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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
