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RHRhea Vandermeer3d ago
I put off making a product video for about six months because every previous attempt turned into an afternoon in an editor. Recorded the screen capture, dropped it in, picked a template and had something I was not embarrassed by in under an hour. The part that actually saved me was the automatic captions — most people watch these on mute and I would not have bothered otherwise. My one complaint is that the template choice matters more than it looks like it does; the first one I picked made everything feel like an advert.
Typeframes
TOTobias Lindqvist9d ago
Set this up for a small open source project after people kept asking where they could send something. Took about ten minutes and the first support came through the same week. What works is that supporters do not need an account — that single thing removes most of the drop-off I saw with the alternative I tried first. Payouts have been on schedule. Marking it four rather than five because the analytics are thin; I would like to know where people are arriving from and I cannot tell.
Buy Me a Coffee
MAMarguerite Osei15d ago
Been using this for about four months for content planning. It is genuinely good at surfacing things I would not have thought to look for, and a couple of those became our best-performing posts of the quarter. Worth being realistic about what the numbers are though. The growth figures are directional rather than exact, and I have seen a few topics flagged as rising that were really one large news cycle. I treat it as a list of things to go investigate rather than a list of things to go write, and on that basis it earns its cost.
Exploding Topics
DEDevashish Raman22d ago
I have used this on every backend project for years and it is still the first thing I install. Collections shared across the team save a genuine amount of onboarding time, and the scripting is powerful enough that we run a decent chunk of our integration checks through it. The honest criticism is that it has grown a lot. What was a fast request client now takes a while to start and pushes cloud features I do not want. It is still the tool I reach for; I just notice the weight now in a way I did not three years ago.
Postman
PRPriyanka Balachandran1mo ago
Moved a marketing site and two documentation sites over last year. The thing I did not expect to care about was deploy previews on every pull request — being able to send a designer a working link instead of a screenshot changed how our review process works. Rollbacks are one click and have saved me twice. Build minutes are the thing to watch on the pricing side; our docs site rebuilds often and we hit the limit faster than I planned for, so check that before committing if you deploy frequently.
Netlify

Courses

Course platforms and cohort-based learning.

Nothing launched in this category yet.

About Courses

Course platforms and course-building tools cover everything from hosting a set of videos to full learning systems with assessment, cohorts and certification. The launches here are worth reading with one question in mind: is this software for delivering content, or software for producing learning? They are different products and the marketing rarely distinguishes.

Content delivery is the commodity end. Video hosting, a progress bar, a payment wall. It is a solved problem and the tools are cheap, which is appropriate because a recorded course is a book with a higher production budget, and completion rates for self-paced video courses are famously dismal — frequently in the single digits.

What raises completion is structure that creates obligation and feedback. Cohorts with a start date and other people. Deadlines. Assignments someone looks at. A place to ask questions and get answers. Tools that support these are solving the actual problem, which is not access to information but the difficulty of learning alone. If you are building a course, the design decision that matters most is not video quality; it is whether anyone will notice if a student stops.

Assessment is the underrated component. Practice with immediate feedback is one of the most robust findings in learning research, and it is largely absent from the course market because it is expensive to author. Even simple retrieval questions after each section improve retention substantially over passive watching. See [flashcards and recall](/categories/flashcards) for the mechanism.

For creators, pricing structure matters more than the platform. Platforms that take a percentage forever are expensive at scale; ones charging a flat fee are expensive at low volume. Consider also who owns the customer relationship: some platforms have their own marketplace and will market to your students, which cuts both ways.

Accessibility is a requirement rather than a nicety in education, and in many contexts a legal one. Captions on every video, transcripts, keyboard-operable interfaces, and materials that work with assistive technology. Platforms vary a great deal here, and it is worth checking before you have built a hundred lessons on one.

The most valuable thing a course can offer that a book cannot is a person who answers your specific question. Everything else is production values.