Retrospective operating entries / 200 entries
Vendor documents, pricing pages, policy changes, tax triggers, founder-published records and the older precedents behind one-person software businesses, each read for the workload, the operating cost and the stop condition.
Historical event dates and source dates are separate from the preparation date of this local edition. Every entry is a retrospective draft prepared 16 September 2026; none was published on its historical date.
200 entries
Christensen and Suess's own 1978 account describes a hobby project, not a shareware channel, that set the dial-up bulletin board model.
FTS-0001 documents the routing rules independent bulletin boards used to move mail, crediting Tom Jennings as FidoNet's originator.
SPA's own 1996 release cites 1984 as its founding year; a 1999 SIIA page documents the merger that created SIIA.
ASP's 1998 developer standards define evaluation periods, registration reminders and support terms shareware authors had to meet.
The company's 1998 SEC prospectus states its headcount, client contract counts and IPO terms in its own words.
Tucows' 2001 Form 10-K describes the directory's rating scale, partner network and headcount as a public company.
RFC 850 and RFC 1036 define the moderation and format rules that governed source-code newsgroups like comp.sources.misc.
Info-Mac's own site reproduces the 1984 message that started the Stanford-hosted Macintosh software mailing list.
The operator's own About page credits Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant with founding The WELL in 1985 as a conferencing system.
Neon's own pricing page bills compute and storage as two continuously metered inputs and prices branches per month.
PlanetScale's own announcement retired its free plan on 8 April 2024, one of several 2023-2024 free-tier removals.
Upstash's own pricing page bills Redis per command with a 500K free tier; its Kafka pricing page has returned 404 since 2024.
Atlas's own documentation sets M0's storage, connection and throughput ceilings and calls it a sandbox, not production.
Redis's own pricing and eviction documentation set Essentials' price range and name volatile-lru as the default eviction policy.
AWS's own pricing data and documentation set SQS's per-million-request rate and its 1 MiB message ceiling, with S3 offload above it.
CloudAMQP's own plans page sets its free tier's queue, message and connection ceilings and the price step above them.
Railway's own documentation prices hosting per vCPU-minute and GB-minute rather than a flat named plan.
Turso's own pricing page bills databases, storage, reads, writes and syncs separately, and its zero-latency claim is the vendor's own.
AWS's own documentation and rate data show Multi-AZ failing over in roughly a minute for double a single instance's hourly price.
Auth0's pricing page defines and prices the monthly active user that its free and paid tiers are billed against.
Clerk's pricing page bills a Monthly Retained User, a narrower unit than the monthly active user Auth0 uses.
WorkOS's pricing page charges per SSO connection, a unit separate from the free MAU allowance on its AuthKit product.
AWS Cognito's pricing page prices monthly active users differently across three tiers and prices security features as an add-on.
The WebAuthn standard's own text defines the non-exportable private key and origin-scoping behind passkey phishing resistance.
Okta's own October and November 2023 notices describe what its support-system intrusion accessed and what it told customers to do.
Cloudflare's R2 pricing page states a per-GB storage and operations charge but no fee for data leaving the network.
AWS's CloudFront pricing page states a free first terabyte, then a tiered per-region charge for data transfer out.
Backblaze's B2 pricing page waives egress up to three times stored data, and further through named CDN partners.
AWS Backup's own documentation names its supported services, pricing examples, and a 90-day cold-storage retention minimum.
The license's own words require keeping the copyright and permission notice attached, and nothing more.
The license text says offering a modified AGPL program over a network requires offering its source to those users.
MongoDB's 2018 licence names the exact stack a company offering it as a service must publish.
The license text sets a four-year default Change Date, but each project fills in its own use grant.
Section 3's grant comes with a litigation-triggered termination clause the MIT license has no equivalent for.
SPDX standardizes short license identifiers, but matching them to what a package actually ships is a separate step.
The Initiative's own review page names the steps a license passes before it is called OSI-approved.
A January 2021 move off Apache 2.0 and a September 2024 addition of AGPL are separate, dated events.
The license text ties disclosure to distributing a copy, a narrower trigger than the AGPL's network-use clause.
Redis 7.4 and later run under RSALv2 or SSPLv1, and a Linux Foundation fork answered with a BSD-licensed alternative.
AWS's own SLA text sets exact uptime tiers and service-credit percentages for EC2 and S3, with a claim deadline and named exclusions.
Cloudflare's Business SLA promises 100% uptime with a formula-based credit, and its own text routes Enterprise customers to a separate agreement.
Vercel's Enterprise SLA sets a 99.99% target with tiered credits, while its public status page tracks incidents as a separate record.
The AICPA's Trust Services Criteria name five categories a SOC 2 report can cover, and its own materials distinguish two report types.
The Cloud Security Alliance's CAIQ standardises vendor security questions, and its STAR registry lets a completed one be reused.
AWS's own documentation says Artifact gives free, on-demand access to AWS's audit reports, while leaving a customer's own compliance documents to them.
ISO's own pages date the 2022 revision and state plainly that ISO does not issue certificates, so a vendor's claim rests on its certification body.
Vanta's own pages require a sales conversation for pricing and state plainly that an independent auditor, not Vanta, issues the SOC 2 report.
Drata's own documentation names what it automates for SOC 2 and other frameworks, and keeps the actual audit engagement with an outside auditor.
The PCI Council's SAQ A track is the lightest validation option for merchants who hand card data entirely to a processor, and it still changed for v4.0.
Vouch's own product and blog pages describe what technology errors-and-omissions coverage includes, excludes, and why enterprise buyers demand it.
Hiscox's own errors-and-omissions and professional-liability pages state a starting price and what the product excludes.
Embroker's own Funded Startups page lists four bundled coverages and states pricing requires underwriting, not a published rate.
Common Paper's published mutual NDA template defines confidential information and states it is not a substitute for a lawyer.
Common Paper's Cloud Service Agreement template lists the sections a SaaS contract needs, from data handling to termination.
USPTO's own guidance says its search tool covers federal marks only and recommends a broader check before filing.
USPTO's own fee schedule sets a $350 per-class base fee and adds surcharges for incomplete or custom filings.
The UDRP text requires proving three elements and limits panels to transfer or cancellation, nothing more.
WIPO's own fee schedule and case database record how the largest UDRP forum prices and publishes domain disputes.
Delaware's own instructions and fee schedule set what a Certificate of Incorporation must include and its base cost.
The CRA's simplified regime taxes a foreign seller's sales to unregistered Canadians past CAD 30,000, and stops counting at a registered business.
The GST Act's own turnover provision, extended to offshore digital sellers in 2016, treats a registered business buyer differently from a consumer.
The NTA's own brochures split electronic-service tax duty: consumer sales are the foreign seller's to file, business sales are reverse-charged.
The federal ADN unifies how a service invoice is issued while each Brazilian municipality keeps setting its own ISS rate.
The IGST Act makes a foreign consumer-facing digital seller register regardless of turnover, and reverse-charges business sales instead.
The Commission's adequacy decision lets a listed, self-certified US company receive EU personal data without executing the SCCs.
The ICO's IDTA and its EU-SCC Addendum are two different documents laid before Parliament for the same post-Brexit purpose.
The Act's own text sets a consent standard and a transfer power, but lets the government switch each provision on separately.
The W3C's own standard names target-size and focus-visibility rules the site's existing WCAG 2.1 baseline did not include.
ITI's own template lets a vendor self-report WCAG and Section 508 conformance, and ITI states it does not review the result.
Apple's own App Review Guidelines set subscription and review rules it revises without a changelog, verified from the current text.
Apple's guidelines and Connect help pages name specific, avoidable rejection causes and a fix-and-resubmit path, verified from the current text.
Most of Google's Restricted Content categories are vertical-specific; its Subscriptions policy applies broadly to a SaaS app, verified.
Google's enforcement pages separate app-level actions from account-level ones and cap most disputes to one appeal, verified.
Microsoft's own Store Policies let non-game PC apps bill subscriptions outside its purchase API, verified from the current version.
Amazon's own content policy names prohibited-content and metadata rules but states no review-duration figure, verified from current pages.
The FTC finalized its click-to-cancel rule in 2024; the Eighth Circuit vacated it, and the FTC restored the old text in 2026, verified.
California's own Automatic Renewal Law requires online cancellation and disclosure, independent of the vacated federal rule, verified.
Apple's own subscription documentation sets disclosure, grace-period and price-increase rules distinct from its general guidelines, verified.
Visa's June 2024 merchant guide names four dispute categories and says the response clock is set by the acquirer, not printed in Visa's own text.
Mastercard's own rules pages blocked automated access, so its reason codes reach this entry only through Stripe's public documentation.
American Express's own merchant site states a 20-day response window, a 120-day filing limit, and a two-redispute ceiling.
Amex's own OptBlue materials say the enrolling processor sets the discount rate, so no single published rate applies to every merchant.
Discover's own site has no public chargeback reason-code page; its codes reach merchants through a processor's documentation instead.
NACHA's own rule, effective 19 March 2021, requires validating first-use bank debit accounts but leaves the technique to the originator.
Regulation 2015/751's own text caps EU debit interchange at 0.2% and credit at 0.3%, applied since 8 June 2015, excluding commercial cards.
Visa's own Q&A caps surcharges at the merchant discount rate or 3%, whichever is lower, after 30 days' notice to the acquirer.
The PCI Council's own 2011 guidance says a token removes PCI DSS scope only if the original card number cannot be recovered from it.
Buffer's own transparent-metrics and profit-share pages report self-reported revenue and payouts at a scale a one-person shop cannot benchmark against.
Ghost's own about page reports live, self-reported revenue and churn figures alongside its constitution as a non-profit foundation.
A 2013 Groove blog post reports the founder's self-reported monthly revenue, churn and headcount, years before today's open-startup dashboards.
Josh Pigford's own 2019 post reports why and how Baremetrics shut down Intros after a month of zero paying investors.
PagerDuty's own on-call documentation states that a rotation needs a backup person before any escalation policy makes sense.
OpenStatus's own README and pricing page document the self-hosting workload a founder trades for a status-page subscription fee.
Have I Been Pwned's own API docs and FAQ state what breach monitoring covers, what it costs, and what it admits it misses.
CSA's own STAR registry pages document how one public questionnaire listing can replace repeated per-deal security forms.
A digitised January 1985 BYTE shows rental prices and mail-order terms for pre-shareware disk libraries.
Apple's own notarization and Gatekeeper documentation set the signing and scan steps a Mac app needs to run without a warning, verified.
RBI's own 2021 circular required a shift to tokenised card storage from 1 January 2022, covering card-on-file data only.
Indie Hackers' own about page and one dated milestone post show how the platform's self-reported revenue claims are built and unverified.
Crisp's own 2019 incident post timestamps a hardware failure at its host, showing what a vendor postmortem can and cannot promise.
Basecamp's self-published method book instructs cutting scope and staff, not proof of profit.
His 2006 foreword disowns the term micro-ISV, then estimates a first month at $364.
The company's own pages date its 2000 founding and call it bootstrapped, without naming early costs.
Ceglowski's own pages date the 2009 launch and give current pricing, not audited revenue.
id Software's own history page dates the shareware release and its try-before-you-buy model.
The company's own timeline dates the 1993 origin and its later pivot away from downloads.
An SEC filing dates its 1994 founding and 1996 store launch, a merchant-of-record ancestor.
Nullsoft's own 1998 site states the $10 shareware fee; today's owner still dates 1997 as its start.
Apple's 2008 releases state the original split; a 2026-current program cuts it to 15% for some.
Vercel's own pricing and limits pages set priced quotas and separate hard ceilings a solo founder must track together.
Cloudflare's own pricing and limits pages set Workers' Free and Paid ceilings in requests and CPU milliseconds.
Fly.io's own pricing documentation ties Machines cost to per-second, per-preset rates and to a VM's started or stopped state.
Render's own pricing page sets Free through top-tier prices for web services and managed Postgres by RAM and CPU.
Supabase's pricing and billing pages set Free, Pro and Team quotas while pricing compute as a separate line item.
Vercel's own blog post describes Fluid compute's concurrency model and cites an unverified 85 percent savings claim.
A dated Cloudflare blog post and changelog entry record a paid billing-model change that left the Free plan's stated limits untouched.
Fly.io's own documentation dates the end of free-plan allowances to 7 October 2024, later than commonly assumed.
Render's own documentation states the exact inactivity window and roughly one-minute restart delay for Free web services.
Two Supabase documents state the same 7-day inactivity trigger, the dashboard restore path, and the Free tier's backup limit.
Stripe's own pricing page states the domestic card rate, its add-ons, and how the UK page differs.
Stripe's own product page lists what a $500 one-time fee buys and what renews annually after year one.
Paddle's pricing page states one blended fee per checkout and names what it says the fee covers.
Lemon Squeezy's pricing page states its merchant-of-record fee, now under Stripe's ownership.
The companies' own announcements confirm the deal and that no financial terms were disclosed.
OpenAI's pricing page lists per-token rates for its current models as retrieved on 16 September 2026.
Anthropic's pricing page names per-token rates and caching and batch discounts as retrieved.
Stripe's own documentation names which usage-billing product to build on and why.
Paddle's materials state which tax duties it takes on and which stay with the seller.
Stripe's own pages price Stripe Tax and distinguish calculation from merchant-of-record liability.
The pricing page starts all three paid tiers at the same 10,000-email floor and separates them by retention and domain limits.
The pricing page's 100-email daily cap binds before its 3,000-email monthly allowance does for many launches.
The pricing page steps price by both pageview volume and plan tier, while a separate page prices self-hosting in labor, not license fees.
The pricing page bundles 50 sites into every tier and prices strictly by combined pageview volume across them.
The pricing page prices Free through Plus by operator seats and an included AI-credit allotment, not by ticket volume.
The pricing page charges per user, per extra knowledge-base site and per AI Answers resolution as three distinct line items.
Postmark's own guide describes per-recipient suppression and an 80% figure for hard bounces, not an account-wide rate threshold.
Plausible's own pages assert GDPR, CCPA and PECR compliance from its cookieless design, without citing a regulator ruling on the product.
Fathom's own page describes default EU isolation and a stricter, manually configured option, neither claimed as a GDPR guarantee.
The developer documentation sets per-minute call limits by plan tier and documents webhook signing, but not a retry guarantee.
The Supreme Court's 21 June 2018 opinion let states tax remote sellers without a physical presence, leaving each state's own threshold intact.
The European Commission's OSS scheme, effective 1 July 2021, lets a seller register once instead of per country, without changing whether VAT is owed.
The European Commission's 2015 rule taxed digital services where the customer belongs, and its Mini One Stop Shop was later folded into the 2021 OSS.
UK government guidance requires an overseas seller of digital services to register for VAT regardless of turnover, separate from the EU's own scheme.
The regulation's own articles set lawful-basis, notice and fine rules for any processor of EU or UK residents' data, with one narrow size exception.
The Commission's 4 June 2021 decision replaced the old Standard Contractual Clauses; old contracts stopped counting as safeguards after 27 December 2022.
The Attorney General's guidance sets three coverage tests; the CPRA's 2023 amendments added rights, not new numbers, and many sellers meet none of them.
IRS notices moved the Form 1099-K threshold from $20,000 toward a planned $600, through $5,000 and $2,500, before the older figure reappeared.
A 2023 amendment made Connecticut's privacy act apply to any consumer-health-data controller, with no revenue or consumer-count threshold at all.
Texas's 2024 statute applies to any business handling personal data unless it meets the federal Small Business Administration's own size standard.
Directive 2019/882's own text exempts microenterprises providing services, but the exemption is a size test, not a permanent status.
W3C's own 2018 recommendation defines what Level AA conformance requires, but the standard is not itself a legal mandate in any jurisdiction.
The Robles ruling applies the ADA to a website and app because of their nexus to physical stores, and the court declined to decide the case without one.
The AI Act's own text sets out when integrating a third-party model shifts provider obligations onto the company that embeds it.
Directive 2024/2853 brings software within strict product liability and compensates lost data, with transposition due by 9 December 2026, not August.
The regulation's own text lists what a data-processing agreement must contain; accepting a vendor's standard form does not certify that it does.
A 2009 amendment to the ePrivacy Directive replaced an opt-out cookie rule with a consent requirement, predating and sitting alongside the GDPR.
HHS's own definitions at 45 CFR 160.103 determine whether a health-adjacent SaaS product is a covered entity or business associate under HIPAA.
The FTC finalized COPPA amendments in January 2025, published them in April, with a June 2025 effective date distinct from the finalization date.
The European Commission's own designations name the DMA's gatekeepers; the regulation's obligations attach to them, not to solo SaaS founders.
The 2021 edition names its ranking method and states plainly that passing it is not the goal.
SPF, DKIM and DMARC each have their own RFC, and DMARC's own text says it depends on the other two.
The database's own docs describe a default-deny mechanism that still leaves testing to the application owner.
The pooler's own docs describe three pooling modes and exactly what transaction mode gives up.
AWS's own docs cap console-issued URLs at 12 hours and CLI or SDK ones at 7 days.
Stripe's documentation requires signature checks and event-id deduplication, not a guarantee against billing bugs.
The March 2019 ACME standard automates issuance and renewal, not every certificate-related risk.
GitHub's own docs scope Dependabot's fixes to manifest-listed vulnerabilities in its own advisory database.
The voluntary pledge sets seven one-year goals, including MFA by default, and names no signatory for you.
AWS's own docs set a 1-day default and 35-day ceiling, and distinguish a backup from a verified restore.
AppSumo's seller page and terms document a negotiated, undisclosed revenue share and an undated seller support duty behind every lifetime deal.
Acquire.com's biannual report states a 4.3x average TTM profit multiple on its own confirmed sales, with a 0.63x to 34x range.
Flippa's own data on 795 facilitated SaaS sales shows profit multiples from 2.6x to 5.9x depending on industry.
Acquire.com's own January 2023 rebrand post cites growth and positioning, and states no change to seller or buyer fees.
Paddle's glossary carries ProfitWell's MRR, churn and retention definitions since its 2022, over $200m acquisition of ProfitWell.
Baremetrics's own Open Startups page states companies share live metrics; it states no verification step behind any figure.
The 2025 Schedule SE instructions set a 92.35 percent base, a 15.3 percent combined rate, and a $176,100 Social Security cap.
Delaware's own schedule sets a $175 minimum but scales with authorized shares up to a $200,000 or $250,000 ceiling.
Paddle's 5% plus 50 cents fee includes merchant-of-record tax liability; Stripe's lower base fee keeps that liability with the seller.
AppSumo's terms fix a 60-day, any-reason refund right and leave the seller-side payout mechanism undisclosed.
Apple's Small Business Program cuts commission to 15% only for developers who enroll and stay under a $1,000,000 USD annual threshold.
Google's 2021 blog post and its current fee page both document a 15% rate on the first $1,000,000 USD, though the mechanics have since grown more complex.
Shopify's partner agreement sets a 0% revenue share on the first $1,000,000 USD in App Revenue earned on or after 1 January 2025, with conditions.
Product Hunt's own guidelines treat solicited voting as manipulation its ranking system can penalize, not as a quality signal.
Hacker News's own guidelines allow occasional self-posting but explicitly forbid asking anyone to upvote or comment on it.
Google's own policy requires the narrowest permissions a feature needs and bars requesting access for features not yet built.
Microsoft's developer agreement sets a flat 15% store fee for apps, down from a narrower 95/5 program the same document once offered.
Reddit's sitewide content policy bars spam while a separate, informal page states the widely cited 9:1 self-promotion ratio.
Google's own search documentation states meeting its criteria never guarantees crawling, indexing, or a ranking result.
Maciej Ceglowski's own blog post describes the bot traffic and pricing decisions behind Pinboard's $22-$39 a year business.
Jon Yongfook's post on reaching $50K MRR describes when he hires and what Bannerbear customers pay today.
An Indie Hackers AMA has Adam Wathan stating Tailwind UI's team size and revenue in his own words.
Two Plausible Analytics blog posts, four years apart, describe its team size, revenue and refusal of outside funding.
Fathom Analytics's own blog documents a $100,000 infrastructure cut and a later internal buyout between its two founders.
An archived snapshot of Nomad List's open page shows self-reported figures the site itself does not call an audit.
Instatus and Atlassian's Statuspage each publish, on their own pages, what a hosted status page actually provides.
Help Scout's own homepage states a 99%-within-24-hours reply rate for its support team, as one vendor's example.
Josh Pigford's 2014 posts made Baremetrics's own dashboard public, years before its Open Startups directory existed.
Cloudflare's own 18 November 2025 postmortem names detection, cause and recovery times to the minute.
CHM's own posts describe shareware-era developers and archived materials, not sales figures.
Apple's program page treats the Mac App Store the same as iOS, naming no separate threshold, rate, or enrollment step for macOS.
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