Paddle Billing

Paddle:

Paddle Billing is a new set of developer friendly subscription billing APIs with feature enhancements and functionality improvements built to strengthen Paddle’s Merchant of Record platform. This developer-friendly upgrade enables SaaS businesses to support more billing models, and represents a comprehensive step forward in Paddle’s capabilities. It improves your ability to increase revenue, retain customers, and scale operations hassle-free.

[…]

Paddle Billing also features brand new APIs that are built to modern standards and are designed to be simple to use. The APIs have been built to empower our customers, and the API returns are thorough and helpful to outline causes and solutions. This is backed by comprehensive API documentation for a seamless developer experience. You can also attach custom data to every entity within Paddle to keep track of data that matters to you, whether that’s on a customer, a subscription or an invoice.

[…]

Paddle Classic currently supports over 4,000 SaaS sellers around the world, it isn’t going anywhere. It will continue to be a stable, compliant, and secure platform with strong and unwavering support. […] You will continue to get updated payment methods and tax updates as they become available. However, some feature updates will only be available in Paddle Billing only.

There’s more information in the announcement. I’m not sure what to make of this. The focus seems to be on subscriptions, and it’s not clear to me whether any of the longstanding limitations of the Paddle platform have been addressed. Compared with other e-commerce providers, Paddle has always felt to me more like a platform than a solution. It has a very basic/opinionated feature set, with no support for shopping carts, very limited discounts, limited support for licenses, no way to fix incorrect addresses, etc. There’s a powerful API that gives you a lot more flexibility—but then you have to reimplement much of the store yourself. The API was also buggy and under-documented at the time I set up my store. The new API sounds better, but I really want is more features that work out of the box without having to use the API.

Some years ago, FastSpring also bifurcated their store/API, into Contextual and Classic. I stuck with Classic because it was working and I didn’t want to have to reimplement and test my whole store. FastSpring Classic continues to work, but it never got new features such as Apple Pay support. In both cases, I wish they could have brought their existing stores and transaction data along, i.e. support the old features and API within the new system. In both cases, I’ll probably eventually have to rewrite using the new API, not because I actually need anything that the new API offers, but because the customer-facing parts of the old system haven’t been updated.

Previously:

• Stripe Tax
• How to Accept Payments for Your Digital Products

App Subscriptions Mac Paddle Payments Web Web API

Bram Moolenaar, RIP

Alex:

In the early 90s, programmer Bram Moolenaar was frustrated with limitations of the vi text editor.

So he created his own open source fork called Vim!

Vim improved on vi with new features like multi-level undo/redo, visual selection, and syntax highlighting.

[…]

What makes Vim special? Its modal editing approach - you enter commands to manipulate text instead of mousing around.

This makes editing super fast and precise! ⚡️

Laura Bernheim (via Hacker News):

Vim, originally abbreviated from “Vi IMitation,” sought to extend the functionality of the vi editor. With the release of Version 2.0 a few years later, Vim declared the new abbreviation was for “Vi IMproved” because their feature set had surpassed vi.

More than two decades since the text editor’s creation, Vim has become so configurable and adaptable that even Bram doesn’t know about all the features it has anymore.

vim_announce (via Fatih Arslan):

It is with a heavy heart that we have to inform you that Bram Moolenaar passed away on 3 August 2023. Bram was suffering from a medical condition that progressed quickly over the last few weeks.

Bram dedicated a large part of his life to VIM and he was very proud of the VIM community that you are all part of.

Slashdot:

Anyone who’s used Vim has seen evidence of Moolenaar’s generosity. “Vim is Charityware,” Moolenaar wrote in its pioneering license. “You can use and copy it as much as you like, but you are encouraged to make a donation for needy children in Uganda.” Moolenaar pioneered the concept of charityware decades ago, and also helped to popularize its adoption. To this day Vim users can still view the license by typing the command :help Uganda or :help ICCF. And Vim’s sponsor FAQ notes that “Each registered Vim user and sponsor who donates at least 10 euro will be able to vote for new features.”

Muhammad (via Hacker News):

In this post, I will be sharing my favorite vim one-liners that have significantly enhanced my vim workflow, making it more productive and efficient. As an avid vim user, I have extensively utilized these one-liners to edit files, and they never cease to surprise me with their ability to accomplish tasks swiftly, saving precious time. This is precisely what drew me to Vim - the unparalleled efficiency it offers when it comes to editing text.

Update (2023-08-10): Christian Brabandt (archive, via Hacker News):

The future of the Vim project

[…]

Access to the github organization is possible and Ken and me have been granted admin rights by Brams family, so we can continue with Github.

[…]

Bram was owner of the all of the mailing lists. I don’t know yet how he managed this and how to request access[…]

Death History Open-source Software Rest in Peace Text Editor Vim