I review new, hot, trendy and just interesting and top software and give you my honest opinion about it so that when you start using it you will know about all the underwater stones that might be heading your way
All the links you are about to click(hopefully) are indeed affiliate but that does not mean that my reviews are biased in any way – if soft is shit or is not worth its cost I will let you know
4.6
/5
20 API calls
40$/mo
Hey, so first things first – what is going on here and why some random guy from the internet is telling you something about which SaaS or VPN or API you should be using as opposed to some other stuff? Well, my name is Mark, I am an IT guy who tried just about anything and everything in this constantly changing world.
Let’s start from the top – I graduated Lancaster University as a Bachelor in Computer Science (with honours) some time ago. Let me tell you straight away – universities are bullshit. The only thing I learned from it was that the lectures on Wednesdays are skippable because professor does no take attendance. Although, towards Year 3 I also realised that lectures on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays are skippable too because university does not care about attendance at all as long as you do well in your exams. I did well.
But, while skipping all these lectures I realised something – I was bored. Sure, gaming is fun for some time but when you game 16 hours a day it kind of feels like your brain is melting so I desperately needed another hobby. And, just like that, I started actually coding. Not that University-forced Snake game on Pascal that noone cares about or needs but some actual real-life applicable code that people will be able see live and use.
As any other almost-graduate I felt like I was the smartest not just in the room but in the whole world so naturally all code that I produced is supposed to change the world or at least make me a millionaire. First, I created a game. C# Unity game with a car on an infinite road with obstacles that you are supposed to go around or else you crash and start over. Fucking world-changing, right? Well, after some battling with Play Market and spending way too much money just to get my game listed it had something like 3 downloads. The world did not notice the talent yet or at least that was what I thought.
Next came COVID. I was in my very early twenties and I wanted to party and UK as well as my home country were on complete lockdown. Decision – create a platform where people from around the world can get together and throw illegal parties. Yes, I was always a bit of a gangster. That was the first time I touched web development. And my oh my, it was love from the first ‘<body>’ tag. The platform I created – I called it thepartyway – turned out to be an absolute dogshit. I had no knowledge of actual development, UX/UI and AI was not around back then so obviously the platform(that, again, I spend hundreds of euros on) had literally zero users. 2-0 World vs Mark.
Next came my pride – my literal ‘fuck you’ to the system – my marketplace. See, the country I come from has two marketplaces – Facebook that almost noone uses and the thing that I will not even mention because fuck them. I was just about to buy my first car then and I really wanted a platform that would work like a marketplace should in 21st century. So I built it. From my perspective it was brilliant – long-polled messaging system, the AI features back when AI was just starting, email notifications… I even created a PWA for it and published it to Play Market. Literal thousands went into development(and Google Ads) but still nothing worked. That was until I recorded one TikTok describing what the platform is. And it blew up. The funny thing – it blew up when I was on a plane heading home from UK so when I landed and turned my data on, my phone literally overheated from notifications. That was the golden era of my entrepreneurship. I had brands contacting me, my TikTok was through the roof, people actually started using my platform and it was gaining country-wide traction. I was proud.
It all came crushing when life intervened. I just graduated and moved back to my home country and I needed a job. Back then I thought that I want to be this fancy-ass “developer” that does something a fancy-ass developer should do – like in those TikToks. And jobhunting was hard, I have spent all summer applying and going to interviews but there was no luck… Until I have planned a trip and literally a day before the trip was supposed to start my phone rang and I got a job. Nothing overly fancy but also nothing that I can disclose without breaking an NDA. But I got lucky because 6 months into my job my direct boss left the company and the board decided that it is best to let me take over than to hire someone else. My career exploded, I was happy, but… there was no time for my marketplace so I just stopped making TikToks and paying for hosting and… it died.
For several months I was just working. Remember, it was my first job and now suddenly I am in charge of all IT in the company whose whole business is in the internet. I learned a shitton during those months(DevOps, API implementation, server management, development lifecycle, and that is just the surface) but I always felt like I was missing out on something. So, one day I decided that I want my marketplace back. I spend tens of hours redoing it and applying my new skills to make it even better – only to realise that noone cares anymore because the whole vibe of it always was “fuck the system whatever it takes” and it turns out steady paycheck was all it took to give up.
The job was steady, I learned more and more about IT, SaaS, APIs, webdev etc. every day but I still needed that thrill of a side hustle taking off – so I came up with something. A NSFW site to hire a… let’s say ‘a wife for an hour’ in my country. Disclaimer – here it is legal. I took marketplace code, remade it a bit, released it and… 0 clicks. That was sad as fuck. But I put my head down and kept working and learning and at some point I realised – there was no SEO on the site. Like literally no content, no keywords. So I remade the codebase again to add more blocks, FAQs and wrote a ton of content.
Guess what? It actually took off. To this day it is getting me like 100+ clicks a day and sits comfortably in top 10 of Google Search. That is pretty nice for a guy who used fucking long polling for messages like 3 years ago. So I expanded, bough some domains in UK, Fance and Germany(that stuff is legal there), applied the same principle and it started doing good in most of these markets. Now, the problem – I am not getting payed for it. It wouldn’t be a problem if I was making a world a better place, like, battling cancer or poverty or some shit, but I am not, I am helping women sell their bodies. Not the most moral thing in the world and IMHO if something is not moral it should pay well.
So, affiliate marketing. I put up some banners with live sex sites on my sites. 0. Fucking. Clicks. Honestly, at that point it felt like the world was teasing me, like “here, you reached some success. now piss off”. But I did reach success, so I though that I should just take my knowledge and apply it somewhere where there definetely is some money – naturally, I created two sites that were focused on marketing – one for beforementioned sex cams, the other for AI girlfriends. If you think of me as some kind of a freak – I swear I never used either of those things, I just looked up the search volume for them and it was huge.
Now we’ve reached today, the day I am writing all of this. I am still in my twenties, I still am passionate about either changing the world or at least making some money with the code that I wrote. I know that even on marketplace stage I could have found investors but in my opinion investors fuck up everything they touch the second it stops being super profitable. I don’t want that. No “get rich quick” schemes, no scamming people, only honest work and hopefully some payout. Maybe at some point I will become an even worse version of me and will start doing it but not today.
That is why you are on this page – fully created and funded by me. Here I will tell you about the software that I used in my “adventures” as well as in my regular day job. The links to the software are in fact affiliate links so I will be earning commission if you choose to start using it but every review that I put up is and will always be based on my actual experience.
To answer the question asked in the first sentence – “Who the fuck am I to tell you anything about software” – I am just a guy with my own ups and downs sharing my genuine experience and hoping that it will bring both me and you something we could both benefit from
SaaS stands for “Software as a Service”. It basically means that you are paying for a software and using it as a service. It can be anything from VPN to API.
When it comes to API the thing that matters the most is the amount of calls you are making. It should always be the first thing to check when the bill seems too high. If the calls your program makes seem reasonable the next thing to check should be either API token leak or cost-per-call
There is no one-fit-all solution. Every piece of software is tailored to specific needs. Explore different options and settle for something that has a price and specs you are comfortable with
Codex, in my opinion, is the best AI to help you with your web projects. It will assist with both code and server management and is much cheaper than almost identical in functionality Claude. Do not use less-knows AIs because they can leak your API keys or other credentials
