Inconvenience Fees

One day in January, I was reading at a cafe in Tokyo, and I got a text from my wife. She is studying Hebrew and said that she wished there was a handwriting practice app for Hebrew like there are for Chinese and Japanese. I thought "I'm not doing anything very important right now..." and replied to her 45 minutes later with a URL.

I actually had it working in 15 minutes. The next 30 minutes were just getting it on the internet: thrashing around with Cloudflare, updating DNS records, stuff like that. 30 minutes is really not bad for setting up a new website, but I couldn't help but take note that a strange inversion had occurred. 30 minutes is a reasonable tax on a weekend project's worth of development. An extra 5% is a dollar in the tip jar. 200% feels like staring at the DoorDash receipt, trying to understand how you got here from a $10 burrito.

Now, I didn't have to spend 30 minutes on this part. It was a pure client-side web app, no AI inference, no API keys, no auth wall. About as simple as it gets. I could have chosen a non-vanity URL, I could have probably built it with v0 or Replit or Lovable and been done in less time. I eventually did make sure I just had a server running somewhere that I could easily hang new stuff off of instead of starting from scratch with each project, so the next thing I did was cheaper. The point isn't "deployment is too hard". The point is that this inversion is everywhere.

Waiting a few days for App Store review? Yeah, it's annoying, but it's not that bad considering it takes two weeks to get a new build out anyway. Want to build a Discord bot? No problem! Sign up for dev access, set up your bot, get an auth token, and then keep a WebSocket open to Discord. You're a programmer, so you probably already have a VPS online somewhere that you can use. Your precocious nephew built an app with Claude to organize the family reunion? How cool! Don't forget to make sure Grandma enables all the necessary OAuth scopes when she signs in for Google Calendar access. So many things went from "tedious but understandable" to "preposterous and intolerable" in record time.

Believe it or not, this is good news. These problems now demand solutions and they are already arriving. The very cool Stripe Projects is a direct response to this phenomenon and has made a great structure for cutting around a lot of UI and process layers to just get your damn API keys already. This is an unalloyed good. Even AI haters need API keys.

But not everything can be solved by deciding to stop making it hard. As of this writing, it is faster for me to add a small feature to a mobile app with Codex than to build the binary on either Android or iOS. I know for a fact this is not for lack of effort on Google's part, and I take for granted that Apple is the same.

Did you know that to ship a Windows app now, you have to sign your binary, and the signature must have come from an HSM or Grandma lands in the "untrusted executable" Haunted House of Malware UI? So you can pay a CA $200/year (and up!) and they will send you a USB key in the mail that you can use for signing. Or you can use Microsoft's cloud signing service ($9.99/mo). Can Microsoft decide to stop making it hard? Maybe? The CA/Browser Forum mandates HSM and Microsoft is a member who depends on the consortium's mutual trust. The big companies in particular have many of these entanglements that have become handcuffs.

So you can cook at home by yourself, or you can pay through the nose to have a lukewarm couriered burrito. Who is going to make it easy to have friends over for dinner?^1Me!