Shed Shred

It's nearly midnight in California, and in a few hours Tillkit goes live here on Product Hunt.

Picture a small shop at closing time. The register drawer slides shut, the receipts are squared away, and there's no platform bill waiting at the end of the month. That's the feeling we built Tillkit around.

Hi everyone! I run a small online shop and got tired of paying a platform every month, so I built our own store and turned the code into Tillkit: Stripe checkout, sales tax, inventory from supplier invoices and profit reports, self-hosted for about $5 a month.

I'm here to learn from other makers, especially anyone who has launched a paid developer product without an audience.

What's one thing you wish you'd done before your first launch?

Hi Product Hunt! Tillkit launches here on Friday, and before then I'd like to hear from people who run or build small online stores.

Tillkit is the source code for a store you host yourself: Stripe checkout, sales tax, inventory from supplier invoices and profit reports, for $79 once plus about $5 a month on Railway. The trade-off is that you own the hosting instead of renting a platform.

Two honest questions:

1. What would make self-hosting worth it for you?