[ram_rar]

I get the spirit of this article. But one of the key things to consider is the operational overhead of maintaining infra for auxiliary services far outweighs the value it provides. There are a few things like payments, notification, monitoring(logs/metrics etc) startups shouldn't build from scratch/self host anymore, unless they plan to take on the incumbents in those fields.

[mccorrinall]

Just give me a dockercompose.yml. That’s all I need.

A positive example for this is mailcow [1]: all you need to do is pulling the repo, editing the mailcow.conf and running “docker compose up”. Logging is preconfigured, and the watchdog just works.

It’s dead simple and provides secure defaults. It’s ready for production in very little time. That’s what I would love to see from more projects.

I hope supabase will follow this at some point. I really like the idea of a self hosted firebase. But right now there is too much to take care of for a single person to actually take a self hosted supabase into prod (be it for side projects or whatever).

[1] https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized

[kiwicopple]

> I hope supabase will follow this at some point.

we have the docker-compose in our main repo: https://github.com/supabase/supabase/tree/master/docker

with instructions/docs here: https://supabase.com/docs/guides/hosting/docker

Hope that helps!

[SodiumMerchant0]

Stripe bans plenty of startups.

[mistrial9]

no new company should take its own payments?

[sokoloff]

No new company that isn’t a payments company should take its own payments, IMO.

[shapefrog]

It is probably a waste of time and resources to file for a banking licence in multiple jurisdictions, become part of the global payment system, seed deposits with central banks and establish swap credit lines globally - all to facilitate the $2.99 no ads plan on their iPhone app.

[thayne]

Do you really want to deal with the legal and compliance hurdles of handling credit cards/debit cards/etc. right out of the gate? (Assuming that isn't what your new company is about).

[noogle]

No, I do not.

However, I've heard (too) many stories like "our payments/ads/infra vendor banned us out of the blue for suspicion/politics/obscure-AI-decision" to ignore this. It could be fine for a start-up that is inherently risky, intended to fail early and risks Other-People's-Money (TM), but not always.

[thayne]

Unless your business deals exclusively in cash and/or cryptocurrency, I don't think you can really avoid that. Even if you are dealing with a credit card company directly, that company could ban you out of the blue for suspician/politics/obscure-AI-decision.

[noogle]

Using Stripe etc. adds another point of failure.

But yes, the fact that essentially all payments are bottlenecked through two vendors with no legal supervision is quite troubling.

Maybe we should form a co-operative of payment recipients? It doesn't need to operate anything, but rather be a "suicide pact" that will extoll a high price from payment processors if they try to unfairly ban a business. Some sort of a smart contract could guarantee fair enforcement.

[DarylZero]

Every hole in the wall restaurant and convenience store somehow manages to do it... are they so much better at all that??

[thayne]

I think they usually use some sort of point of sale device and service to handle credit cards. That is pretty analogous to using a payment processing service.

[shapefrog]

That is a payment processing service.

[patmorgan23]

They pay a bank for merchant services. They don't become their own payment services.