The Daily
A note a day on APIs and the realities of shipping web applications. Stuff I've actually learned across 25 years of doing the work.
Lemon Squeezy: What Actually Changes When Someone Else Handles VAT
Lemon Squeezy positions itself as the merchant of record so you don't deal with VAT. Here's what that actually means in practice — and what it costs you.
I spent a week integrating Lemon Squeezy for a small SaaS product last year and came away with a clear opinion: it's a genuinely good fit for a specific situation, and a bad fit for everything else. The merchant-of-record model sounds like magic until you understand what you're actually trading away. What "Merchant of…
Read the daily →Migrating Off Auth0: When the Bill Outgrows the Value
Auth0 is genuinely great — until your MAU count hits a tier and the invoice makes you do a double-take. Here's how I think about the migration decision.
Auth0 is one of those services I've recommended without hesitation for years — right up until the moment a client forwarded me an invoice and asked me to explain it. The math on Auth0's pricing is fine at small scale and brutal at medium scale. And "medium scale" starts earlier than most people expect. What Auth0…
Read the daily →Postmark: Mixing Transactional and Marketing Email Will Hurt You
I learned the hard way that sending newsletters and password resets from the same stream is a deliverability disaster. Here's what Postmark taught me.
A client's password reset emails were landing in spam. Not occasionally — consistently. We dug in and found the culprit immediately: their marketing newsletter and their transactional emails were going out through the same Postmark message stream. The newsletter had a 12% spam complaint rate that month. It poisoned…
Read the daily →Replacing Zapier with Something You Can Actually Debug
Zapier works until it doesn't, and when it breaks you're staring at a black box. Pipedream gives you real code, real logs, and real control.
Zapier has a failure mode that I've hit enough times to be genuinely annoyed by it: something breaks in a workflow, you click into the error, and you get a vague message that tells you almost nothing. No stack trace, no raw response body, no way to re-run with a shoved in. You're debugging through a keyhole. Pipedream…
Read the daily →HelloSign API: Embedded e-signatures that don't feel like a redirect
Most e-sign integrations punt users to a third-party URL and hope they come back. HelloSign's embedded flow keeps them in your app — and it actually works.
Every e-signature integration I've built before HelloSign followed the same depressing pattern: generate a document, redirect the user to DocuSign or Adobe Sign, pray they complete it, wait for a webhook, reconcile the state. Drop-off rates are brutal. Users get confused. Support tickets pile up. One healthcare client…
Read the daily →