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by curiously 4112 days ago
so why should a developer use this vs building their own? if open source back end tools exist why not self host those?

looks like a great product, curious to know what stack you are running, are each backend hosted on amazon?
1 comments
outrunthewolf 4112 days ago
Hey, another co-founder here.

There is no reason why you couldn’t do that! we’ve even open-sourced a bunch of our components to help people do it - https://github.com/moltin

The reason we created Moltin was to speed up this process, bring it up to modern standards, and give developers the creative freedom to use the tools they’re comfortable with. By not going down the self-hosting route you also no longer have to manage the installation, keep the codebase secure or worry about scaling.

Our main stack utilises nginx, php, postgres, redis and a few other things in-between, we’re built on top of AWS purely for the flexibility it gives us.

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curiously 4112 days ago
so basically the benefit here is saved time and reduced operating costs by outsourcing the ecommerce infrastructure.

How did you decide that ecommerce would benefit the most by outsourcing the infrastructure?

I'm definitely interested in using this to see if I can host a shop since I most certainly end up creating a lot of it from scratch. From a developer point of view, it looks like an SDK/API for building ecommerce websites.

How would you differentiate yourself from shopify like solutions? Are you targeting the developer market vs non-technical users?

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outrunthewolf 4112 days ago
Correct. As a developer you know the amount of time you can put into building your own solution to a problem. That approach is fun and a great way to learn, but at some point the benefits can often outweigh the actual costs.

We all spent years building eCommerce websites on a range of platforms and grew more disenfranchised with them over time, we knew there had to be a better way. We started to discuss the concept of building JS only stores. We loved what Stripe were doing for payments and wanted to bring it to the rest of eCommerce, so we ended up settling on our API approach.

Exactly, We're building for developers, Shopify (typically) supports quick stores for non-technical users, but as developers it greatly limits the flexibility we have.

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