We've recently passed 100 paying customers for one of our Shopify apps, EZ Exporter.

Shopify apps are technically SaaS products. We maintain the app and the servers it runs on and provide it as a service to Shopify store owners. You can set different types of pricing: from one-time fees, usage-based, or recurring monthly subscriptions.

EZ Exporter is our first paid app which got published on the Shopify store last December. It took about …

I just finished re-doing our main site for Highview Apps, a software company I started with a friend of mine that makes Shopify apps. We've been thinking of re-doing the site for some time now and I was finally able to allocate a couple of days to work on it.

Initially, we just wanted to have a company site up and running quickly so we just picked a very simple one-page, free Bootstrap 3 …

I've always hated the idea of having to pay for SSL certificates. You could always generate them yourself for free with OpenSSL and they're just as secure as the paid ones. But if you're running a public-facing website, you're pretty much stuck and have to pay for one if you don't want your visitors seeing security warnings in their browser. At least that was the case until Let's Encrypt, a free certificate authority, came …

If you're a Mandrill user, you've probably already gotten an email from Mandrill that they will completely be integrated with MailChimp and will require a paid MailChimp subscription to continue its use. The cheapest paid MailChimp subscription at the moment goes for $20/month.

If you're bootstrapping a startup, you look for any savings you can get. That $20/month could be used for other things, like 4 DigitalOcean servers to run your apps on.

I signed …