Changes to our stack in 2025

We keep a pretty faithful list of downstream services and apps we use, and just published a big update to backdate some of the changes from the past few months. You can view the full list there, of course, but I thought it'd be fun to chat a bit more about the specific changes (just like we did in 2024):

Changes

• Plain, our replacement for Helpscout. We'll write more about this migration later; while we're paying more for Plain than we ever were for Helpscout, it's a much better fit for our needs.
• Linear, replacing GitHub Issues as our issue tracker.
• Trotto, our replacement for Golinks.
• Better Stack (which we were already using for logging) replaced PagerDuty and StatusPage as our alerting tools.

Added

• ImprovMX, which handles/handled some edge cases in our migration to buttondown.com.
• Mercury, for managing finances.
• Digital Ocean, for hosting our SMTP infrastructure.
• Depot, a drop-in performance improvement for GitHub actions.
• Tuple, a lovely and simple pair programming tool.

Removed

• A brief and torrid tryst with Metabase, having already churned from it in favor of a home-grown solution.
• Churned from Audiogest and Pika after a few months of use. (They're both great tools, but not a good fit for our needs.)
• Churned from Notion in favor of plain-text documentation; it ended up being overkill for our needs, and difficult to keep in sync with other sources of truth.
• Churned from DNSHelper; we built our own replacement for parts of it, and are investing in a slightly more novel approach to DNS management later this year.
• Churned from Texts after the WordPress acquisition as I suspected it would be EOL'd (and indeed it is, in favor of Beeper).