I was just the other day looking for a tool to easily move a non-sensitive file from my macbook, to my network-locked production machine. Rather than doing many hops through SSH tunnels, the easiest thing to do would be to host the file online, and wget it down to my linux machine.
The options out there were lacking. I used https://bashupload.com/ for a bit, but the problem is that after you download the file once, it gets deleted. Sometimes I want to share the file to multiple machines.
It wasn't a usecase I thought of, so it's not really accommodated for it, but I like it! I'll try make a nice little "for devs" page with simple endpoints :)
Hey everyone, I and the team have been hard at work improving ImprovMX since the acquisition at the start of this year. It was slow going at first, with lots of tech debt getting in the way of safely making changes. But after an initial slog, feature velocity got significantly faster, so it was quite worth it.
We've simultaneously launched a bunch of new features that you can checkout in our blog post:
- email logs search by keyword/date
- access logs to audit who did what when with your account
- longer email log retention
- rules routing for custom routing logic
- AI support chat bot
Really curious to hear any feedback, or what we should be building next!
I did a cross-country account migration for ImprovMX in January 2025.
It was a total nightmare, and definitely the vast majority of the acquisition migration work.
We ended up with a scheme where each customer was migrated over, as a "trial" account until it converted over to a regular paid subscription on the next subscription renewal time.
I wonder how you guys handle that.
We did see some similar services out there, but we didn't deem them high quality and trustworthy. It's kind of hard to build a reputation around a service you only use once. If our acquisition broker had said "use stripemove.com, we've done it many times, they're great", we probably would have forked over the cash immediately.
Consider reaching out to saas acquisition brokers!
Thanks for the advice. Yes, building a reputation is the hardest challenge when you have a once-off kind of product. Hopefully the low price can attract leads and we can start from there, although I understand that it can also backfire and make it look low quality and untrustworthy but we need to start somewhere.
Our tool tries to explain each step in detail and also links to the specific Stripe documentation to help the user understand the process to build trust.
The subscription transfer is done as a trial, following Stripe's recommendation.
Honestly, a low price for a product like this makes no sense, and might give the opposite signal. Real, trustworthy businesses know what they're worth and charge accordingly. Businesses know that if this process screws up they could lose or over-charge customers and have to make refunds.
What's the alternative? Pay someone to manually move records over one-by-one. I'd estimate that costs a few dollars per customer. If you can be slightly cheaper than that, they'd be silly not to pay.
I'm new to entrepreneurship and just signed my first few corporate legal agreements. I was also deeply aware that anything agreed to was basically a gentleman's agreement--it wouldn't be worth either party going to litigation over, and even less so if the other party was internationally based.
So I've been following the "no-assholes" policy as well.
I did actually find nslookup.io while researching whether I should build this or not, and based some of my user interface choices off what I saw there.
I ultimately decided to make inspector.improvmx.com because I wanted something simpler.
A lot of our customers at improvmx are non-technical (yet still want to figure out how to setup their DNS entries themselves or with our help, and hopefully never touch it again). I think nslookup.io is more powerful and gives more information, but a lot of our customers would take one look at the site and immediately their eyes would glaze over from the technical overload.
So it's ultimately less about things you could add, but rather the simple lack of features is something I'm looking for, which is targeting a different use case.
Anyway, please let me know if you have any thoughts/suggestions for inspector.improvmx.com!
Yeah, your tool is a lot simpler and can be less overwhelming for people who are not familiar with DNS. Don't think I'll remove any features from Nslookup. Good to have multiple DNS checkers for people to choose from :)
I recently acquired a SaaS that does business with people in the EU (we bill with stripe), so I decided to continue paying VAT. I do it all by a combination of code, scripts, and by-hand.
We have custom code that determines the VAT rate to charge, and also looks up a customer's VAT number to see if they qualify for VAT exclusion. At the end of each quarter I have a script that calculates the amount of VAT to be paid to each country in the EU, then visit the Ireland VAT OSS site, input the values for each country manually (they don't allow CSV!!!!), then send them a wire using wise.com.
The current scheme is an evolution of what the former founders did. It was a nightmare to get things onto good footing after the acquisition. But once I did it for the first time, the subsequent times are pretty straightforward, and I probably won't touch it again for a long while.
I could probably move towards stripe tax, or paddle/lemonsqueezy, but the migration would be a nightmare. And it's not a good business decision to do a lot of work including risky migrations to move onto a new provider that will charge a larger percentage as a service fee, just to better handle taxes, which I've now largely figured out.
The one advantage to doing all this, is that I actually understand this stuff pretty well now, rather than it being a black box where I just pay a company a lot of money so I don't have to think about it. Open question on if that's actually worth my time. It seems like it is for now.
One opinion I'll offer, is that all these foreign tax agencies are far less organized than you might think. You could probably get away by not paying VAT, for far longer/more revenue than you'd think, and if you do want to be a proper foreign business and pay, there's basically zero verification on if you're paying the right amount, so just try your best??
Feel free to ask me for any advice around VAT/etc. matthew@improvmx.com
Most countries in the EU have a VATOSS/VATMOSS filing system. They're all relatively straightforward, but Ireleand's system is generally the easiest to use...and also the only one in English. (This matters because it means that they'll correspond with you in English, and any tax authorities in other EU countries are on notice to correspond with the taxpayer in English.)
A few blogs mentioned that as an external US entity, you probably want to do VAT with Ireland (basically you deal only with Ireland for paying VAT, and what you pay gets forwarded through the system to all the other EU countries).
The reasons they cited were that it's in English, they have among the shortest initial application times (a few weeks vs. a few months for others), and that they're generally the most business friendly (which you can guess given how they attracted all the US tech companies as as tax haven).
In practice I've found this to be the case. I've had a few email chains with the Ireland tax authority, and they were responsive within a few days. And I got things done. Though I was surprised to find that the "best" EU tax authority was still worse than the IRS.
Things I was surprised by:
1) It takes an extremely long and complicated application form (and several weeks) to get an EU VAT number to pay VAT taxes. By comparison the IRS lets you get an EIN instantly, and you only need to fill out a few fields
2) Setting up a login to the Ireland Tax system is the worst thing in the world. I expected a simple username/password type system. Instead: you apply, then you have to remember a code, they don't give you any confirmation email, then 3 weeks later they send you an email giving you another code, and you have to hold onto that code, because you need to wait 72 hours for the database to update, before you can enter that code to create a certificate (but you don't know to use the first code or the second code), and you then need to save that certificate to your local machine, and re-upload it whenever you want to login. It's actually even worse than I describe, but I honestly cannot even remember all the steps
3) When filling in how much VAT you owe each country, you need to fill out every country and every amount manually, no way to upload a CSV or anything
If this is how bad Ireland is, I imagine other EU countries are even worse.
In the dock you can right click an app, and Options, Assign to Desktop N.
Luckily, when I plug my macbook into the dock with monitor, I actually want it to be a static desktop, showing just the website I'm working on. And I want the monitor to switch through desktops that have my applications.
This basically just works with one caveat. When switching from plugged in to unplugged, the macbook screen becomes desktop 1, and all the desktops shift over by one. So I just rearranged everything to be +1 (i.e. gmail/calendar are actually always desktop 2), and everything works seamlessly.
It's really sad to me that Hashicorp never found a monetization model that worked.
100% of the companies I worked for over the last 6 years all used Terraform, there really wasn't anything else out there, and though there were complaints, it generally worked.
It really provided a lot of value to us, and we definitely would have been willing to pay.
Though every time we asked, we wanted commitment to update the AWS/GCP providers in a timely fashion for new features, and they would never commit and tried to shove some hosted terraform service down our throats, which we would never agree to anyway due to IP/security concerns.
Perhaps an open source fork of Terraform, where the cloud providers themselves maintain the provider repos, is the correct end-state. AWS started doing that in the last few years, assigning engineering resources to the open source TF provider repos.
That way, the profit beneficiaries bear the brunt of the development/maintenance costs.
I was just the other day looking for a tool to easily move a non-sensitive file from my macbook, to my network-locked production machine. Rather than doing many hops through SSH tunnels, the easiest thing to do would be to host the file online, and wget it down to my linux machine.
The options out there were lacking. I used https://bashupload.com/ for a bit, but the problem is that after you download the file once, it gets deleted. Sometimes I want to share the file to multiple machines.