the code you don't want to write is usually the code that ends up taking the most time.
So I started paying more attention to the services that handle this stuff for you.
Actual infrastructure that can save you from spending a weekend building something nobody will ever pay you for.
If you're building B2B SaaS, integrations are going to find you whether you like it or not.
And suddenly you're maintaining a collection of OAuth flows that you never wanted to maintain.
It gives you a way to connect your application to third-party APIs without having to build every integration yourself.
They currently support hundreds of integrations, including a lot of the APIs you'd expect a B2B product to eventually need.
A tool for sales teams that connects to their existing stack and pulls everything into one place.
The interesting product is what you do with the information after you've connected them.
I've written enough scraping code to know that scraping is one of those things that looks incredibly easy until you actually have to maintain it.
Firecrawl is basically infrastructure for getting useful information from websites without having to build the whole scraping stack yourself.
You can crawl and scrape websites and get the result in formats that are actually useful for applications.
You eventually need subscriptions, customer management, invoices, webhooks, refunds, taxes, usage and a bunch of other things you didn't think about when you started.
Polar is interesting because it's built specifically around monetizing software.
And one thing I like about the direction they're taking is that they're thinking beyond checkout.
Because $10k MRR sounds great until you discover you're spending $8k serving those customers. Trigger.dev
This is one of those services you don't really appreciate until you build something that needs it.
Your application now needs to: fetch data from several APIs process it generate a PDF upload the PDF send an email