How is this any different than the subscriptions they previously offered? And what do services like Recurly do that Stripe subscriptions don't? And when is Stripe going to automatically handle sales tax?
I still have not found a single subscription solution that seamlessly handles adding sales tax and properly reporting it. Stripe does not. Recurly does not. TaxJar does not work with subscriptions. Avalara does not work with subscriptions...
With my UK small business hat on: Sometimes, it is just easier and cheaper to build it yourself than to rely on an outsourced service that doesn't do exactly what you need.
We have a database table of VAT rates per country with starting dates when they come into effect. All customer accounts are tied to a specific country, so all payments or subscriptions for an account can look up the current rate from the database and apply tax as necessary.
All successful payments (one-off or recurring) are recorded in our DB, triggered by webhooks from the various payment services we use. The DB records include all the tax information that applied at the time of the payment, including things like country and proof-of-location as required under EU VAT rules, and also including generating a sequential ID for each payment to comply with the rules there. This is also the point at which we do any necessary currency conversion calculations, and we then generate and send customers an email automatically with all the same details.
A little scripting looks up the necessary sales and tax figures from the database for the various VAT returns we are required to file for UK and for other EU customers.
The significant limitations are mostly around keeping that VAT rates table up-to-date (I know of no acceptable automated method for doing this, so we just have to review the information manually at frequent intervals) and around handling money repaid (refunds, or if we do ever get a chargeback or similar). As far as I'm aware, none of the automated services is even close to getting these things right either, so we're still no worse off having to do a few things by hand in these relatively rare situations.
Setting that lot up was a decent chunk of work, particularly all the hassle around EU VAT, which we had to retrofit in at least one case I can recall. However, it's certainly achievable for an average developer within a few days.
That's what businesses like Avalara are trying to do, but the EU VAT rules are such a mess that even the specialist businesses trying to do it still haven't nailed it several years later.
Same problem here. We use Avalara and just manage the subscription piece ourselves, i.e submit the transaction once we receive the webhook from Stripe.
Previously they only offered tiered billing (e.g.: gold, silver, bronze plans), further, the API for that was structured so you're billing for the next month.
This announcement suggests "usage-based", which is how AWS and Google Cloud bill you: for how much you used during the previous billing period.
Stove-top siphon pot (Yama 5 cup). I've found it to be the best method after trying all (according to my personal tastes and style). Metal filter only.
French Press or Clever comes in second place. Also metal filter only.
For cold brew: two glass 3L jugs, a funnel and metal filter.
Other things:
Baratza Virtuoso Grinder, Lavatools digital thermometer, timer (any will do), gram scale (any will do).
Coffee: Fresh beans from Portorico importing (NYC). Light-roast only.
Same situation. Had a System 76 Lemur Ultra for 3 years and hated it after 6 months. The battery had to be replaced every 10-12 months. The build quality was appalling. Everything was falling apart. The finish and keys were coming off. HDMI never worked. WIFI problems every day. It was really a piece of garbage. I'd be embarrassed to sell those.
Just got a Dell XPS 13 for about the same price I paid for the System 76 piece of junk. It's an amazing computer.
Most lotteries are not 1 in 175 million.. using the hardest-to-win lottery skews this article a bit..
I don't really understand the point of this article. Is he trying to expose the "morons" who play the lottery for being just that? Maybe the $2 or so bucks means nothing to people playing. Maybe the excitement of the lead-up to the drawing and the checking of the numbers is more fun than $2 in my pocket. You can barely even buy a soda with $2 now.
If those jackpots swell over $200M, betting $1 to win against 1:175M odds is a good bet. If I could bet $1 to win $15 and I had a 1 in 10 chance of winning, I'd do it every time.
In the end, the lottery funds go towards the city/state, and usually education. It's a fun form of charity.
> But swing traders need to win at least 50% of the time in order to be profitable.
That's not true. It completely depends on your strategy/system. You can be highly-profitable with a 30% win-rate (or any number) granted the amount you win is far higher than the amount you lose. If my average win is $1000 and my average loss is $100, I can be profitable with only 10% wins (excluding commissions).
I don't really understand this article. You compare the core node add/edit form with GMail's email compose form - and that's it? That's all Drupal can do? No, it's not even close. I understand that the core UI elements in Drupal are pretty bad, but why not mention how easy it is for a developer to clone that compose form? Why even use a node form to do the comparison (you're not creating content here). This just takes an unfair stab at Drupal without going in to any details at all.
Does it cause you to reflect a bit that you're accusing Acquia of not understanding the potential of Drupal and of just trying to spread FUD to attack it?
No. First, I'm not accusing Acquia of anything. I'm simply saying that I don't agree with the article, understand the real point of it, and I think it was poorly written. I'm completely failing to see the connection or proper comparison of GMail's compose form to Drupal's not-so-pretty node forms. I think it does nothing but make Drupal look bad without giving any information at all.
I don't have a guide on-hand but my advice, if you're new to Drupal, would be to take a few weeks and really explore the power of it (via contributed modules and some of your own development; if possible). The same thing scared me away initially (that was 8 years ago), but I've learned to love the power and complete flexibility that this platform offers.
Since we're talking about messaging, try out the Private message module. Right off the bat, you'll get a much cleaner form than the ugly node form. Private messages are also fieldable so you can add additional fields like attachments, labels, etc. Using the API (hook_form_alter()), you can do anything you want to any form at all. Then once you introduce a good theme, the possibilities are as endless as any other solution.
I'd also take a look at some of the Drupal 8 backported modules for Drupal 7 (if you're going to use 7). They introduced a number of great UI changes and made some of them available for Drupal 7 via modules.
Thanks - I used Drupal a lot from v4.4-4.7 and then was responsible for the security of a handful of 4.5-4.7 and v6 sites. Neither task endeared me to it, but I know Drupal 8 is going to be pretty different, so seems a good one to look at.
The flexibility's great, but the code hooks felt like a maintainability nightmare ("just what's affecting this now? It's 6 months since I last looked at this module..."). A tradeoff I guess. I was also burned by broken modules (submitted a couple of patches, but it did defeat the point of off-the-shelf features), but Wordpress et al are no better at that either!
Continuing with my earlier point, I don't have specific examples to give, but I've built so many complex web applications using Drupal with beautiful interfaces/UIs that you wouldn't even be able to recognize what was powering it. The complete allure of Drupal to me is that you can be literally anything (for the most part), and you can do it incredibly fast.
I just got the System 76 Lemur Ultra a few weeks ago. Intel i5, 128GB SSD, 8GB RAM. It's amazing. Ubuntu works perfectly. All hardware works perfectly. Their support is top-notch and almost instant. With shipping, total was like $860.
Peace of mind going forward with new Ubuntu releases is priceless.
