[languagehacker]

Great idea to bootstrap a product like this using an opinionated approach that I mostly agree with. The biggest challenge here will be that the audience you're most likely to target with this will likely be more interested in doing this themselves off a repo they've already got written up and charging $10k for it to a private client instead.

[davegaeddert]

Thanks. Yeah, I agree with that. I'm honestly still trying to figure out exactly who it's for and the whole free/paid/price equation. Individuals? Agencies? Beginners? People with a couple years Django experience?

I'm finding it super helpful for my own purposes if nothing else. There are some topics that Django (understandably) doesn't get into, but also some rough edges that could use smoothing over (in my opinion).

[brianwawok]

And I think that is the rub.

You need to be an expert user to make use of this.

An expert user can likely already do this. And likely has differing opinions about some of your choices (maybe not a Heroku fan, like I would personally only ever run Django on GCP).

[davegaeddert]

100%. Still working through it, but I think the question (or one of them) to me is whether you can lower the bar to where non-experts can get off the ground with some "expert" opinions (or at least experienced ones). Django itself just doesn't tell you, "hey Heroku + Stripe + Sentry + Tailwind + Poetry will get you off the ground if you don't even know where to start, and here's how to do it. And here's how you patch over some of our own idiosyncrasies... Revisit these things when you hit $X MRR or X users and know more about what you're doing."

Totally unproven yet, but I also think there could be an interesting community aspect. If everybody "in" Forge is essentially paying to be there, I think could have a really great place to ask questions and get help from people who are building stuff with a similar mindset to yourself.