I don't disagree that they could have started with a better name, but I think that ship has sailed years ago when they covered SF with the name on billboards, including one that literally says:
> Don't charge it, Brex it.
469 karma · joined November 9, 2020
> Don't charge it, Brex it.
Startups usually have tons of cash in the bank to underwrite against, which made them actually very safe to lend to, unintuitively enough (that underwriting model was Brex's original innovation, remember?).
Whereas small businesses usually don't, but still need a reasonable credit limit to spend with, so they end up having to underwrite using traditional data sources like credit scores and whatnot, and they probably haven't been able to develop a sophisticated enough model quickly enough to curb losses, and the recession certainly isn't going to make things any easier.
So, anticipating further accelerated credit losses down the line, this is them throwing in the towel on that whole experiment.
I would just prefer to have my banking and spending in 1 place, and if I did that with Mercury, I'd be sacrificing 1%+ rewards, which I would not consider a financially responsible option when Brex exists and has a good enough banking experience.
Wouldn't it be nicer for everybody if there were more options that had both a great banking experience and credit-level rewards that all competed for our business? That's all I was trying to encourage with my feedback, but the fanboyism in this thread has proved to be too strong for that message to get through.
I was just saying that for a VC-backed tech startup, the lack of rewards is a huge turn-off, compared to some of the other options for spending available to us.
Though I still wonder if they considered just closing off to new customers instead of closing accounts of existing ones, since the fact that the latter would blow up in a nasty PR nightmare like this and do massive damage to their brand was pretty foreseeable.
Comparing Mercury and Brex/Ramp specifically, Mercury is notably missing rewards on transactions, while Ramp has unlimited 1.5% cashback, and Brex has a bunch of multipliers ranging from 7x to 1x points.
If I have access to all of the options above, it would be financially irresponsible for me to spend through Mercury.
Would like to see Mercury get more competitive here even at the cost of less cushy unit economics.
EDIT: Some of the replies here seem to think Brex is shutting down entirely? Please read the actual article and the founder response above. They're only shutting down operations for small businesses, presumably because that's the only segment that doesn't have sustainable unit economics. % rewards on spend from interchange revenue has been around for decades. The model works, given the right set of customers and credit risk profiles.
Anyone have other recommendations for where I should keep my domains?
While we're all here venting about Cloudflare, is anyone else frustrated about how they lure you in to their CDN product with "free" bandwidth, but then lock behind so many useful features arbitrarily behind what I can only imagine is a thousands of dollars per month enterprise plan? Just look at their cache-purging page for an example of this, everything other than basic purge by URL is enterprise only: https://developers.cloudflare.com/cache/how-to/purge-cache/
These days Cloudflare is literally my last choice for a CDN for my new projects, and I try to warn against others considering using it. My new go-to is bunny.net, who charges a reasonable usage-based fee for bandwidth and gives you unfettered access to all the features they've built. Though I'd even reach for Cloudfront with their expensive bandwidth costs these days, because at least their pricing is transparent and scales smoothly with usage, and they don't arbitrarily cut you off from useful features.
Even their bandwidth might not really be "free", since I've heard if you actually use any significant amount, the sales people will come knocking on your door to coerce you to get on the same enterprise plan or have your site taken down.
This is only true if I can be confident that I can replicate the hosted setup with the open-source version if I invested the necessary resources. Otherwise, the existence of an open-source option adds little value. In fact it can turn me off from a product since it'd seem like they're using open source as a marketing hook with no real intention of empowering users to be able to actually move off their hosted platforms.
As far as I can see, this is fully available in the open-source version of Vault: https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/vault/ha-with-consul
But I just checked my apartment's website and it seems like if anything the rents have slightly increased compared to the price I renewed at last year!? Obviously this is a sample size of 1 and doesn't reflect the overall market.
Curious if anyone else has real data on rent price trends. Is it just my apartment or is this a case of the market staying irrational for longer than I'd have hoped?
EDIT: data was provided in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31533492
Very clearly cut down to the point where it's not feasible for anything outside of toy projects.
I know there's a free "community" hosted version, but I'm not sure what the differences is outside of the limits and support, and I'd prefer to see the pricing scale up a bit more gently than 0 -> $150 as soon as I reach the limits of the free offering.
One of the under-appreciated superpowers of gradually typed systems like TypeScript is the ability to ignore errors in parts of the codebase I don't care about right now, and focus on exercising the runtime behavior of the code paths I'm currently working on, because I can always have a working program that can be executed (and possibly crash at runtime) regardless of what the static analysis tells me is wrong with it.
Without this, large scale changes tend to become extremely painful all-or-nothing affairs that have to be applied codebase wide at every iteration, and I only find out the change doesn't work the way I expected at runtime after I've already done all the work applying it to everything across the board, and have to repeat the whole process over and over again.
I'm a bit apprehensive because most of the advice I've heard from YC and elsewhere about finding a co-founder involves looking for someone you have a long history with, and that's by definition not something a co-founder matching program can offer.
Wondering how the outcomes here compare with just going at it solo. I understand having a co-founder de-risks the business and increases the chance of success in a bunch of ways, but it also introduces a bunch of new risks that can turn out to be pretty catastrophic.
It's still very hard for me to design a _good_ looking website from scratch as that takes actual creativity and imagination, but after reading Refactoring UI I at least have a bunch of tactics to stop myself from designing _bad_ looking websites, because I now know exactly _what_ makes them look bad.
Every option for purging other than purging by URL (which is practically useless if you need to purge html AFAIK, which maps to basically every extensionless URL) is locked behind an Enterprise plan. Not even the $200 business plan has access to anything more than that.
This has been the story of my life on Cloudflare. They lure you in with the promise of free bandwidth, and then lock out anything remotely interesting or useful behind what I can only imagine is a thousands of dollars per month Enterprise contract.
I've since moved on to BunnyCDN, which has a flat, reasonable bandwidth-based pricing and no feature locks, and have been much happier. Only complaint so far is their SSL certs support, which doesn't do wildcard certs, so I had to upload my own, which was a bit annoying, but manageable.
For SDK v3, I just needed to add the forcePathStyle flag.
For aws4fetch (note that this isn't a presigned request, it's just signing the request for Sig V4 like the official SDK would), I needed to change the fetch url to https://my-account-id.r2.cloudflarestorage.com/my-bucket/key.
For a second, I thought you were the pilot from the article that was incapacitated haha...
I haven't been able to get either working:
const s3Client = new S3Client({
endpoint: 'https://my-account-id.r2.cloudflarestorage.com',
credentials: secrets.r2Credentials,
})
await s3Client.send(
new PutObjectCommand({
Bucket: 'my-bucket,
Key: 'test',
Body: JSON.stringify({hello: 'world'}),
}),
)
const r2Client = new AwsClient({
...secrets.r2Credentials,
})
fetch(
await r2Client.sign(
'https://my-account-id.r2.cloudflarestorage.com/' +
'?Key=test&Bucket=my-bucket',
{
method: 'put',
body: JSON.stringify({ hello: 'world' }),
},
),
).then((response) => console.log(response.status))
I've verified that the key has full access and even rerolled it to make sure I didn't mess up the copy paste, but still no luck.
Any ideas where I could be going wrong?
I value privacy & security personally, and want Signal to succeed, but any compromise to UX in the name of privacy & security is going to make it impossible for Signal to compete as a mainstream messaging platform where network effects are paramount.
In the mean time, I'm using the system font stack popularized by Bootstrap's reboot.css reset. It works great for eliminating font loading latency and layout shift, but AFAIK none of the fonts in there are variable, and they all render slightly differently in terms of font weight specified vs actual visual weight, which has been making life difficult.
This is a step in the right direction though, at least soon we'll have a variable font for one mobile platform in the system font stack, though I'm unsure yet how to take advantage of this since I'm not sure if there's a way to determine if the font we end up loading in the stack is actually variable.
IME, Plaid is lightyears ahead in terms of reliability and overall developer and end-user experience.
Example: Remember the Stripe Corporate Card? It was "launched" as invite-only 3 years ago and is still invite only today, with little signs of traction. Meanwhile both Brex and Ramp have become decacorns through crazy revenue growth.
It's not really just a Stripe thing either. I think people are way under-estimating how hard it is for a large company to launch and succeed with a product outside of their core offering, especially when the competition is a small nimble startup with a singlular focus on that one product.
Startups die all the time, for all sorts of reasons, but "large company started competing with it" is a rather rare one.