Ben Foster

I’m not here to hype. I build, I scar, I share. Mostly about #AI, #billing, and the messy bits of running #startups.

Building @CredytAI and other things

[Ben Foster @benfosterdev]

Just launched @CredytAI on HN
https://t.co/0dWY8MQWTF

#BuildInPublic

[Ben Foster @benfosterdev]

@NousResearch Can I use the desktop app if my agent is hosted externally?

[Ben Foster @benfosterdev]

I think @claudeai is intentionally throttling usage now that we've had a flavour of how fast work _could_ be. Default will likely continue to get slower, premium will become what default used to be.

[Ben Foster @benfosterdev]

SHOUTING AT CLAUDE IN CAPS MAKES NO DIFFERENCE TO EXECUTION

But I do feel a bit better afterwards

[Ben Foster @benfosterdev]

I don't think this is placebo. I think there has been regression on existing models. I've been happily using Sonnet for most things for a long time and now it's just plain stupid

[@levelsio @levelsio]

I don't know if it's placebo but using Fable for those few days it felt it just never gave up on problems and kept trying crazy ways to get whatever you wanted done. Now back on Opus and it's kinda lazy, thinks things are too daunting and keeps asking if you sure

[Ben Foster @benfosterdev]

Should I just switch from Claude to Codex? Anyone made the jump and prefer it?

[Ben Foster @benfosterdev]

Ranting into the ether: The Claude experience has degraded so much in the past month. Now even medium sized tasks are painfully slow. I'd guess that it's about 25% of the speed of Claude from 3 months ago (even using Sonnet)

[HackerNoon | Learn Any Technology @hackernoon]

AI products can introduce different operational requirements than traditional subscription software.
This article by @CredytAI examines why Stripe usage-based billing is fundamentally broken for AI products:

[Ben Foster @benfosterdev]

@HsanC_ yes

[Ben Foster @benfosterdev]

Enjoying @nexudotio Open Design so far. The workflow does feel smoother in Claude Design but I'm going to keep going.

It would be much better if it handled versioning better (fixed with custom instructions) and had proper sync to GitHub.

[Ben Foster @benfosterdev]

Using claude now is like rendering a page of images on dialup in 2000

[Ben Foster @benfosterdev]

This is basically all of Reddit hacker/saas subs

[@levelsio @levelsio]

My friend went to an indie hacker meetup this week and said this:

"i went to indie hacker meetup

so what’s really interesting is that almost everyone is super focused on development.

they build these whole spaceships that generate code, review it, make all kinds of reports, analytics, and so on.

one guy built an entire factory: he has a list of ideas, and agents generate the landing page, the saas, the analytics, and pull everything into one dashboard. straight-up sci-fi.

and they focused optimize all of it like crazy.

and you can really see how comfortable that is for them.

but the most interesting part is that almost none of them have money or traffic.

and nobody knows where to get either one.

you often hear something like, yeah, i should probably do on marketing, but first i’ll finish my super system and then i’ll start.

or in best i would need to make agent that will post to instaram automatically

before, the classic programmer would spend a year writing code, tests, preparing for scale in the basement, and not show anything to anyone.

now it’s even worse: the amount of useless aislop nobody needs has grown massively."

[Ben Foster @benfosterdev]

@postmarkapp I probably would have stayed had you offered true usage based pricing rather than gating on features. I had to pay $16/month just to get custom inbound domains. I don't mind paying for things when my products actually have traction.

[Ben Foster @benfosterdev]

I just nuked my Postmark subscription and replaced it with Cloudflare Email Service. $200/yr saved in around 15 minutes of work using Claude.

It's never been easier and harder to be a SaaS company.

[Ben Foster @benfosterdev]

@postmarkapp Yes mainly the price. I was already using Cloudflare so for my particular use case and limited number of users, it wasn't worth paying for.

[Ben Foster @benfosterdev]

@rauchg Unread, built mostly with Claude Sonnet 4.6

https://t.co/0VjGLbYvzu

[Ben Foster @benfosterdev]

@danyay @levelsio @TermiusHQ I have a CLAUDE.md template I use on most projects. When I bring Claude into a new one I ask it to use the template, analyze the current project and update the file but keep all the generic best practices, write tests yada yada

[Ben Foster @benfosterdev]

Yup. There are better uses of my time.

[@levelsio @levelsio]

I don't write code anymore

I haven't written code in I think 6 months?

I think everyone is like this no?

[Ben Foster @benfosterdev]

Things breaking is part of the development process. The fact that they get to prod is something else. I rarely have such issues and still use Sonnet for most things. A good test rig goes a long way.

[gabriel @g_br_l]

@levelsio *how*, though? I'm building a new project that's not even too complex and when doing incremental improvements (not even saying new full fledged features), almost every time something breaks. using mostly 5.5 recently because opus seems to be worse in that regard.

[Ben Foster @benfosterdev]

I wrote about GitHub's recent "attempt" at usage-based billing https://t.co/1pDhLXzwQP

[Ben Foster @benfosterdev]

Eagerly watching so I can do the same thing with Quickbooks!

[@levelsio @levelsio]

By far THE most annoying part of running a business for me is collecting receipts for my accountant

Every month my accountants hounds me for invoices and receipts of every single expense I did, doesn't matter how tiny like $0.50, sometimes also for income (I don't know why)

Most companies charge monthly so that means collecting 12 invoices per year at least

One reason I am canceling so many SaaS is not even the cost, it's just that I hate bookkeeping so much so I think if I don't spend the money, I don't need to collect invoices and receipts for every single payment every month (also I like extremely high profit margins like 99.99%)

I'm down to just about 10 companies I pay now, like Cloudflare, Hetzner, Backblaze etc. so that means only ~120 invoices to collect per year cause most are paid monthly

Yes I have an automatic email filter that forwards invoices to my accountant but many companies do NOT send you an automatic invoice by email

So you're talking about logging in to 10 websites, them sending you a 2FA code by email, opening your email, entering the code, trying to find wherever the Billing page is hidden, going to Invoices, opening the invoice, clicking Download to DPF (if it even exists)

This week I tried to improve this, my accountant uses Xero, so I made a Xero API key, gave it to Claude Code, and asked it to login and figure stuff out, then it just asks me which expenses still need a receipt and a note, I find it and drag the PDF or screenshot into Claude Code and it resolves it

Next step is letting it login to all my vendors and also download the invoice by itself which seems very very possible

Much easier!

[Ben Foster @benfosterdev]

@fwdemail @CloudflareDev It probably isn't.

[Ben Foster @benfosterdev]

Did exactly this today. Just wish @CloudflareDev had better support for subdomains

[@levelsio @levelsio]

✉️ Trying @Cloudflare's new Email Sending feature today

If you send 1,000,000 emails per month:
- Postmark: $1,206/mo
- Resend: $650/mo
- SendGrid: $600/mo
- Cloudflare: $354/mo
- Amazon SES: $100/mo

So Postmark is now by far the most expensive email provider

And SES and Cloudflare are now the cheapest email providers

I know my friend @marckohlbrugge is trying out SES now so I'll try Cloudflare and see how it is, SES is cheaper but Marc said it takes a bit more managing, and since I already use so much Cloudflare stuff it's nice to use them for email too

With AI especially all of these are just as easy to use and setup in your app/site so economically it makes sense to go for the cheapest, because email is just email, it's all the same and deliverability is good with all of these I think

TL;DR email sending has become a commodity!