What a Mid-Project Change Actually Costs
The hours are the half you can see. The other half is a guarantee the old design gave you for free, and a change request quietly spends it.
10 min readBlog
Thoughts on building software products - engineering, design, strategy, and the lessons we've learned shipping real products.
Pay for Milestones You Can Check, Not for Weeks
A payment schedule on dates is hourly billing with a fixed total. Tie each payment to something you can check in a demo, and hold back the last slice.
8 min read
Your Definition of Done Should Fail the Build
Fixed scope rarely dies on the estimate. It dies at acceptance, when done was written as prose. Write the criteria as checks the build can fail.
9 min read
Buy the Queue. You Still Own the Retry.
BullMQ gives you retries, backoff and concurrency. It does not give you a job that is safe to run twice. Here is the half we wrote around it in zeroutil.
10 min read
Telegram Is Your Login. You Still Own the initData Check.
A Telegram Mini App has no sign-in screen. The client hands your backend a signed string instead, and verifying that string on every request is an integration you write. We built volta's on it.
8 min read
Buy Stripe Billing. You Still Own the Grace Period.
Stripe Billing retries a failed subscription payment, emails the customer, and sets a status. What it does not decide: what your product does during the four days before the cutoff, and what the cutoff means when the account is a Telegram channel.
7 min read
Buy Stripe. You Still Own the Webhook.
We built volta's payment layer on Stripe Connect. What buying Stripe did not cover: raw-body signature verification, duplicate events, and marketplace refunds.
7 min read
Your Static Site Is Probably Not Cached
A static build on Cloudflare Pages still serves HTML as cf-cache-status: DYNAMIC. What it costs, and how to check yours.
7 min read
Buy the Email Vendor. You Still Own the Unsubscribe.
What buying an email vendor does not buy you: three defects that land in the seam, and the one curl that finds the first one on your domain.
8 min read
Why We Quote Fixed Scope - And When to Refuse It
The US federal contracting rulebook says outright that hourly pays a vendor to be slow. It is also clear that fixed price is wrong for exploratory work.
5 min read
Build vs Buy: The Four Numbers That Decide It
Auth, payments, email, storage, search: what each costs to buy in 2026, what you take on by building it, and the one default that is usually wrong.
6 min readStay in the loop
One email a month: what we shipped, what it cost, and what we would do differently. We send a confirmation link first, and every issue carries a one-click unsubscribe.