pqvst

Probably the closest I've ever been to getting a heart attack. Normally <$1 per month, and now suddenly $284,006,266,443.74. Whatever the bug is on their end, this is unforgivable.

Sphere looks quite promising, and I haven't come across them before. Their coverage looks pretty good as well, and pricing sounds reasonable. It looks like they have a Stripe integration. Is that something you're using?

I run a B2C SaaS business. We're an EU company. We use Stripe for all billing, and we use Stripe Checkout and Stripe Tax for all of our tax calculations. We've built our own tools to generate monthly/quarterly tax summary reports from our Stripe payments data.

Luckily most of our business is in the EU, so as an EU company, filing our EU VAT is easy.

We used Avalara for 1 year in order to setup VAT registration in Norway. We chose Avalara because they do in fact provide full service solutions for VAT (registration, filing, and remittance). However, they are expensive and were AWFUL to work with: poor communication/support, no integration with Stripe, and we had to manually generate carefully structured Excel files in order to import our sales data. We cancelled our contract with them after 1 year, but were able to take over the filing account from them and now our in-house accountant does the filing and remittance (which is quick, easy, and MUCH cheaper).

We have considered something like Paddle, but it is difficult to justify the increased fees as our business grows. For the amount of money we'd be spending on Paddle in extra fees vs Stripe, we may as well just use a service provider or hire our own staff.

With Stripe Tax we can easily monitor our thresholds in other countries. There are some countries that technically require registration for even a single transaction in that country, which is ridiculous. I imagine for most companies it is definitely not feasible to register, file, and remit in all of those countries.

From Q1 2024, Gmail and Yahoo will require senders to have SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Also, spam complaints must be kept below 0.3%.

I recently added DMARC monitoring to some of my domains through CloudFlare.

Yes. That is a good point. I'll update the post and recommend using a local tool instead.

Huh. What browser?

Thanks :)

Thanks! I didn't realize web-push had a way to generate the keys until later. Also it was just easier to use the vapidkeys site.

Started AwardFares (https://awardfares.com) back in 2018. It's a search engine for finding flights to book using your airline miles. Started as a side-project, completely bootstrapped and self-funded.

We hit $2k monthly revenue after about 1.5 years. Growth completely stopped during COVID, but is now growing very well (more than 10x that).

I shared my insane MBP repair history on HN last year (including 5 top-case replacements and 2 complete laptop replacements): https://pqvst.com/2021/08/24/my-macbook-pro/

Kind of funny, I'm still on my most recent replacement/repaired unit, and it's still working great since my AppleCare Protection Plan expired (knock on wood). But I guess it's only a matter of time until I'll have to buy a new one.

Glad to hear! Appreciate the kind words :)

Glad to see Unified Remote mentioned! I created it 12 years ago, back in 2010 when Android and smartphones were basically brand new. I still maintain it, although less frequent feature updates these days.

I've been using Grafana Cloud (free tier) for over a year now. Still very happy with it. I did a comparison with Influx Cloud:

https://pqvst.com/2021/06/22/hosted-monitoring-evaluating-in...

I also recently started using Logtail for one of my projects. They also have a good free-tier and it comes with a Grafana instance embedded, so that you can visualize metrics computed from your logs. Seems quite useful but haven't had a chance to really test it fully yet.

We first started getting bounce notifications around 7 hours ago, I'm surprised it took this long for Postmark to announce the service issue.

We're seeing responses like this in our logs:

smtp;550 5.7.1 Service unavailable, Client host [<ip>] blocked using Spamhaus. To request removal from this list see https://www.spamhaus.org/query/ip/<ip> (AS3130). [DM6NAM04FT060.eop-NAM04.prod.protection.outlook.com]

Historical "Time to Inbox" available further down on this page: https://status.postmarkapp.com/

Update: I received a response from Apple now:

"You were sent an email today noting that your banking information in iTunes Connect is invalid and needs to be corrected. This email was sent in error and you do not need to update banking information. We apologize for the error."

Well. I receive monthly payments from Apple for App Store revenue. I guess this used to be from "iTunes Connect" but is now called "App Store Connect", hence the confusion on my part.

Same, couldn't find any warnings. Glad to hear I'm not the only one at least!

Indeed. The first thing I did was close the email and log into my account, but couldn't find any warnings there. I've sent a support message to Apple as well asking what's up with this email.