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.
The OpenAI context window trap that's quietly inflating your bill
Multi-turn conversations feel simple until you realize you've been re-sending the entire history on every call. Here's what that costs and how I fixed it.
Multi-turn conversations look trivial in the OpenAI docs. You append messages to an array, send the whole thing, get a response, append that, repeat. What the docs don't dwell on is that every single turn re-sends every single prior message — and the token meter runs on total tokens in the request, not just the new…
Read the daily →Stripe Billing: Don't Downgrade Users on the First Failed Payment
Stripe's retry logic is smarter than most people use it. Here's how I wire it up so customers don't lose access the moment a card declines.
The first time I accidentally downgraded a paying customer mid-cycle because their card issuer did a routine fraud hold, I got an earful. Rightfully so. The charge failed, my webhook fired, I marked the subscription inactive, and the user lost access to a service they'd been paying for without interruption for eight…
Read the daily →Loops Is the Mailchimp Replacement I Didn't Know I Needed
I switched a SaaS client from Mailchimp to Loops for transactional and lifecycle email. The API is clean, the mental model is sane, and I haven't looked back.
Mailchimp is fine if you're sending a monthly newsletter to a list you built from a contact form. The moment you need to send a password reset, a trial-expiry warning, and an onboarding drip from the same platform — and keep your user records in sync — it becomes a pile of duct tape. Loops solves that problem, and its…
Read the daily →Vonage vs. Twilio for SMS: Where the Gaps Show Up in Production
I've run both in production at volume. The pricing sheets look closer than they are, and deliverability differences show up in places you won't find in any comparison blog post.
I've shipped SMS integrations on both Vonage and Twilio across a handful of production systems — appointment reminders for a healthcare client, order status notifications for an e-commerce shop, and alert pipelines for an industrial monitoring setup that fires messages at weird hours when equipment goes out of spec…
Read the daily →Dead-Man Monitoring for Laravel Cron Jobs Without Paying for It
Paid cron monitoring SaaS is fine until you're running 40 scheduled tasks across a dozen client apps. Here's how I do heartbeat monitoring myself.
Paid cron monitoring tools are great until you're managing scheduled tasks across a dozen client applications and the per-monitor pricing starts adding up faster than the problems it's catching. I've used Cronitor, I've used Healthchecks.io, and they're genuinely well-built products. But at some point I got tired of…
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