ship yours in a single git push.

Run your AI side-project on zahid.host

EU-based hosting, git-push deploys, automatic HTTPS, no cold starts. Free tier with a custom domain — perfect for shipping the agent you just read about.

$git push zahid main
→ Live at https://your-agent.zahid.host ✓
Get free account → Pricing
from €0/mo · no card required
LIVE [news/show-hn-free-text-cl…] indexed:0 read:2min 2026-10-20 · —