Our First Purchase Was Our App

First(s)

All your business firsts are special - your first user, your first charge, your first employee. Included in that sentimental list is your first purchase for the business - the first thing you need so much as a tool to help you succeed that you pay for it.

Funnily enough for us that was us.

We were setting up a couple of endpoints using our own company account (which is a normal 'ol Formcake account under my company email) and realized that, since we'd be launching we needed to go beyond our simple "Sandbox" Account and upgrade to "Developer" to make sure we could capture all our submissions, including those using our homepage Codepen.

Advantages

At first it seems silly to bill ourselves for our own service - don't we know someone with us? Like me?

But the more you think about it the more sense it makes. Billing for our own usage:

1. Let's us know if the plan limits make sense.
2. Allows us to QA our own billing infrastructure.
3. Enables us to avoid creating a "superuser" or "admin" type role to circumvent billing - everything that uses our service gets billed, period.
4. Supposedly AWS charges internal business units retail prices. If a world-destroying, everything outfit like Amazon is doing it it must be savvy!

Conclusion

Paying for our app simultaenously validates our code and prevents us from having to (unnecessarily) write more of it.

Turns out dogfood is good for you.