Trust and safety in marketplaces: verification, reviews, and dispute resolution
The trust layer is the part of a marketplace that determines whether the first bad transaction kills the business or whether the platform survives it. ID verification, review integrity, dispute workflow, and escrow are the four mechanisms that make the difference, and each has a specific shape that works in 2026 and several that don't.
Building a credit/token economy inside your product: when and how
Credits are the default pricing architecture for AI SaaS in 2026 because inference has no economies of scale. Here is when credits beat straight pricing, how to design the ledger so it survives audits and refunds, and the jurisdiction traps to avoid.
Claude 4.7 vs GPT-5 vs Gemini 3: which LLM wins for production SaaS in 2026
Three flagship models, three different strengths. Here's how we pick between Claude 4.7, GPT-5, and Gemini 3 when wiring an LLM into a production SaaS — and the tradeoffs nobody talks about.
Local payment rails for global marketplaces: beyond Stripe
Stripe handles the US and Europe gracefully. It handles Brazil, India, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria less gracefully — or not at all. Here's how to architect a multi-gateway marketplace without drowning in ifs, and the local rails worth wiring up first.
SaaS pricing in 2026: usage-based vs per-seat vs hybrid models
Per-seat, usage-based, hybrid, freemium — the four models every SaaS founder picks between. When each one fits, how Vercel, Linear, and Notion chose theirs, and how to migrate without burning goodwill.
Two-factor authentication done right: TOTP, WebAuthn, and passkeys
SMS 2FA is deprecated, TOTP is table stakes, and passkeys are the 2026 default for any product that takes account security seriously. Here's how to pick, ship, and recover each method without creating a worse problem than the one you started with.
From prototype to production: shipping an AI feature that doesn't hallucinate
The prototype impressed the stakeholders. The production version invented a policy number and sent it to a customer. Here's the layered defence we ship now so that doesn't happen.
The real cost of running LLMs at scale: token economics for SaaS founders
What LLMs actually cost at production scale in 2026 — per-model pricing, cache math, batch savings, input/output ratios, and the trap that sinks more SaaS margins than any other.
Animations that perform: Framer Motion, View Transitions API, and when to pick which
Three animation tools, three jobs. Framer Motion for component choreography, the View Transitions API for cross-route animations, and CSS for everything small — here is how the Vertex Stack team decides, and the INP gotchas that separate animations that feel good from animations that tank Core Web Vitals.
Feature flags, gradual rollouts, and experimentation for SaaS teams
Feature flags are three different tools sharing a name: kill switches, progressive rollouts, and experiments. Teams that conflate them ship slower, measure worse, and wake up two years later with a codebase full of dead branches. Here's how to separate them cleanly.
We don't just write about this — we ship it.
SaaS platforms, two-sided marketplaces, AI-backed products — shipped to production since 2017.