Stripe Projects and How IaaS is Changing

Just a few hours ago, Patrick Collison of Stripe announced an early, developer-preview version of a "provision and manage services from the CLI" tool.

Stripe Projects is accessible at projects.dev, and will be rolling out early access over the next few weeks.

If I'm being optimistic about this announcement, it makes me think of the golden era of Rails, and Heroku, and how easy it was, for a time, to setup services & accounts connected to those services through the Heroku add-ons system. In my opinion, this was the golden era of IaaS. There were multiple, competing services available. You could quickly get setup with error monitoring, logging, email, caching—whatever your heart desired. Setting up custom domains could be a headache, but overall the experience was clean. To to quote Collison, quoting Karparthy:

Building a modern app is a bit like assembling IKEA future. There are all these services, docs, API keys, configurations, dev/prod deployments, team and security features, rate limits, pricing tiers.

There was a time when Heroku almost had this "IKEA furniture" problem figured out. Your accounts, API keys, config, dev/staging/prod split, pricing tiers—everything was actually glued together in Heroku.

It's a shame those years were so brief.

That golden era of Heroku was predicated on its network effects. Because Heroku was so popular, service providers were happy to provide an integration point (through Heroku's add-on system) as it easily funneled users towards their platform. This, in turn, made Heroku a more enticing IaaS provider. A very happy feedback loop.

In these days, the happy path was Ruby on Rails. Heroku worked so well with Ruby on Rails. As Rails adapted, it adapted. As Rails iterated on their Javascript systems, they iterated. It stuck with Rails through all of its JavaScript eras; CoffeeScript, bundlers, packers, turbo, hotwire.

Especially because of the bias towards Rails, if you were a Rails dev, there really was no other option. The onboarding experience to various service providers was seamless.

Out with the old (Heroku), in with the new (Hetzner)

We're in a different era now. I've personally switched my all of my apps from Heroku to Hetzner.

And like a wrote about a month ago, I've been writing Extremely Personal Software.

I'm fully on this bandwagon of Extremely Personal Software now. I even made my own package manager and a framework of sorts for managing my EPS stack. (That's a topic to expand upon in a later post.)

Hetzner matches this era of vibe-coded-apps-just-for-yourself very well. Managing your own VPS is much easier than it used to be. And it's so much more affordable than Heroku. My very minimal app with a hobby postgres instance used to cost ~$17 / month on Heroku—on Hetzner it's $6 for a dedicated instance + backups.

And now, the only thing missing from the "self-managed VPS" solution is the "provision and manage services from the CLI" tool. If Stripe Projects is a good enough product, and can pull together enough vendors, this very well may usher in a new golden era of IaaS.

The Future of Self-Hosted EPS

Something I keep thinking through is: how will the average person see the benefits of Extremely Personal Software?

This might seem a bit random, but PewDiePie, of early YouTube fame, has been getting into programming. He recently made a video called, "I Fixed YouTube !", where he demos how he removed YouTube shorts from YouTube, but in a more general sense, how he has been trying to reclaim his attention and brain from ads, news, and algorithms.

His solutions, in order, are:

1. Adding a second profile to his phone (flipping his attention apps, social media, to a separate profile)
2. Self-hosting
3. Removing shorts from YouTube (using a browser extension)
4. Unfollowing everyone on social media
5. Getting a DNS blocker

Ultimately, he summarizes these steps as his "tech fence". Building a fence to keep out the bad tech.

Extremely Personal Software is an extension of this self-hosting idea. I don't want a notes app, or a weight tracking app, or any other random SaaS to know anything about me, nor feed me ads, or news, or vertical scrolling video, or AI summary features.

But, realistically, what sort of person do you have to be to know to add a second profile to your phone? Self-host some services? Install and run a DNS blocker? These are non-trivial things!

At the stage we're at in self-hosting and Extremely Personal Software, you have to be a pretty tech savvy individual to protect yourself from the bad, attention grabbing technology. That's really dissatisfying to me. I want everyone to be able to wield the shield of self-hosting, and build their own, personalized tech fence.

I don't know exactly what that will look like. One way we could see it happening is more people becoming tech savvy—like PewDiePie learning to code.

Another thing we could see is the carving out of a new job. A "personal (developer) assistant" type job. You hire someone, similar to a lawn care company, or a cleaning service, to help you maintain your personal tech hygiene and repair your tech fence.

These are just wild ideas, of course.