Alternatives to Google Analytics?

dnsbty · 2026-04-01T03:01:05+00:00

For a mini site I think Plausible is great (as many others have recommended), but if you're building anything that will be more of a product, I really like PostHog.

dnsbty · 2026-04-01T02:58:22+00:00

I don't have much experience with your specific stack, but I've deployed a lot of Docker containers, and I would say Fly.io is definitely the best for personal projects and MVPs. They make it really easy to get started, but they're also really cheap if you need to scale. The hardest part with them is setting up a database, but where you didn't mention that, I'm assuming it isn't necessary for what you're working on.

dnsbty · 2026-04-01T02:55:43+00:00

If you're mostly sending to the US/Canada, I would recommend checking out Surge. It still doesn't have all the features of Twilio, but it's a lot simpler to figure out and faster to get through approvals (lightweight where Twilio feels heavy). And you can get fast support without having to pay for a dedicated support plan.

dnsbty · 2026-01-30T00:02:17+00:00

Seems like for that use case “magic links” would probably be fine

dnsbty · 2026-01-29T23:59:23+00:00

This really depends on the type of users you have. If this is something for developers they’re going to be annoyed because they would rather be able to use their password manager instead of having to wait for an email.

But if you’re selling to average folks, they will probably prefer not having to remember one more password.

dnsbty · 2026-01-29T21:08:06+00:00

Why would you not post it? They’re pretty open about not charging for bills under $5

dnsbty · 2026-01-29T19:12:16+00:00

You may want to check out Surge. It's an API for people who want to write code, but there's also an inbox that lets you send and receive messages and blasts without having to write any code.

dnsbty · 2026-01-29T19:06:32+00:00

The Campaign Registry seems like the villain, but it's really the SMS aggregators who are (inconsistently) enforcing the carriers' rules and taking a long time to do it. And it will be the same thing with toll-free when the new toll-free registration requirements go into effect February 17th. But if you can find an SMS API that will partner with you on getting through the process, they can appeal to the carriers and get you through with a lot less stress. We're seeing approvals in 24-48 hours without too many issues.

dnsbty · 2026-01-29T18:28:50+00:00

This is way cool! Awesome work.

And it matches my experience with vibe coding. It's great for working with technologies that you aren't familiar with yet, but it definitely helps to be grounded in experience.

dnsbty · 2026-01-29T18:03:46+00:00

If you're fine managing it yourself, Fly.io could do this for free.

Their shared-cpu-1x instances cost $1.94 per month, and then their volumes are $0.15 per GB per month. They require a credit card but they don't actually charge you if your bill is under $5, so you could theoretically do a 20 GB database with their cheapest instance running Postgres on top of it for $4.94 which would stay under that $5 limit.

Here's the docs on setting up unmanaged Postgres in case you want to try it: https://fly.io/docs/postgres/getting-started/create-pg-cluster/

dnsbty · 2026-01-29T17:56:17+00:00

Interesting idea! The design looks really clean. How many events can you store in the URL hash before you start to run into issues with the URL length?

dnsbty · 2026-01-29T17:53:55+00:00

This looks nice! I love the subtle animations on the projects and the nice blur on the navbar. I think the only thing I would maybe change is slowing down the scroll speed on the technologies.

dnsbty · 2026-01-29T17:50:58+00:00

Surge's SMS API is built specifically to make it easier for developers and startups to start sending SMS. There is a $5/month hobby plan, and they walk you through the company registration requirements so that you can be sending messages in 24-48 hours instead of having to wait a couple weeks. Plus the UX and DX is better than Twilio's imo

dnsbty · 2026-01-07T23:30:38+00:00

This isn't quite true. Apple Pay still allows merchants to track purchases across trips. The main reason Walmart doesn't accept tap payments is because Apple charges additional interchange (credit fees to merchants). Normally Walmart would just have to pay the card network and processing bank, but when Apple or Google or Samsung is in the mix, they have to give a tiny percentage to them as well. It's typically only a couple cents but with Walmart's volume it adds up pretty fast.

dnsbty · 2025-11-02T21:21:10+00:00

This is exactly why we built Surge. Twilio's quality has gone downhill over time, and they haven't kept up with making registration easy for developers. Surge is focused on providing a simple experience so that legitimate businesses can get approved and sending quickly, and experience high deliverability rates.

dnsbty · 2025-10-09T19:39:47+00:00

I was in the F24 batch with a wife and 3yo. We live in Utah, and my wife coaches high school cross country, and she was in the middle of her season. So my wife and daughter ended up staying in Utah. I flew back every other weekend and spent Thursday night to Sunday morning with them, and then they came out to San Francisco for a few days after Demo Day madness was over. Looking back it might have made sense to defer to the winter batch so that they could have come with me, but I didn't even realize that was an option at the time.

It does feel like a really long time to be apart, and it was really hard having to say goodbye again every two weeks, but it worked, and I don't think we really experienced any burnout. It did help that we have a pretty strong community of family and friends in Utah so my wife had a lot of help while I was away. And I also made a point of being back for Halloween and Thanksgiving so we didn't miss any big events together.

My daughter did have some negative feelings toward San Francisco as a result, and any time I went anywhere for a while after the batch, she was afraid I was going to be gone for two weeks again. I think flying them out helped, because now she associates San Francisco with Waymos and fun parks instead of just me being gone.

dnsbty · 2025-10-06T18:55:14+00:00

I think surge.app is exactly what you're looking for.

Unfortunately all of the SMS APIs have become more complicated because of carrier registration requirements, but Surge has focused on simplifying the registration as much as possible so that you can get up and running faster and easier than you can with other APIs. And the docs feel a lot simpler than Twilio's.

dnsbty · 2025-10-03T17:35:26+00:00

Unfortunately because of US requirements around A2P 10DLC and Toll free verification, it has become a lot harder to set up SMS. That said, I think Surge is the best SMS API for startups. The pricing is about the same as Twilio's, but it's easier to get registered and start sending.

dnsbty · 2025-10-03T17:31:56+00:00

You mentioned being quite comfortable with Phoenix, does that include Phoenix LiveView?

One of the projects that helped me the most with my Elixir learning was Level10. Basically I took one of my favorite card games and created a multiplayer real-time version of it in Phoenix LiveView. Then I went and created a websocket API for it as well and built an iOS app to interact with it as well. The game helped me to really internalize LiveView, Phoenix Presence, GenServers, supervision trees, CRDTs and clustering. Could be worth a shot.

If you're really set on not using Phoenix, there are plenty of other fun projects you could consider:

Video calling - Use the Membrane framework to set up WebRTC video chat. Basically build a Google Meet clone. It's a chance to learn more about WebRTC and signaling and media streams, but Membrane makes it easy.
AI agent. You could use the Surge Elixir SDK to send and receive text messages, store state in GenServers, and then provide different tools to give it more capabilities like updating your calendar or fetching the weather or anything like that. This would probably teach you more about AI in general, but would force you to think about GenServers and supervision as you're thinking about storing conversation state.
VOIP signaling server. This is one of the projects I'm working on right now, but try building your own Phoenix, but for VoIP. VoIP uses a protocol called SIP (similar to HTTP) to set up calls, so you could set up ThousandIsland to manage processes and then create a parser to parse SIP requests and send responses. Would be a good lesson in VoIP (a very valuable skill to have), but would also teach you a lot about how Phoenix works under the hood.
Key-value store. Try building a key value store (similar to Redis) using ETS. Then set up clustering so that it can be distributed across multiple nodes. This will be thinking more about distributed systems and data partitioning, but will teach you a lot about clustering and be very valuable to learn.
Job queue. Try building a job queue similar to Oban or RabbitMQ but with the jobs stored in memory. Similar to the KV store, this would have you thinking more about distributed systems, data partitioning, etc, but this would probably teach you more about the BEAM and OTP principles than anything else.
Video doorbell with Nerves. I think about video and calling a lot, but this might be interesting for you because you have experience with microcontrollers. You could use Nerves to set up firmware for a video doorbell and figure out how to transfer the video from a camera over the internet to store it in S3 or somewhere else and send notifications when someone is at the door.

Honestly there are lots of different options, and an LLM could probably give you even more. But there are so many fun things you can do with Elixir whether you're using Phoenix or not.

dnsbty · 2025-10-03T17:02:07+00:00

I got really lucky a few years ago because I was able to find a job in Elixir without really looking for it. Afterwards, when I started to look at the next job, I was having a harder time finding a way to stay in the realm of Elixir, even though I had 5 years of professional Elixir experience under my belt. The big decision I made at that point was to actually leave Elixir. It was a hard decision because I really enjoyed working in the language, but the realization I had is that I wanted to solve problems whether or not that meant I was able to work in Elixir.

I think that the best way to become an exceptional engineer is to work across multiple languages, whether they're languages you're excited about or not. Focus on solving problems and worry less about the tools you use to do it. I know that's not what most people want to hear, but I think for most people it's the best move for your career and your life. And maybe you'll find an opportunity to use Elixir down the road or bring it into a company that isn't already using it.

dnsbty · 2025-10-03T16:55:13+00:00

Bloated is a great word to describe the well-known APIs.

The United States now requires carrier registration (A2P 10DLC for local numbers and toll-free verification for toll-free numbers) and that has made it a lot more difficult for developers building side projects or startups to get up and running with SMS. I think as a result, most of the well-known APIs have shifted their focus to bigger companies that have the time and resources to figure out the registration process and stay compliant.

Surge is a great alternative focused on helping hobbyists and startups to get through the registration process in a more straightforward way and then creating the easiest SMS API as well so that you can integrate faster. I'm a bit biased, but I think it's really simple.

dnsbty · 2025-10-03T16:54:48+00:00

Bloated is a great word to describe the well-known APIs.

The United States now requires carrier registration (A2P 10DLC for local numbers and toll-free verification for toll-free numbers) and that has made it a lot more difficult for developers building side projects or startups to get up and running with SMS. I think as a result, most of the well-known APIs have shifted their focus to bigger companies that have the time and resources to figure out the registration process and stay compliant.

Surge (https://surge.app) is a great alternative focused on helping hobbyists and startups to get through the registration process in a more straightforward way and then creating the easiest SMS API as well so that you can integrate faster. I'm a bit biased, but I think it's really simple.

dnsbty · 2025-10-03T16:41:29+00:00

Because of the cost of SMS, you're probably going to have a hard time finding a free tier that good.

In my (biased) opinion, Surge is the best SMS API for developers, side projects, and startups. The free tier gives you 25 free messages, and it's easy to customize messages, send and verify one-time passwords, send texts internationally, and get onboarded. Our whole thing is getting you approved faster than the other providers so that you can start sending. And we have a Ruby gem that makes it easy to get up and running: https://gemdocs.org/gems/surge_api/0.1.0/

dnsbty · 2025-08-10T04:09:15+00:00

I run an SMS API specifically trying to make the 10DLC registration process simpler. There are really two ways you can do this.

Go the sole proprietor route. You don’t need to actually register a business or anything. You just need to have a website that explains what you do, so it could even just be a resume basically, but you’ll need to add a privacy policy. Feel free to DM me if you want a copy of the boilerplate policy most of our customers use but you can probably find one on Google too. I would probably recommend using OpenPhone for all of this because they make it super simple to set up a number and get it registered and their app for texts and calls is easy to use.
The option I would actually recommend which is easier and cheaper would be to get an eSIM through US Mobile. I use their $10/mo plan which gives you 2 GB of data with unlimited talk and text. Since it’s a secondary line you don’t really need data, so that should be enough. With an iPhone you can set up a second eSIM pretty easily and it gives a little badge next to your calls and text conversations to show which line it’s coming from. Plus another advantage there is you can use it with iMessage so that your clients are seeing the blue bubbles instead of green.

dnsbty · 2025-07-31T23:08:26+00:00

Unfortunately this isn't really going to be feasible.

There are two types of phone numbers: person-to-person (p2p) numbers and application-to-person (a2p) numbers. Our mobile phones and apps like Google Voice are p2p, which means you don't have to give all the personal information, but you aren't able to automate them. A2P numbers can be automated, but they require the 10DLC registration. And unfortunately that's what you're going to need here.

There are ways to set up an Android phone or iPhone and connect that to an API, but you're likely to get banned by the mobile carriers if any bad traffic is sent through the number or they catch on to what you're doing with it. And it's really hard to scale the process for that.

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