Launch HN: Gold Fig (YC S19) – Version Control for Settings Pages
Gold Fig is a tool that automatically creates a shared log of configuration changes to the SaaS tools you use. Modern applications are built atop a menagerie of these tools. Services like Stripe, SendGrid, Zapier, Segment, Twilio, Sentry, Travis, GSuite, domain registrars, CDNs, or even internal dashboards can directly affect your production and corporate environments, yet their configuration is not tracked with anything near the same fidelity as source code.
Mistakes occur when people make config changes without proper context. Depending on which service was impacted this can result in outage, loss of revenue, or reputational harm. It’s usually the thing that broke in a subtle way for some extended period of time that bites the worst. Moreover, when an incident does occur, the respondent often also has limited context about changes made, leading to longer resolution times and possibly even further misconfiguration as previous configuration was lost. As an example, we've personally experienced this pain when managing the CDNs fronting core services. We had to synchronize changes across our Fastly configurations, DNS records, and origin servers, with no single source of truth to guide us. Any mistake could result in downtime.
Some teams attempt to address this lack of context by putting one person in charge of doing all of the configuration for a service provider, leading to development bottlenecks. Other teams attempt to manually track these updates in a text file, email threads, or in their team chat. With Gold Fig, we want teams to be able to confidently share the management of their SaaS tools. Team members should have access to the full context behind all of the configurations they manage, and should be able to easily keep themselves up to date as they evolve. Gold Fig lives alongside automation tools like Terraform and Cloudformation, allowing you to plug the gaps that those tools can’t cover.
Our initial product is a browser extension that automatically launches on settings pages of SaaS tools. When you make a change on these sites, the extension gives you the opportunity to also provide a commit message, similar to how you would with a code check-in. Now you have a record of some button clicks that impacted your environment. The change has a permanent URL so you can look it up later if you forgot what you did, use it to help you move settings from staging to prod, or have others review the changes that were made. Now that Gold Fig has captured what changed, when, and why, you’ll never get stuck in a situation where only one person knows exactly how something was configured. A byproduct of Gold Fig is that you now have a foothold into being able to undo these types of changes. We envision Gold Fig being part of all devops team’s way of surfacing and tracking changes. In the future we’ll be able to empower teams to do pull-request like approvals, show context before a change is about to occur, and provide more awareness to those responding production incidents.
Our extension is able to capture payloads while being generally agnostic of the site itself. We’ll capture changes even if we haven’t seen the site before or if something has changed from the previous time we encountered it. For common sites like AWS or GCP we capture additional rich context like the product being impacted, the region/zone, and project name. We also aim to work on sites we don’t have access to like internal dashboards teams have built to manage customers, environments, or settings.
We’d love to hear your experience with settings pages and SaaS configs. We’ll be here listening to your feedback, answering your questions, and happy to field any feature requests for Gold Fig you may have. You can give it a whirl here: https://app.goldfiglabs.com/ Thank you!
Greg & Vikrum - hello@goldfiglabs.com