1,222 karma · joined April 27, 2011
I'm on his side - I think the copy is bad - but he was pretty unhelpful in the thread and ended up getting it locked.
It wasn't quick, but it did seem to work. Here's the timeline:
- May 2018: I contact Google about being unable to export my accounting data from last month
- November 2018: after nothing but "thank you for your patience" emails, I complain to the AG
- early February 2019: I get a letter in the mail from the AG saying they'd forwarded the complaint to Google
- late February 2019: Google finally gives me my data [edit: I'd had April originally, but that was a separate request].
A related fun fact: accounting data exports for extensions have been broken for me (and I think all extension merchants?) since April 2018. I had to get the NY attorney general to write them a letter before they would actually respond to my support requests so that I could properly file my taxes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20588493. I'm sure that will be fun this year!
If you end up liking them, here's my affiliate link: https://my.frantech.ca/aff.php?aff=3397
It works well for me and one other power user, but hasn't grown beyond that. My guess is it's just a failure of marketing -- I make lots of these projects that scratch an itch and then just hope people will find them.
At least it's cheap to run ($2/month for the vps plus <$10/year for the domain).
I used to use https://medium.com/@ashan.fernando/forwarding-emails-to-your... to do this cheaply via SES, but it was a pain to set up for new domains and had some odd behavior at times.
https://improvmx.com was something else I came across, but I don't feel great trusting an unknown service with all my incoming mail.
Zoho works and is free for one user but the webapp is pretty rough to use.
https://forwardemail.net is an open source option but I wasn't sure about how reliable it would be.
I've since switched to Firefox, which is much better on Android than when I last tried it.
edit: updated; thanks for the feedback!
There's around 1k members right now. I stole the 10k catchphrase from The Listserve. Consider it aspirational!
Yes, people can be selected multiple times, but they must submit a post before they can be selected again.
No, I don't currently plan to release the posts. I might change that at some point but I'd want authors to opt in -- even though the license allows it without their consent I doubt everyone understands that.
A letter from the New York AG got them to respond, but I still need to email them every time I need my data (they get an engineer to run a db query manually, from what I can tell).
I did get an email today that they're migrating to a new system, so maybe it'll work in the future, but I wouldn't trust them based on what I've seen.
I understand the broader extension security situation is pretty atrocious, but I like to think there's some small improvement from url-limited extensions like mine (that would otherwise exist as scripts that ask for plaintext credentials).
On other hand, I think I'm much lazier when it comes to marketing them since there's no urgency to make a profit.
I generally run one instance + sqlite and accept the downtime. The next step up might be two vms across two providers + a cheap managed db.
I don't think I have any super strong recommendations. I did become a fan of BuyVM recently due to their $1/month shared sql plan. But, they're apparently they're planning to retire it, which puts them at a similar price point as something like vultr.
Some other services not mentioned there that I've used for free recently:
- humio cloud for log aggregation
- nodequery for server monitoring (though its future is unclear)
- braintree used to waive a big chunk of payment fees ($50k?) for startups, but I'm not sure the program exists anymore
Beyond things that are literally free, I'm a big fan of cheap vps providers if your uptime can take it and you can do your own ops. One of my projects makes ~$200/month and is hosted for $6/year on a 256MB vps. Lowendtalk/Lowendbox is the usual place I find these.
Since there are questions about company formation in the comments, here's my notes on US taxes/legal from when I got started: https://www.simonmweber.com/2016/07/11/launching-a-chrome-ex...
In my case it's been a better-to-ask-for-forgiveness-than-permission situation. I've had almost no official contact with Google and do my best to abide by their terms.
Feel free to reach out via email if you'd like to chat! There's a chance I'd be interested in buying it if you're planning to shut down.