What s the most ridiculous thing you ve blown startup money on?

Everyone has that regret: fancy office chair, logo redesign, too many SaaS subscriptions. What was yours?

Hi everyone! I'm Travis, I've been a software developer since 2006 and I've worked on a good number of open source projects and side projects. Recently I integrated Stripe for the first time in one of my projects, in order to....*gasp*....charge users and accept payments. The integration was easier than expected, but it still feels kind of slimy to be asking for money for something that was a side project and I just built for fun. On the other hand, I'm using OpenAI credits, so if I actually gave it away totally for free, it would simply cost me more and more money as time went on, especially if it went viral (the dream). So I justify the payments as a scaling/sustainability measure.

Interested to hear others' perspective on this one. Is accepting payments completely shameless? Does it sully the reputation of your project? Necessary evil?

Claude Code and Codex has been speeding up dev at Layercode, but also led us down time wasting rabbit holes.

Here s what we ve learned so far:

1. As of GPT5, Codex is succeeding in tasks more often than Claude.