Back in 2020, before everything closed up, I built out a multi-tenant version of POP Forums that you could buy. Give me money, and it magically provisions an instance of the forum for you. It's very customizable, which is why running on PointBuzz, it looks like it's part of the site. But the reality is that buying is a little clunky, and I've never done any marketing for it. I don't enjoy that or want to do it, and especially not spend money on it. So I've had one customer for one month. I made fifty bucks.
I'm probably going to tear it down, maybe save a few bucks on the hosting bill. I'll still have PointBuzz running its own forum, because it's easier to change the main site separately. But I'll also build a full on paid membership system into the forum by adapting the stuff I wrote for the hosted version. In other words, it'll be open source like the rest of the core forum. I suspect if I get that in place for PB, I'll make more in a week than I did in six years of selling the forum.
It's just so much faster to build software these days, because of the robot help. AI agents will do stupid things if you let them, which is why "vibe coding" is not a thing beyond prototyping. You need expertise to guide it, because LLM's are not capable of wisdom and judgment. They never can be, which is why you still need humans. Still, the speed helped me build a replacement Hyundai app because I didn't like the official one, in just a few nights.
I look forward to porting this subscription stuff to the forum product. It'll be the first major addition in a few years.
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