Lucas Fischer

We built a B2B productivity tool that helps freelancers track billable hours. Our core web app is priced at $35/month, and we have about 400 paying customers. Last year, we finally launched our iOS app to capture the "on-the-go" market.

We set the price in the App Store at $35/month to match our website. Then, we looked at the revenue reports. After Apple took their 30% cut, we were netting just $24.50 per user. We were actually losing money on every iOS user after accounting for hosting and support.

So, we made a decision: we raised the App Store price to $50/month to cover Apple's tax and maintain our margins. We thought our power users would understand; after all, we were providing immense value.

The backlash was immediate. Within two months, our iOS subscriber count dropped from 120 to 70. Our App Store rating tanked from 4.8 stars to 3.2 stars. The reviews were brutal: "Greedy developers. Why is it $15 more expensive just because it's on my phone?"

How much time do you think we have left before AGI?

OpenAI just shipped GPT-6 Astra, calling it "the most intelligent and aligned model in the world."

stripe sends webhooks at-least-once. so what's the actual risk?

one paid invoice, two deliveries, non-idempotent handler: you've just provisioned twice. you won't catch it in review because the code is correct on the first delivery. the bug only shows on the second.

so how do you even reproduce it?

I stopped reading and started running. took a real express and postgres billing app, replayed the scenario in a sandbox: same stripe webhook, delivered twice, like a real retry. no prod involved. the buggy handler provisioned seats 1, then 2, then 3. signature verification was clean throughout.