Month 66

Plenty of people looked at strackt in July; two of them, in the same week and without knowing about each other, told me the same thing. They both thought it was a way to self-host packaged open-source software. One runs twenty-eight self-hosted apps and said per-app pricing made no sense for them; the other picked Firefly III for their first deploy and, when it didn't work, assumed they'd done something wrong. Neither had a reason to think otherwise — they were reading the product exactly as written. That's the part that stings: not that they were wrong, but that they weren't.

What Moved

The first half of the month finally did the thing I'd been promising since May. Hybrid became the default surface on the 5th, and on the 11th I decommissioned the customer-facing Filament panel outright — not flagged off, deleted. Two months of writing 'I'll start subtracting next month,' and then one commit that did it. There aren't two of everything anymore.

Then about ten days went into WordPress, and it went quite a bit deeper than I planned: an update loop that inventories a site, checks it against the Wordfence feed and applies only what's safe to apply; migration that pulls a live site in instead of asking you to push it out; archive import, a plugin, a public API surface. It's the most complete single capability strackt has, and it sits on the same side of the line as everything else — you build the site, you deploy it, you keep coding on it, and strackt keeps it up.

And then the testers arrived, and the last days of the month went to undoing an assumption underneath all of it. Not the code; the sign on the door. 'Your servers. Our problem.' turns out to be the axis I share with Coolify, so leading with it filtered nobody. It's 'your code' that filters. The homepage, the pricing FAQ, the value proposition and the scan-time detection all moved to say so. The price didn't change — the price was never the problem. The funnel was letting in the wrong reader and then asking them to judge it.

What Didn't

The fix so far is all words. One of those testers had asked me, before any of this surfaced, for the product to tell them when a deploy isn't going to work. It still doesn't. They were already inside, clicking Deploy; no amount of homepage copy reaches someone who's past the homepage. Detection can see that a repository ships its assets only in release archives and can't build. It should say so, at connect time, plainly. That's still open, and it's the one that actually mattered.

And the outreach plan I wrote in July points at r/selfhosted — the exact audience I just spent a week deciding strackt isn't for. I found that out by reading my own notes back.

Would I Pay For This Today?

Yes, and for the first time that isn't the interesting question. Last month I wrote that one user who wrote it isn't proof, it's dogfooding, and I wanted a different answer to 'has anyone else run this?' I got one. Nobody paid; one of them told me flat out that the pricing made no sense for what they'd use it for, and they were right about that, for them. What I have now isn't a yes from a stranger — it's a much sharper picture of who was never going to say yes. That's worth more than it sounds.

Next Month

Open it on the 28th. Before then: make the product refuse a repository it can't build, with a reason, at the moment you connect it — no more silent boundaries where the user concludes they're the idiot. Rewrite the outreach so it goes where the developers are. And get someone from an empty account to a running application without me in the room.

Twenty-six days, and this time I know who I'm opening it for.