Sky

Two cheap technical things that catch a surprising share of this pattern before it starts. Require a verified email before the first job runs, which stops the throwaway-address loop. And delay the heaviest operation for brand new accounts, new signups get a lower concurrency limit for the first few days, then it lifts automatically.

Neither is visible to a normal customer. Both would have turned your weekend from $180 into about $6.

Consecutive failures is right but do it from more than one region or you will trade false pages for false calm. I had a check region that got itself blocked and reported my app healthy for two days while it was returning 500s to actual humans in Europe. Two probe locations and requiring both to fail is the version of this that does not lie to you.

Tag every ticket for two weeks with one word for what it was about. Do not analyse, just tag. At the end of two weeks the list will be brutally short and the top two will be a third of your volume.

Mine were: where do I find the export button, and why did my card fail. The first was a UI problem I fixed in an hour. The second needed a better dunning email. Together they were about 40% of my inbox, gone permanently. That was worth more than any tool.

The other thing that causes exactly this is dried ink on the underside of the nib where it meets the feed, which a bulb syringe flushes straight past. Soak the section in room temperature water for a few hours then flush. If the water goes faintly coloured after an overnight soak on a clean pen, there's your answer.

The email matters more than I expected. Mine was three short paragraphs: the price is going up for new customers, yours is not changing, here is what the extra money is paying for. No apologies, no long justification. Two of fourteen replied - one to say thanks, one to ask whether they could switch to annual at the old rate, which I said yes to instantly because a year of prepaid cash at $19 is better than a monthly at $39 that might churn.

Swapped to my EF with a drier ink and it's usable. Not lovely, but usable. Lesson learned about gsm.

Nib width matters more than price at your volume. Fast notes on unpredictable office paper wants a fine or extra-fine. A medium on cheap paper is exactly how people conclude fountain pens are impractical at work. If you buy one pen, buy it fine.

It looks professional, not greedy. Every buyer who has bought anything before expects it. The ones who push back hard on a modest cap are telling you something about how the next three months would have gone.