jblake

Yeah that sounds like a lot of fun, but alas no time for that. I think I need to stick with Datadog logs and use Sentry for errors. I was excited to try to get everything into one tool, but that doesn't seem realistic. Datadog is just so much better at logging. And figure out my AI workflows. Sentry's Seer is interesting, but it seems unnecessary - why not send everything straight to Claude.

Funny timing, my app for Shopify is for merchants to sell tickets, and it's featured on the App Store home page right now.

I could discuss it with Andrew, but every case will be unique and necessitate its own approach. If I could make one suggestion for anyone dealing with a software patent issue, from my crash-course, is to look into Alice (2014)[1] under Section 101, and review any similar cases, especially by the same entity. You can download case documents pretty cheaply and learn a lot. I paid like 15c a page, and seeing the docket is free. Take the curiosity you have for computers and apply it to the legal system. It's inputs and outputs. But don't go too deep and put your business on the bench. Move the needle a little each day but know you have some time and don't rush into any decisions. Ultimately it's not the end of the world and life will go on.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Corp._v._CLS_Bank_Intern...

I just spoke with Andrew and he was incredibly helpful and is going to help me out. Whew. Thank you Andrew and HN!!

Yes, my case is on Pacer.

Wow, thanks Andrew! I sent you an email with the lawsuit. I look forward to hearing from you. What an amazing community!!

Thank you. I have not personally been served, I found out about it via emails from two different patent attorney firms offering their services, with the lawsuit attached as a courtesy. The lawsuit looks legit to me. I live in Tahoe so don't get mail but will check today and also check with my registered agent in Reno.

Can you recommend me a patent attorney? Any idea on how much this could cost?

The case details does not detail an asking amount. I could post the case details here if people think that's a good idea. I suppose it's public information anyway.

You are not alone!

I've never worked with a lawyer before. How do I pick one? Should I pick one in my state - Nevada? Should I post the case details here? I guess I was hoping someone on HN had a connection or is an IP lawyer themself, as I have no idea how to pick a lawyer and no idea how much this could cost.

- Monitor (with Bugsnag) and fix all errors/exceptions like its your religion. No new feature dev if there's an open bug. Write tests.

- Use Heroku. Monitor metrics to ensure you don't have major performance issues

- Use Datadog. Datadog can monitor and fix many things (web request queue too big -> trigger lambda function to scale up Heroku dynos, Worker queue latency too high -> same thing, scale up worker dynos, memory swapping -> restart dyno).

- Spend a lot of time fine tuning your logging, and custom metrics in Datadog. Makes investigating much more pleasurable.

- Any issues or exception notifications route to a #devops channel in my slack. Other slack channels include signups, business metrics, daily revenue reports, etc

- If something ever happens where you had to intervene to fix it, do a real post-mortem with yourself and try to come up with a way for that to never be a problem again.

I also do a lot of remote camping & off-roading without internet. I'm working on a simple little app where I can get paged on my satellite messenger (Garmin Inreach) if something is wrong, and key clients can also ping me. Only trusted contacts can SMS the Garmin Inreach, so I would use Twilio as the communication pipe. And I've pre-ordered Starlink. My off road truck has an elaborate electrical system (Lithium battery, solar, etc) and I plan to find a way to run the Starlink dish off 12v.

Currently working on my home backup plan, which includes hot-standy Mac mini, time machine and cloud backups, home battery backup generator (Ecoflow Delta), Starlink, portable generator, etc.

Thanks, I will email you. Not a bad idea on the accountant, but finding (a good) one is indeed the hard part. How do I even vet that? I hate "hiring" for something I don't know a lot about. As for tax benefits, my understanding is I will save ~4,500 on self-employment taxes (because I pay myself 100k... $130k-100=30 difference... social security caps at around $130k), plus no longer pay medicare 2.9% on anything past 100k. Additional taxes include state payroll things like UI, but it's not a lot. So it could be worth $10,000+ in saved taxes to be an S-Corp instead of a Sole-prop.... was my conclusion.

I'm so excited for Starlink! As a solo founder I do all of my support, but I like to frequently go off-roading and camping outside of cell service. I have a satellite messenger for critical things, but it still leaves me feeling quite anxious to go on extended trips. If I can toss a starlink dish in a briefcase and get fast affordable internet in the Sierra's, life will be good.

I work remote now (well I run my own software co), and with nothing tying me down I settled on San Diego a few years ago. Love it here, but it's very expensive (looking to buy soon) and I miss the mountains (and green stuff)... so I'm planning to move to Tahoe as soon as the restrictions lift.

A few years ago I was using Beanstream and paying $0.25 per transaction, no percentage points.

I run a SaaS company for event organizers (sell tickets, etc)... it's a ghost town. It's kind of nice actually, I get to catch up on work in peace. I've been installing and customizing Datadog, fixing some rare bugs, finally getting around to that feature...

But, some revenue before July would be nice.

I run a Saas business solo, for eight years now, netting six figures, and I've been on Heroku the entire time for just under $1,000 a month. Monolithic rails app on a single database, 300 tables.

Sometimes I feel teased by 'moving to EC2' or another hot topic to save a few bucks, but the reality is I've spent at most 2 hours a month doing `heroku pg:upgrade` for maintenance once a year, and `git push production master` for deploys and I'd like to keep it that way. I just hope Heroku doesn't get complacent as they are showing signs of aging. They need a dyno refresh, http/2, and wildcard SSL out of the box. I honestly have no idea what the equivalent EC2/RDS costs are and I'm not sure I want to know.

Agreed, I've been using Heroku about 8 years now for my solo SaaS business. The most I've ever done in dev-ops is restarting a server and upgrading postgres versions. However, paying around $800/mo, I do fantasize sometimes on switching to AWS. Honestly I wouldn't even know where to start, and likely not a good use of time. For Heroku, I'd like to see HTTP/2 support, automated wildcard certs, and another Performance dyno option.

Self employed in CA, single, $225 per month, no subsidies.

Heroku. Used to be paying around 1,500 month, but with some major surgery got it down to ~$750. You can't really go any lower without becoming a "hobby" app.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Heroku yet. I'm a one man business too, and 90% of the details in this post I don't even have to worry about. Sure I pay a pretty penny for it - at least a thousand a month - but it just works. Rails and all of its beauties, postgres, redis, sidekiq, sendgrid, twilio, Scout, Papertrail, and that's about it. Looking to add AppOptics soon for business KPI / APM metrics.

Love my SE. Replaced the battery for $15 off Amazon yesterday. With replacements available on ebay for under $100, I don't have to baby my phone or use a case.

If apple offered a modern SE, I'd probably buy it, but I'm also quite happy with my SE as-is. If the SE wasn't getting iOS 13, I don't know what I'd do... thankfully it is.

Usually I'll let the points sit and use them when I have to travel - so the points never touch my bank accounts. I'm not a tax expert, but for that reason I don't bother reporting any income on it

As a small business owner, what I like about the Chase business cards is rewards come back in the form of points that I can easily transfer to my personal cards. It sounds like Stripe applies them towards the statement, i.e., benefit goes to the business, not to me personally.

However, the 50k free processing is very enticing as thats way higher than any other signup bonus I've seen. But again, credit goes to business, not to me. With a typical chase card, I'll get ~$1,000 worth of points (tax free) added directly to my personal points balance for simply switching a few business expenses to that new card for a couple of months.

The way I set this up in my accounting system was to pile all first data deposits into an asset clearing account, create a bill to pay the client, and then record a payment from that clearing account. Since the IRS only sees income & expenses, I can understand the trigger for the CP2000. I didn't see a logical way to report this activity on my return.

I guess I need to write a short letter explaining it, saying I don't do it anymore, and include highlighted bank statements of the money coming in, and the money going back out. Unfortunately I don't have tax numbers for the clients.

Decent, but too many misses. I found one thats a bit closer to what I'm looking for: https://www.owcdigital.com/products/thunderbolt/thunderbolt-... but it doesn't ship until Feb.

Not thrilled, but I need to replace my 2011 Air. Apple has me in the corner with Xcode...

I'm a Stripe connect application provider, and I get hundreds if not thousands of "Zip code failed validation" decline errors - primarily affecting Canadian customers. The decline rate is too high in my opinion to be user-error.

I use both. Braintree for SaaS income (monthly, one-off, client contracts), and Stripe for marketplace payments (Stripe Connect - event ticket sale service fees). It works well, and helps me reconcile the income easier into separate clearing accounts that I set up with Xero. I was originally enticed to Braintree because of the first free $50,000 of processing. I have been very happy with both.

Odd they didn't mention performance improvements in the blog post. From my understanding, there have been some massive gains (of which, some commits date back to early '15!) One of them which has been killing me, is that model schemas were not preloaded on app boot, which led to the first few dozen requests (depending on how many workers you have on Puma) perform 100+ sql queries and add over 1s to response times. Not only were they not preloaded, but they were not cached across ActiveRecord::Base.connection's

Good work rails team!