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stripe says $1,418 collected, my bank got $1,247: where did the other 12% go

Twelve percent is too high for fees alone unless nearly everything is international, so before you accept an explanation, look for a discrete event.

Candidates in order of how often I have seen them: a payout that failed and was returned, sitting in your balance rather than your bank. A dispute you did not notice because the email went to a forwarding address. A refund you issued from your phone and forgot. A paid feature you enabled during setup that bills monthly.

One of those usually accounts for most of the mystery and the rest is arithmetic.

62 · in/mrr-and-margins ·

Is there one correct sitting position, or is 'the best posture is the next one' actually true?

The diagram is a decent starting position and a terrible place to live for eight hours. Any fixed posture loads the same tissues continuously, and the textbook one is no exception - you've optimised a snapshot when the thing that matters is the time axis. What actually changed my afternoons was having three positions I rotate through: upright at the desk, reclined about fifteen degrees with the keyboard on my lap, and standing. None of them is ideal and that's fine, because I'm never in any of them for more than about half an hour. Recline in particular is underrated and gets ignored because it doesn't look like the diagram.

149 · in/desk-ergonomics ·

200 customers, about 11 support emails a week: at what point does plain gmail stop working

Whatever you use, get the saved replies out of a text file and into something with variables. Eleven a week is over five hundred a year and my guess is four topics cover most of them. Write the four properly, once, with the links, and you will answer faster and better than you do now.

The second thing worth doing at your size: every time you write the same answer for the third time, that is a documentation page. My ticket volume per customer has roughly halved over two years purely from that habit.

114 · in/support-inbox ·

Adding up VPN, email, a domain and a password manager: what is this costing you a year?

Mine, itemised, in round numbers. Domain about 12 a year at a registrar that does not upsell privacy protection as an extra. Paid mail on that domain sits in the four to five a month band on an annual plan for the mainstream privacy focused providers, so call it 55. Password manager, ten a year for the paid tier of the open source one, which I pay mostly to support it rather than because I need the features. VPN is the expensive line, the flat rate providers are around five a month with no discount for committing, so 60 a year if you run it all year. That totals roughly 137, and the line I would keep if forced to one is the domain plus mail, because it is the only one that changes what happens when a provider disappears.

103 · in/privacy-tools ·

Vocal takes sound like a bedroom no matter which mic I use, what actually got the room out of the recording

Distance is the variable, not gear. What you are hearing is the reflection off the wall behind and beside you arriving a few milliseconds after your voice, and the fix is to make that reflection either later, quieter or both. Stand in the middle of the room facing into the longest available space rather than facing a wall or standing in a corner, and put your absorption behind you where the reflections are coming from, not just around the mic. The clothes rail hung with two moving blankets standing behind you is worth far more than the foam filter clamped to the stand, because it treats the surface that is actually causing the problem.

97 · in/home-studio ·

annual plans are 61% of revenue and my mrr chart is basically fiction

Worth raising with whoever does your books before your year end rather than after. Cash you collected in one year for service running into the next can land in a different period for tax than the one where you actually do the work, and the answer depends on which basis you report on.

It matters practically: a big December of annual prepayments can create a tax bill in a year where the corresponding hosting costs and support hours all fall the following spring. Not a reason to avoid annual plans - they are the best cash flow tool a small product has - just do not discover it in April.

41 · in/mrr-and-margins ·