In February 2026, we finished the quiet project we'd been working on for two years: replacing our third-party billing and helpdesk with platforms we built ourselves.
Why
For most of our history we ran on off-the-shelf software. It worked. Mostly. Over the years the list of small complaints grew:
- Features that didn't match how we actually bill customers.
- Helpdesk workflows built for call centers, not two-person teams.
- Occasional surprise EOL notices and forced migrations.
- Integration work every time we wanted the two systems to talk.
The breaking point came when our helpdesk vendor announced a price increase tied to a pricing model that made no sense for our scale.
What we built
Billing. Invoices, subscriptions, payment retries, proration, refunds, credit notes, VAT handling for EU customers, tax reporting for BR customers. Stripe for card processing; everything else is ours.
Helpdesk. Threaded ticketing with the workflows we actually use. Macros for the 40 replies we write most often. Direct hooks into the hosting platform so a ticket can open a terminal on the customer's server with one click (with the customer's permission, recorded).
What it means for you
Faster responses, because our tooling now matches our actual workflow. Fewer surprise feature changes, because we're the ones shipping them. And no risk of the billing system disappearing overnight because an acquirer decided to wind it down.
Most of all: we control our own plumbing now. It turns out that matters.