guyfromfargo

On December 28th Spotify quietly disabled the ability to create new apps. The only way to get an API key or use the Spotify API is to first create a Spotify App. No announcement or official statement was released when this functionality was pulled. Spotify disabled generating new apps from the developer dashboard. Users started posting in the Spotify Developer community, and no response or communication was given until 2 weeks later.

"We'd like to say that the teams are currently investigating this and new integrations are currently on hold while we make updates to improve reliability and performance. As soon as we've got any other news to share, we'll let you know."

It has now been over a month since app creation has been completely disabled. Because of previous Spotify API changes requiring 250k MAU to publish an app, there are 100s of Spotify integrations that rely on users providing their own API key. I first came across this when trying to integrate my new Stream Deck into Spotify.

With Spotify's continued pattern of degrading their API, I wouldn't be surprised if this is the final nail in the coffin.

I have one of these and I really enjoy it.

No it’s not FSD. There is no navigation at all, you’re correct that it’s “just lane assist”. But the lane assist is next level.

I take a few 1,000 mile plus road trips every year and the comma pays for itself every time. Using the stock lane assist, I’m constantly correcting it. The stock assist tries to take an exit, doesn’t handle curves well at all, and any construction or unusual road conditions it won’t work at all.

With the Comma, on the highway it’s basically FSD. On my last 1000 mile trip I never had to disengage, only to pass and make turns.

The biggest advantage is Comma allows you to be completely hands off the wheel. Where lane assist forces you to hold the wheel at all times.

Founding Sales by Pete Kazanjy is hands down the best book I’ve read on sales. It has a step by step guide on how to implement a sales process in your business.

I keep it on my desk at all times. Whenever I have a sales question I thumb through and it always has the answer.

I enjoy Patio11’s Bits About Money Essays. You’ll frequently see his posts make the front page of HN.

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/

Don’t forget that Azure was down two weeks ago as well.

I own a small SaaS and the numbers you presented are similar to my situation in 2023. I owed over $100k in Taxes and I’ve literally never had over $100k in my business or personal bank account.

No that’s not a law. Typically when DJing the venue is responsible for paying the ASCAP and other licensing fees. As long as the DJ didn’t pirate the music they are free to use whatever source of the music they want.

The fun part is paying ASCAP and BMI doesn’t guarantee you have the rights to play any song, just most songs. So you’d have to look up if the song you want to play is in the ASCAP library before you play every song. And if they don’t have the song you must contact the artist/label and get permission before playing it. Obviously this isn’t practical. But it illustrates just how difficult it is to be compliant with copyright law.

This is me! I have bootstrapped two SaaS companies, and used to hang out on Indie Hackers all the time from 2016-2021. Then the vibe completely shifted, and the self promotion and influencers took over.

I had a modest following on Indie Hackers, and my posts always did well. But after 2021 none of my posts ever could cut through the “7 tweets you need to make right now to generate signups”. I just stopped posting and that’s when I came over to Hacker News.

I hope something pops up like Indie Hackers again, because there are a few of us who build small products and don’t want to be Twitter influencers.

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.

We’re already here. Check out Cline or Roocode. The technology is incredible.

I wrote a custom MCP to grab tickets from my Kanban board, Roo will pull down the tickets and start implementing them. I then have another agent that QAs, and either kicks the ticket back, or moves the ticket to human review.

I’m doing this on a real world micro SaaS. It has about 50 paying customers, and I’m the sole developer. I did a complete rewrite and the AI was able to complete about 90% of the project. I estimate I can get about a week’s worth of coding done in a day with this setup. I haven’t even scratched the surface of optimizing this workflow.

I’m also just one guy working nights and weekends, I’m sure there are many startups solving this same problem. It’s amazing to be shipping features this quick, but as a developer I’m terrified of what this is going to do to our careers.

Thank you for posting this! I can’t believe section 174 is not more well known. I run a small software company and hiring an engineer is literally 5X more expensive as hiring a marketing or support person in a post section 174 world.

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.

The article says the officers got promoted.

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 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.

Completely agree. I am a bootstrapped SaaS owner and we cleared about $1M in revenue, $1,200 in profit, and $90k in taxes.

Bootstrapping a tech company in a post Section 174 world doesn’t even seem feasible. I can’t believe this issue isn’t being taken more seriously.

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.