eins1234's comments

Reasonable Free Tier, yes, but "call us" Enterprise pricing starts at a team of 11 people, a fact that is hidden deep in their pricing grid behind a tooltip, which I find distasteful.

In what world does a 11 person team qualify as an Enterprise? Though pedanticism aside, my problem is more with the opaque pricing than the naming.

This thread makes me wonder if the root of the problem is actually the lack of a local runner. I hypothesize that it's the length of the feedback loop that's the real issue.

Even if we had a local runner, if it takes a ton of time to start and complete every step, it'd be almost as painful to debug as a remote runner taking the same time. On the other hand, if the cloud runner is ridiculously fast, and completes steps on the order of single digit seconds, it would be fairly painless to debug.

Fauna has an interesting approach to null that I've grown to like:

Null is a real value that can be compared intuitively like any other value (`Equals(null, null)` returns true). [1]

However, in indexes, any term that evaluates to null is simply not stored in the index. So we can create a unique index with multiple null values because they simply won't exist in the index, so won't violate the unique constraint.

If we do care about null values in a particular index, we can handle that by mapping the null value into another value that will get stored in indexes using a "binding", and then use that index to query for or constrain uniqueness by that mapped value [2].

This is not the most convenient thing in the world, but at the end of the day, it feels like an edge case, so I'm happy with having to jump through some hoops to handle it in exchange for making the much more common cases (null comparisons and unique indexes with nullable values) more intuitive and less error prone.

[1] https://fauna.com/blog/understanding-nothing-or-null-in-faun...

[2] https://docs.fauna.com/fauna/current/learn/cookbook/fql/sear...

> I feel like it's just a pure marketing play to only support more than one external screen on the 14" pro.

I'm convinced it's exactly this. I gave them the benefit of the doubt with the M1 that it's just a first-gen quirk, something that they managed to address with the Pro and Max and would become a non-issue going forward.

But now that M2 has been introduced with the same limitation, it's become crystal clear that this is yet another classic Apple anti-consumer profit-seeking tactic.

Hoping the rest of the industry can eventually catch up to and hopefully overtake Apple silicon in performance/watt and discourage this kind of behavior, but given the sheer amount of resources they have available compared to every other player, I'm not holding my breath.

I don't know... If I had to guess, this sounds more like incompetence than malice to me.

I don't really use a CDN to manage high traffic volumes. It's more to provide a better, lower-latency experience for my users regardless of where they access my apps from.

Imagine already paying for a service and then having someone snark at you for wanting things for free.

I tried to exercise some restraint this time, but screw it. Here's another rant:

Beware of Cloudflare's tactic of luring people in to their CDN product with "free" bandwidth, and then locking useful features arbitrarily behind what I can only imagine is a thousands of dollars per month enterprise plan. Just look at their cache-purging page for a super obvious example of this (there are plenty more, way too many to list), everything other than basic purge by URL is enterprise only: https://developers.cloudflare.com/cache/how-to/purge-cache/

These days Cloudflare is literally my last choice for a CDN for my new projects. My new go-to is bunny.net, who charges a reasonable usage-based fee for bandwidth and gives you unfettered access to all the features they've built (and doesn't route your users to farther/closer nodes based on how much you pay: https://cloudflare-test.judge.sh/). Though I'd even reach for Cloudfront with their expensive bandwidth costs these days, because at least their pricing is transparent and scales smoothly with usage, and they don't arbitrarily cut you off from useful features that you might not know you need yet.

Even their bandwidth might not really be "free", since I've heard if you actually use any significant amount, the sales people will come knocking on your door to coerce you to get on the same enterprise plan or have your site taken down.

Of course it is... Typical Cloudflare.

This leads me to wonder...

Is there an easy way for regular consumers to set up recurring payments in a "push" configuration (i.e. from my bank to someone else's) rather than "pull" configuration (i.e. most subscriptions where the service charges a credit card on an interval)?

I split a T-Mobile multi-line plan with a few friends where I'm the payer, and I remember looking into this a while back to help them pay their share on time and without hassle, but coming up empty.

Feels like it would be useful for paying for something like Mullvad too, but I feel like there are benefits to that model that reaches beyond the individual use cases I mentioned.

It'd allow me to manage money going out of my account from 1 centralized location, making money flow more predictable and less chaotic than the status quo where a random amount of money is pulled out of my account from various credit cards every month, and I have to log into each account separately to figure out how much.

Yes exactly. That's exactly how lending works.

I don't disagree that they could have started with a better name, but I think that ship has sailed years ago when they covered SF with the name on billboards, including one that literally says:

> Don't charge it, Brex it.

https://twitter.com/TrungTPhan/status/1262799209654177792

If I had to guess, I'd say the biggest contributor to poor unit economics for small business vs startups is credit losses.

Startups usually have tons of cash in the bank to underwrite against, which made them actually very safe to lend to, unintuitively enough (that underwriting model was Brex's original innovation, remember?).

Whereas small businesses usually don't, but still need a reasonable credit limit to spend with, so they end up having to underwrite using traditional data sources like credit scores and whatnot, and they probably haven't been able to develop a sophisticated enough model quickly enough to curb losses, and the recession certainly isn't going to make things any easier.

So, anticipating further accelerated credit losses down the line, this is them throwing in the towel on that whole experiment.

That's a perfectly valid choice! FWIW, I actually do like Mercury's UX marginally better than Brex.

I would just prefer to have my banking and spending in 1 place, and if I did that with Mercury, I'd be sacrificing 1%+ rewards, which I would not consider a financially responsible option when Brex exists and has a good enough banking experience.

Wouldn't it be nicer for everybody if there were more options that had both a great banking experience and credit-level rewards that all competed for our business? That's all I was trying to encourage with my feedback, but the fanboyism in this thread has proved to be too strong for that message to get through.

That's totally understandable, for the small business segment.

I was just saying that for a VC-backed tech startup, the lack of rewards is a huge turn-off, compared to some of the other options for spending available to us.

Nice to see you taking feedback seriously.

I would guess they probably found that the "small business" segment of their customers ended up contributing to a disproportional percentage of fraud, support requests, etc, to the point they were net negative?

Though I still wonder if they considered just closing off to new customers instead of closing accounts of existing ones, since the fact that the latter would blow up in a nasty PR nightmare like this and do massive damage to their brand was pretty foreseeable.

While it's great to maintain good enough unit economics to not have to pull stunts like this one, it's not necessarily always a plus from a customer perspective.

Comparing Mercury and Brex/Ramp specifically, Mercury is notably missing rewards on transactions, while Ramp has unlimited 1.5% cashback, and Brex has a bunch of multipliers ranging from 7x to 1x points.

If I have access to all of the options above, it would be financially irresponsible for me to spend through Mercury.

Would like to see Mercury get more competitive here even at the cost of less cushy unit economics.

EDIT: Some of the replies here seem to think Brex is shutting down entirely? Please read the actual article and the founder response above. They're only shutting down operations for small businesses, presumably because that's the only segment that doesn't have sustainable unit economics. % rewards on spend from interchange revenue has been around for decades. The model works, given the right set of customers and credit risk profiles.

Nope, thanks for bringing it to my attention. Though not sure who to trust at this point haha...

Anyone have other recommendations for where I should keep my domains?

Wow, that's terrible. Thank you for the heads up. Just transferred my domains back to namecheap.

While we're all here venting about Cloudflare, is anyone else frustrated about how they lure you in to their CDN product with "free" bandwidth, but then lock behind so many useful features arbitrarily behind what I can only imagine is a thousands of dollars per month enterprise plan? Just look at their cache-purging page for an example of this, everything other than basic purge by URL is enterprise only: https://developers.cloudflare.com/cache/how-to/purge-cache/

These days Cloudflare is literally my last choice for a CDN for my new projects, and I try to warn against others considering using it. My new go-to is bunny.net, who charges a reasonable usage-based fee for bandwidth and gives you unfettered access to all the features they've built. Though I'd even reach for Cloudfront with their expensive bandwidth costs these days, because at least their pricing is transparent and scales smoothly with usage, and they don't arbitrarily cut you off from useful features.

Even their bandwidth might not really be "free", since I've heard if you actually use any significant amount, the sales people will come knocking on your door to coerce you to get on the same enterprise plan or have your site taken down.

Even though I would personally choose to use the hosted version, I still consider the availability of an open-source solution to be a great hedge against vendor lock-in/failure.

This is only true if I can be confident that I can replicate the hosted setup with the open-source version if I invested the necessary resources. Otherwise, the existence of an open-source option adds little value. In fact it can turn me off from a product since it'd seem like they're using open source as a marketing hook with no real intention of empowering users to be able to actually move off their hosted platforms.