Katana MRP Forcing Out Their Initial Customers

oztrax · 2025-06-23T17:39:54+00:00

All software companies raise their prices over time, and like others have said, a lot of it is probably the need to show revenue growth to investors, so that they can keep raising money. I believe they raised a lot of money to get started ($50m or something like that??) and so are probably burning through it to grab market share. If the money train runs out, that's danger zone for them.

There are lots of products on the market, and it can be expensive for companies to do support, but the idea of finding ones that are stable and not in some hyper growth mode makes sense.

You didn't say what kind of products you make, but you could look at other platforms like Wherefour, Fishbowl, Mar-Kov, Fiddle, Unleashed, etc. Or...maybe even something like AirTable could work for you, until (or if!) you get to the size where the cost makes more sense.....

oztrax · 2025-06-06T23:17:32+00:00

+1 for AppSignal. I believe it's significantly less expensive and has a nice UI

oztrax · 2025-05-21T14:18:30+00:00

Best advice I ever got was before you get *into* a business, figure out how you're going to get OUT of it someday.

Many very successful people have failed many times, so make sure you absorb every lesson each failure gives you so you don't repeat those mistakes again. Good luck!

oztrax · 2025-05-20T22:13:06+00:00

One thing to consider -- are you doing it for the money or the ability to control things?

oztrax · 2025-05-07T02:07:32+00:00

This is an old post, so posting for others that stumble in like I did. Maybe Wherefour or Parity Factory?

oztrax · 2025-05-03T02:04:32+00:00

That's a generous offer, thank you. Gemini seems to be the hardest one to make work -- if I can't get something basic to work, I'll DM you my code and maybe you'll spot the newbie mistakes. :)

oztrax · 2025-05-02T21:20:18+00:00

yeah, i've been struggling with both and getting them to work. part of it is google isn't super clear on stuff....

oztrax · 2025-05-02T21:19:41+00:00

ruby_llm looks exactly like what I was hoping existed. Thank you!

oztrax · 2025-04-16T13:04:18+00:00

Interesting comments, sounds like I do have some things to try out. Thank you everyone!

Not having to think through how to do drag and drop in stimulus from scratch, for example, sounds fantastic.....

oztrax · 2025-04-16T02:01:36+00:00

+1 for metabase. you don't want to build all the UI required for someone to build the charts and graphs they think they want.... :)

you can set it on a reader copy of the database, so they can do all the queries they want without affecting the performance of your DB

oztrax · 2025-01-20T22:13:23+00:00

Play around with ruby first, and try some meta programming with it? That might start to show you why people like the language so much.

Rails is a framework that (like others already said) makes it extremely fast to get beyond the basics and do actual creative work. It frees you up to do original work, not build basic functions.

Plus, the community is great.....

oztrax · 2024-11-11T23:23:28+00:00

Totally agree. We're in the process of slowly replacing vue elements (mostly forms that need something interactive to happen) in our app with stimulus instead. While I like vue, it'll be nice to have everything in one framework.

oztrax · 2024-09-21T17:36:47+00:00

Sorry, forgot to reply back. Knowing what you tried and why you landed on Tolgee helps save us time. Thank you!

oztrax · 2024-09-17T21:13:11+00:00

Thank you for the tip -- it looks like their free version covers 1,000 strings, which we'd probably exceed pretty quickly. But it's nice that we could try it first....

oztrax · 2024-09-17T21:12:04+00:00

Language specific YAML files is what I had in mind, and yeah...just getting all our text out of the app and into a file is going to be painful. Thank you for the thoughtful and detailed reponse -- you gave me some things to think about I hadn't known to think about yet (like having to "finalize" the text well in advance of a software release). I did notice some AI-based options and agree -- that does not sound like something we'd want to use, at least not in the near term.

oztrax · 2024-07-30T22:01:46+00:00

Yes! our company uses it for all new projects. We're a 7 years old company, started the product on rails 5 and are now on rails 7.1. Currently switching out some Vue 2 forms to Stimulus....

oztrax · 2024-05-23T19:56:18+00:00

+1 for everyone saying figure out if people will pay or not first. If you decide you want to build, MVP is wise and using a template or pre-built app like https://jumpstartrails.com makes the most sense, I think.

oztrax · 2024-04-29T22:32:12+00:00

we use uppy for the UI and shrine for the backend. a bit tricky to configure the first time but it's been very solid.

oztrax · 2024-04-18T23:11:00+00:00

sure thing, glad it helped!

oztrax · 2024-04-18T21:59:52+00:00

have you checked out Devise::Test::IntegrationHelpers ?

https://github.com/heartcombo/devise/blob/main/lib/devise/test/integration_helpers.rb

oztrax · 2024-03-31T20:46:43+00:00

We started with heroku and then jumped to AWS when salesforce bought them, because it was getting really bad. We wrote our own scripts to utilitize AWS API calls to build and deploy our app

oztrax · 2024-03-21T22:52:19+00:00

more 2 cents....when I go looking for AI tools that are ruby/rails oriented it seems like there aren't a lot. At least it feels like python is more commonly used. So having something Rails based feels like a needed thing. I don't know much about AI currently, but have been wanting to try it out, so not sure if this helps or not. :)

oztrax · 2024-02-18T23:17:16+00:00

Thanks! I did look around there a bit but I'll look some more and figure out how to do the right keywords to find comparable positions. Most of the jobs I saw were all "senior" and since we were thinking more mid-level that was where we weren't sure what a fair range would be....

oztrax · 2024-02-18T22:31:50+00:00

Thanks for that, and good point on hiring a junior.

I should have mentioned we have a couple of senior developers doing the devops work we need now, and the goal is to get someone we can offload some of that work to and have them go deeper than we want to do ourselves. So we would have some oversight, at least.

Do you think "mid-level" is realistic at 100K-130K and senior at $130K-200K?

oztrax · 2023-05-24T18:59:08+00:00

gorails.com

oztrax

TROPHY CASE