I decided to try Porkbun last week, had a minor issue and opened up a support chat. Instantly I was connected with a guy named Richard who I could tell was a real person, who had deep knowledge of domains and DNS, and he was empowered to solve my issue. I was blown away. I haven’t had support like that in years.
Congrats to Comma! I’ve had a Comma 2 and then upgraded to Comma 3. It really is a game changer on long trips. It’s also fun trying out all of the different forks, and experimental features.
I work in this space and can tell you it’s fairly common to test on real cards. Stripe knows this and they don’t care as long as it’s very infrequent tests.
But there is no reason to test a dozen times with a real card. Stripe is the gold standard of a test environment that exactly matches the real world. On top of a test environment they also have test clocks so you can run tests over time.
There is only one test in my opinion that warrants using a real card. The very first time you go live. When you’re first swapping the test keys to a live environment. There isn’t a good way to be 100% sure your system is working correctly without a real card test. The front end has a “test” badge, but there is no 100% way to verify the webhook and webhook secret are configurable properly without some sort of a test.
You only have to do this the first time. I often see devs want to use real cards to test updating a webhook secret, but you can usually replay a previous webhook to ensure your changes are working as expected.
For your specific situation I wouldn’t do any more real tests, but I wouldn’t panic about your previous tests. The odds of them taking action against you are extremely low.
I wrote the entire 2nd version of my SaaS between midnight and 6am at a coffee shop in Austin. It was so peaceful to crack open an IDE, and sip on a hot cup of coffee at midnight, and code until I could barely keep my eyes open.
Unfortunately Covid completely destroyed all of these spots. I’m really excited these are making a come back.
I'm not sure why this comment was killed. A heading in the ABC 11 article is literally "Officers involved were later promoted". The text of the article later goes on to say
> Months after the interrogation, Guthrie was named a 2019 Employee of the Year for the Fontana Police Department.
> Guthrie is now a sergeant. So is Janusz.
> And Michael Dorsey, the lieutenant who Guthrie says told him and Janusz that officers believed Perez Jr. had killed his father, has been promoted to captain and is now chief of police of Fontana, overseeing 188 sworn officers, according to its website.
Completely agree. We migrated our entire video library from Azure to Bunny. We went from paying over $2,500 in egress every month to about $200. It’s unreal how much Bunny has saved us.
I’m surprised to see so many people disliking Open Pilot on HackerNews. I have one of these, and it’s a total game changer on long trips. I drove from Texas to California using my Comma 3 and I didn’t have to overtake it a single time on the interstate.
Sure you have to actively be alert your entire drive, but it’s still significantly better than actually doing the work of driving.
I've only driven a driver-assist system once and kind of hated it, but I've always assumed that the mental work of remaining attentive as a passive participant would actually be more mentally taxing than just driving. It seems like you're inevitably going to lose attention.
I consult in this space, and Sigma is one of my favorite tools. It can be useful specifically for fighting delinquent churn. One of the first things I like to check is to see if a particular card brand is declining more than others. I also like seeing the average time between the first failed payment and success. There is all sorts of data in Stripe that can help create a strategy for combating delinquent churn.
Sure you could get and store all of this data from webhooks and into the database, but most product teams don’t want to spend the time implementing this. Keep in mind it’s usually the finance/revenue team that needs this data. They’d rather pay Stripe a couple hundred/thousand dollars and get the data instantly, rather than bugging the product team only to find out the ticket got back burnered.
No one cares because most software developers are employed at big companies that can amortize. Even YC will probably just increase its seed instead of complain and consider it a "cost of business". This affects only marginal people. I am interested to talk with you about this if you want (feel free to reach, my email is in my profile).
Why do you speculate that number? With $1M in revenue and $1.2k in profit, there must have been $998.8k in expenses. I assume "pay yourself" was part of the $998.8k. But I don't know the answer to the other part of your question: I don't know if the $90k in taxes are included in the $998.8k expenses.
Given you’ll eventually get that full software deduction tax break back, just spread across several years, I am surprised there aren’t companies that will finance that to have the money upfront (with a fee of course :( )
But most startups get broke in several years, and codebases can't be repurposed as easily as, say, a fries-making machine, so the fee need to be very high to compensate the risk.
I’m curious if you’re getting killed by the new Section 174 changes?
In 2022 you spent what looks like at least $150,000 in what’s now classified as Research and Development. So this means you’d have a tax burden of around $30k even though you only made $10k in profit.
