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.
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 →Stripe Tax: When automated tax calculation breaks
Stripe Tax looks like magic until it isn't. Here's what actually goes wrong in production and how I handle it.
Stripe Tax looked like the answer to a problem I'd been duct-taping for years. Automatic tax calculation baked right into the checkout flow, no Avalara contract, no TaxJar webhook spaghetti. Then I shipped it for a client and spent two days figuring out why orders from Louisiana were calculating at zero. That…
Read the daily →