Product
Build it or buy Retool? The admin panel question
Retool, ToolJet, Appsmith, or custom: the admin-panel decision is mostly about how much your team's time costs and how strange your data is.
Category
Product
Engineering, design, and the technical decisions that shape what you ship. Build-versus-buy, internal tools, and product tradeoffs from people doing the work.
20 articles
Articles in Product
Product
AI coding agents in production: what they break, what they fix
Coding agents are net-positive on greenfield velocity and net-negative on legacy maintainability. The scaffolding around the agent decides which one you get.
Product
The microservices retreat
Why Amazon Prime Video, Shopify, and GitHub reversed microservices decisions, and what the modular monolith actually means.
Product
Auth in 2026: Auth0 vs Clerk vs Supabase Auth vs build-your-own
Auth0's Okta-era pricing has permanently shifted the auth provider calculation. Here is how the options stack up in 2026.
Product
The hidden cost of "small" tech choices three years in
How Auth0, Algolia, and Stripe pricing changes and technical lock-in can cost startups months of engineering time and 15x price hikes.
Product
The vendor you chose in week one is the migration you will run in year three
How small vendor choices made in week one compound into expensive migrations by year three, and a pre-commitment checklist to avoid the trap.
Product
We built our own internal CRM. Six months later, here's what we wish we knew.
A practical account of building an internal CRM at a small team. What worked, what we would throw away, and the math that actually decided it.
Product
The case for building internal tools instead of buying
After two years running a small team across a stack of subscriptions, the math on building internal tools has shifted. Here is the framework we use now.