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I get the spirit of this article. But one of the key things to consider is the operational overhead of maintaining infra for auxiliary services far outweighs th

I get the spirit of this article. But one of the key things to consider is the operational overhead of maintaining infra for auxiliary services far outweighs the value it provides. There are a few things like payments, notification, monitoring(logs/metrics etc) startups shouldn't build from scratch/self host anymore, unless they plan to take on the incumbents in those fields.

mistrial9 5y ago
no new company should take its own payments?
- shapefrog 5y ago
  It is probably a waste of time and resources to file for a banking licence in multiple jurisdictions, become part of the global payment system, seed deposits with central banks and establish swap credit lines globally - all to facilitate the $2.99 no ads plan on their iPhone app.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  No new company that isn’t a payments company should take its own payments, IMO.
- thayne 5y ago
  Do you really want to deal with the legal and compliance hurdles of handling credit cards/debit cards/etc. right out of the gate? (Assuming that isn't what your new company is about).
  - DarylZero 5y ago
    Every hole in the wall restaurant and convenience store somehow manages to do it... are they so much better at all that??
    - thayne 5y ago
      I think they usually use some sort of point of sale device and service to handle credit cards. That is pretty analogous to using a payment processing service.
      - shapefrog 5y ago
        That is a payment processing service.
    - patmorgan23 5y ago
      They pay a bank for merchant services. They don't become their own payment services.
  - noogle 5y ago
    No, I do not. However, I've heard (too) many stories like "our payments/ads/infra vendor banned us out of the blue for suspicion/politics/obscure-AI-decision" to ignore this. It could be fine for a start-up that is inherently risky, intended to fail early and risks Other-People's-Money (TM), but not always.
    - thayne 5y ago
      Unless your business deals exclusively in cash and/or cryptocurrency, I don't think you can really avoid that. Even if you are dealing with a credit card company directly, that company could ban you out of the blue for suspician/politics/obscure-AI-decision.
      - noogle 5y ago
        Using Stripe etc. adds another point of failure. But yes, the fact that essentially all payments are bottlenecked through two vendors with no legal supervision is quite troubling. Maybe we should form a co-operative of payment recipients? It doesn't need to operate anything, but rather be a "suicide pact" that will extoll a high price from payment processors if they try to unfairly ban a business. Some sort of a smart contract could guarantee fair enforcement.
SodiumMerchant0 5y ago
Stripe bans plenty of startups.
mccorrinall 5y ago
Just give me a dockercompose.yml. That’s all I need. A positive example for this is mailcow [1]: all you need to do is pulling the repo, editing the mailcow.conf and running “docker compose up”. Logging is preconfigured, and the watchdog just works. It’s dead simple and provides secure defaults. It’s ready for production in very little time. That’s what I would love to see from more projects. I hope supabase will follow this at some point. I really like the idea of a self hosted firebase. But right now there is too much to take care of for a single person to actually take a self hosted supabase into prod (be it for side projects or whatever). [1] https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized
- kiwicopple 5y ago
  > I hope supabase will follow this at some point. we have the docker-compose in our main repo: https://github.com/supabase/supabase/tree/master/docker https://github.com/supabase/supabase/tree/master/docker with instructions/docs here: https://supabase.com/docs/guides/hosting/docker https://supabase.com/docs/guides/hosting/docker Hope that helps!

mistrial9 5y ago

no new company should take its own payments?

shapefrog 5y ago
It is probably a waste of time and resources to file for a banking licence in multiple jurisdictions, become part of the global payment system, seed deposits with central banks and establish swap credit lines globally - all to facilitate the $2.99 no ads plan on their iPhone app.
sokoloff 5y ago
No new company that isn’t a payments company should take its own payments, IMO.
thayne 5y ago
Do you really want to deal with the legal and compliance hurdles of handling credit cards/debit cards/etc. right out of the gate? (Assuming that isn't what your new company is about).
- DarylZero 5y ago
  Every hole in the wall restaurant and convenience store somehow manages to do it... are they so much better at all that??
  - thayne 5y ago
    I think they usually use some sort of point of sale device and service to handle credit cards. That is pretty analogous to using a payment processing service.
    - shapefrog 5y ago
      That is a payment processing service.
  - patmorgan23 5y ago
    They pay a bank for merchant services. They don't become their own payment services.
- noogle 5y ago
  No, I do not. However, I've heard (too) many stories like "our payments/ads/infra vendor banned us out of the blue for suspicion/politics/obscure-AI-decision" to ignore this. It could be fine for a start-up that is inherently risky, intended to fail early and risks Other-People's-Money (TM), but not always.
  - thayne 5y ago
    Unless your business deals exclusively in cash and/or cryptocurrency, I don't think you can really avoid that. Even if you are dealing with a credit card company directly, that company could ban you out of the blue for suspician/politics/obscure-AI-decision.
    - noogle 5y ago
      Using Stripe etc. adds another point of failure. But yes, the fact that essentially all payments are bottlenecked through two vendors with no legal supervision is quite troubling. Maybe we should form a co-operative of payment recipients? It doesn't need to operate anything, but rather be a "suicide pact" that will extoll a high price from payment processors if they try to unfairly ban a business. Some sort of a smart contract could guarantee fair enforcement.

SodiumMerchant0 5y ago

Stripe bans plenty of startups.

mccorrinall 5y ago

Just give me a dockercompose.yml. That’s all I need. A positive example for this is mailcow [1]: all you need to do is pulling the repo, editing the mailcow.conf and running “docker compose up”. Logging is preconfigured, and the watchdog just works. It’s dead simple and provides secure defaults. It’s ready for production in very little time. That’s what I would love to see from more projects. I hope supabase will follow this at some point. I really like the idea of a self hosted firebase. But right now there is too much to take care of for a single person to actually take a self hosted supabase into prod (be it for side projects or whatever). [1] https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized

kiwicopple 5y ago
> I hope supabase will follow this at some point. we have the docker-compose in our main repo: https://github.com/supabase/supabase/tree/master/docker https://github.com/supabase/supabase/tree/master/docker with instructions/docs here: https://supabase.com/docs/guides/hosting/docker https://supabase.com/docs/guides/hosting/docker Hope that helps!