I feel it's way too hand wavy on consistency and correctness. My opinion as someone who've implemented marketing workflows that breaks all the time (and tons of painful lessons).
Strong correctness guarantee is something that should not be undermine. Even more important than availability.
The examples on the website is simple but heavily undermines the importance of correctness. Anyone who implement similar pseudo-code directly will eventually suffer from data correctness issue in crashes.
Hahaha totally relatable. Love Zendesk but they kept charging and adding more features I don't need.
I built https://pointanswer.com/ for myself to host 3 of my own SaaS instead of paying more than $100/mo for simple helpcenter. I'm the only one using it with no customers but it's still way better than paying for Zendesk.
But did spent too much time on it as I built in pre-Claude era.
My personal experience:
For many years I used Zendesk to manage support and host my documentation. It's a powerful platform with help center structure that I liked liked the most. I was paying about US$30/mo for OnVoard.
When I use Zendesk for my second SaaS business, RenderKu, it costs me $70/mo. This amount is more than 3 Hetzner servers I'm paying to host the whole infrastructure. And I'm only choosing Zendesk mainly for hosting documentation.
At this point, when I was planning to start my 3rd app business, the thought of forking another $70/mo for hosting documentation made me rethink my options. I've eventually come to the conclusion it would be better for me to start PointAnswer and use it as helpcenter for myself since I only needed simple and affordable helpcenter.
Being an advocate for GCP all these years, I can only say the earlier you get out of it, the safer it is for your business. All it takes is for their automated system to go haywire, and you can say bye bye to all your goodwill and customers. Go look at twitter how many customers are blaming railway. Founder had history getting screwed by GCP, yet still choose to depend on them.
You can't rely your business on GCP. Honestly, this is the most silly way to kill your own business.
For context, copied from my post 3 years ago.
March 10, 2023 | hide | past | favorite
As a 4 years customer, our production severs have been suspended by Google Cloud because we didn't fill up some information on-time. Contacted support but they expect us to wait for 24-48 hours to get it resolved while all our servers are down.
Anyone linked with someone powerful in google cloud can help?
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- Running production on google cloud for 4 yrs with my startup. 100% legit SaaS business.
- Always pay bills on-time no issue. Good customer never open tickets, ask for help or what just quietly pay my bills each month.
- Our servers was abruptly suspended yesterday midnight and my whole business is now down for > 10hrs.
- We run a SaaS business that other ecommerce stores rely on and have hundreds of paying merchants.
- My customers have been grilling me and I don't feel gcloud's trust and safety team understand/care how urgent the issue is.
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Why were our servers suspended? Because we didn't fill up information in time?
- Apparently they dropped us an email 10 days back that I missed out
- Titled "Important Information Regarding Your Google Account" with no indication of suspension or what in title.
- Given the number of subprocessor "Important" emails they send it's too easy to miss out the email.
- 10 days gone by and our servers were abruptly shutdown with zero suspension notification or what.
- We've been paying $400-$700/mo for the past 4 yrs consistently and they shut us down because we didn't fill up some information?
When I tried to ask them to at least temporarily get our servers back while the verification is ongoing, I didn't get any answers.
Google Cloud have zero empathy for customers.
It's not like my account got suspended for fradulent issue or what. It's suspended because I didn't fill up some information on-time and they don't even allow me to temporarily reactivate my services or what. Especially when I had to wait for hours to get their team to verify my details before I can get my servers back.
You can't trust them with your business. Don't run any production stuffs with Google Cloud, ever.
Facebook doing that is actually good, to protect consumers from data abuse after incidents like cambridge analytica. They are holding businesses who touches your personal data responsible.
Because business owners don't have the time and resources to keep changing vendors to save 10% costs. Time is money.
Switching cost is more than you think. For example, I don't like Zendesk it's expensive and over-engineered. But I stick to it because I know how hard it is to port my docs over and re-setup the live chat. It's half a day work. To save $50/mo, it's not worth my time. My focus is growing my company, not to save $50/mo.
The key to long term success in Shopify ecosystem is to focus on a niche market. For example, a scheduling tool for merchants. If you build something that almost every merchant will use, it will be eventually added to Shopify's core offerings.
the password reset link if you replace "console/console" with "console" it should work.
I will push a fix shortly.