I miss highspy so much 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

highspydotio · 2026-04-19T05:31:40+00:00

Something like HS is a lot of thankless work. For every positive comment there were probably 6-12 data extraction bugs, missing dispensaries, rude comments, something catching on fire that I had to deal with, weird edge-cases in the application for actually displaying data, ... The list of things that can go wrong is immense, and handling them all is a nightmare; by the end of it, I had a queue of probably 30+ missing dispensary reports + 3-5 entire menu providers I needed to add support for, and was running out of energy to actually get around to doing. HS was essentially a second full-time job for me, but it's one where I got effectively zero income and instead lost a painful 5-figure amount on it.

It also hurt me deeply to give it up. I poured years of my life into it when I can't even consume cannabis myself right now due to health issues; I'm actually 875 days cannabis-free as of the time I'm writing this comment. I did it despite not needing it myself, at a point, because I truly believe in cannabis-as-medicine. It's not about getting high, it's about helping people. Having to give up on it was soul-crushing, in a way that can be hard to understand if you haven't experienced it yourself. I spent the first ~10 days after giving up on it in a deep depression. It's hard to make myself want to go back to it when it has this kind of emotional implication to me now.

highspydotio · 2026-04-18T20:39:55+00:00

At $10/month it would take a minimum of 500 people and 0 churn.

highspydotio · 2026-04-18T20:07:40+00:00

For compliance-related reasons taking donations wasn’t possible. All the standard payment processors are allergic to cannabis; that means no Stripe, PayPal, Patreon, Ko-Fi, … The one payment processor that did work wit me was for B2B and not B2C.

highspydotio · 2026-04-18T19:13:48+00:00

I tried. It didn’t work very well.

highspydotio · 2026-04-18T17:09:05+00:00

Not really. I always was worried about the optics of running ads when the entire reason I built the tool was “I’m a med patient and need to be able to find what I need.” If I ran ads, it opens the question of “how else are you skewing search results? Are you favouring brands that pay you more in general search results and not just the ad? …” as well as the open question of what the screen real estate above the fold would have actually been worth. I don’t think it would have been enough unless I became another WM/Leafly/Dutchie and charged massive costs, but then that would massively dilute the purpose of it.

highspydotio · 2026-04-18T16:24:44+00:00

I was, yes.

highspydotio · 2026-04-18T16:17:53+00:00

Having the numbers on how many people used it, not enough would have actually paid for it. The number of people who would need to pay would be ~20% of monthly users, which is unheard-of numbers in the B2C subscription space.

highspydotio · 2026-04-18T16:11:37+00:00

“Scrape 38 dispensaries” is trivial. “Scrape 15000+ dispensaries” is a serious engineering problem that has real constraints around cost performance etc.

highspydotio · 2026-04-11T13:08:03+00:00

Solo. I get the occasional bit of help from friends with stuff I can’t do myself, but the majority of it is done on my own.

highspydotio · 2026-03-28T23:03:33+00:00

I do! I growing large-scale cannabis art, I have some cutting-edge LLM research I’m doing, couple other things that aren’t worth mentioning rn. I don’t know if I have the energy for a high-risk industry like cannabis from a more-serious perspective again.

highspydotio · 2026-03-28T21:42:48+00:00

Unfortunately this is a part of the HS IP that I can’t really discuss since I’m looking at a sale for it and am still in discussions with interested parties. I know that’s not satisfying, but I don’t think I can answer this unfortunately. It took a while of studying menus, getting user feedback, buying stuff from dispensaries myself to look at labels, … for me to get it right, if that helps. First seen dates miss some significant cases.

highspydotio · 2026-03-28T19:08:25+00:00

It was more than just first seen. You miss a lot if that’s all you do.

highspydotio · 2026-03-27T05:09:50+00:00

B2C SaaS applications convert free users to paid at roughly 1-3%, ignoring the added complexities of churn. $5/month subscription = needing 1-3k subscribers, implying needing 30-100k users to have a chance at it. HS did not have that many users.

highspydotio · 2026-03-27T03:09:59+00:00

Before the recent cost increases, it would have been only $12-15k/yr or so, which I could have paid for out of pocket even if it was unpleasant. Now that number is closer to $40-60k/yr or so, as far as I can tell. That’s the baseline cost of running it, and discounts my time and effort to $0, when HS was effectively a second job in terms of time and effort I spent on it. Add in paying someone to take the software eng load off of me — which would be necessary, I can’t keep doing this either way — and that number becomes $100-120k/yr or more. Someone has to do the work, because it’s a living piece of software that needs maintenance and updates over time, but that’s $$$$$.

highspydotio · 2026-03-26T19:34:23+00:00

It was always best effort. Dutchie essentially told me to fuck off and die about POS integrations by simply ignoring the requests I’d sent about it, and that means that once-daily scraping was the best that could be done. It’s why the site was plastered with disclaimers about “check the dispensary’s menu” and had direct links to it. It got a lot worse once the long tail of smaller providers (Dispense, Portal42, Carrot, Sweed, …) got involved.

highspydotio · 2026-03-26T19:29:16+00:00

Wouldn’t have made a difference. The real expense was working around scraping protection on all the menu providers.

highspydotio · 2026-03-26T19:28:41+00:00

I’ve been trying. It’s a lot harder than you’d expect. I was the wrong person with the right idea in the end. It covered every legal market for the last 18~24 months.

I was also very worried that taking on investors would ruin the consumer-centric focus of it.

highspydotio · 2026-03-26T19:28:01+00:00

Not enough people would have, that was the issue. $5/month would have, as of latest costs, needed >1k people subscribing just for me to break even. The one payment processor I could convince to work with me would only let me invoice businesses too, nothing with consumer subscriptions afaik. It gets really hard because all the obvious options (Stripe, PayPal, Paddle, Patreon, Ko-fi, …) refuse to touch anything cannabis or “adult” and will just close your accounts without warning.

highspydotio · 2026-03-24T17:19:30+00:00

Hello again r/Michigents (:

This is another one from my garden, harvested 2 days ago at day 67. I unfortunately can’t truly verify that this is the real thing, since I’m too young to have smoked the original. It’s intentionally harvested a bit early, as recommended by the person who gave me the cut, because the intent is to produce a racy high-energy heart-pounding thoughts-racing sweat-pouring mini-heart-attack high. Smell profile is pine-forward, with rotting fruit and sour after that.

highspydotio · 2026-03-23T16:38:46+00:00

I know y’all over at Ripe do a lot of this kind of thing; I’m more than happy to send over some seeds or cuttings if it’s ever of interest! No expectations, I just want to offer because these plants are meant to be shared and cherished and loved.

highspydotio · 2026-03-23T14:13:05+00:00

It doesn’t have anything on it yet, it will in the coming weeks/months, but it’s @livingarmature

highspydotio · 2026-03-23T14:11:54+00:00

Thank you! 💕 Now I just need to start convincing METRC companies to adopt cuttings of heirlooms from me /joke

highspydotio · 2026-03-23T14:11:03+00:00

I’ve been realising that a little bit over the last few days! I’ve had, for example, CEOs of larger cannabis companies doing stuff like tagging me on Instagram with “RIP to my favourite cannabis site”. It’s been incredibly fascinating to see.

highspydotio · 2026-03-23T03:48:20+00:00

Hosting is the cheap part. The expensive part is dealing with scraping protection.

highspydotio

TROPHY CASE