... difficult balance. No card might feel good because you see people signing up and it feels like you're making progress. However, you might just be picking up people who have no intention of becoming customers and it might rack up bills (particularly early on when you might be tight on cash). However as a user, I 100% want to be able to check something out before I pay. So understandably I think its just one of those things ... ... situation. Note that nearly all the hyper-scalers (outside of dev tools/infra) have an always free plan but for "normal" start-ups it's a lower %, i.e. great if you can make it work, but harder to execute. CC vs

... because static guardrails and prompts failed. I want to hear your engineering war stories: What broke when you gave your AI agent too much autonomy? Did it try to drop a database, hallucinate a critical tool call, or rack up a massive API bill? How did you catch it and fix the vulnerability? Let s share the chaos and talk about real production bottlenecks ...

... problem: AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode) have no built-in brakes. They retry indefinitely, rack up cost, and give you nothing auditable at the end. I had a run estimated at $2.40 hit $65 before I caught it. MartinLoop wraps any agent with: Hard budget caps (USD, tokens, or iterations) Verifier gates npm test must pass before a run counts Full audit trail every attempt, cost, and outcome in JSONL Run receipts one command shows exactly what happened ...

... thoughts ). I notice this especially with solo founders. So I was wondering if you, as founders , are also building your brand. If so: Which platform is key for you? How much time do you actually spend on social media vs. creating a product? What are your proven hacks for building a personal brand? As for me, it helps a lot to reply often, but then I spend less time creating something. And on socials, I am around 3 hours ... ... post when I have a real observation from building. Generic "building in public" content burns time fast. The posts that have actually felt worth writing came from specific pain: - building TokenBar after realizing how easy it is to rack

... coming soon , before it goes live, consider creating a simple landing page or mailing list for interested users to subscribe to ahead of time so they can be the first to be notified when it goes live and rack up the first subscribers ...