LucaSiviero

Hi! I migrated a 4 year old PrestaShop store with thousands of products, orders and customers. I built a set of idempotent migration scripts along the way and open sourced everything!

TL-DR: I built an AI website builder in Webround and never released it because it costs too much, while you can get the same result with a Claude subscription.

Hi everyone! I've seen a lot of AI website builder marketing lately and decided to build one for Webround.

At the end, I stopped the development and didn't release it despite it wasn't that bad. The reason behind the decision are in the blog post I've linked, and I would be very curious to hear from other people their take on AI website builders, if they've ever used them, the kind of impression they had, what they think about them and if you share my view on them.

Totally agree. As you said, the gap is significant and closing it requires a lot of effort and investments to cover a risk that could eventually cool down if the general situation stops being this critical.

Stripe doesn't just process payments. Are there comparable alternatives on the side of Developer Experience and the amount of services that you can build on top of Stripe? I have never found in any other product the level of care for devs and founders that Stripe has. I'm clearly not talking about "pay by card" and basic payment processor interactions.

I get your point, and even in Italy we have Banca Sella (first one that comes to mind) which is a great way to collect payments with a local processor. But it's not Stripe...

Stripe is not just an integration for Link or Card payments, and payment fees are actually not that bad. Developer experience matters most to me. Plus, I agree there are alternatives to a basic Stripe implementation, but what about Stripe Connect?

As an Italian solo-founder, I have to admit that the US vendor dependency is really strong, but when you look at what you need to build a serious product, what can you actually use from European vendors that is even close to US products?

Take Stripe as an example: is there a real alternative that covers what they do? Not to talk about Cloud and Edge Computing vendors: GCP, AWS, Cloudflare... does anyone even get close to these products / companies and what they offer? Managed environments, automatic scaling, serverless architectures that just work and cover all your needs?

I'm a big fan of Hetzner, which has great prices, a great managed environment and lot of features that give you a reliable structure to work on, but I don't actually want to manage everything by myself.

I also use Bunny.net for my products, but the services are still limited and contained to very specific stuff.

Just take a look at Neon Postgres as an example: where do you find a product like this in Europe?

I believe that the problem is mainly structural and cultural. When a new technology comes out, it's usually from US researchers and companies. So how does Europe even stand a (real) chance at giving the world (or the continent) the best packaged services?