For a bit more than a month now I’ve been working hard on finishing my new app EpicForge.app and finally launching it. This is a big step for me: I’ve shipped my fair share of websites, apps and random tools on internet, but this is the first time I’m making a paid app, asking real money to use it.
Why is it that as soon as you complete that stripe checkout integration and slap a pricing section on your landing page, it becomes so much more emotional?
When it’s a free tool, you don’t really care whether people use it or not, you just had an idea and feel content to have made it a thing and put it out in the world but when it’s a paid app, if nobody buys it then suddenly it feels like this big failure.
Are you good enough? Somehow this becomes a judgement of your skills and business acumen. Because of this feeling I’ve refrained from turning on payments in some of my apps from fear of failure… But not this time.
What is it?
Epic Forge is based on a tool I built for myself and have used for the past 3 or 4 years at work. I manage these recurring projects in JIRA that consist of an epic and a bunch of stories/tasks which are mostly the same but have different assignees depending on the geo (APAC/AMER/EMEA).
At first I would use the out-of-the-box JIRA deep clone tool but then would spend an hour editing the titles, changing the assignees, etc. I also hate that it keeps cloned-from links to the original issue.
So I built my own tool that stores templates for your epics (or sets of stories) and lets you export to a CSV for easy import into your projects. It has nifty features:
- Templates can have multiple variants where you can toggle part of the issues and/or change the default assignee.
- Issues can have placeholder text (using the
{{placeholder}}format) in the issue summary and description which you can auto-replace at export time.
Tech Stack
I always go for my trusty Django for the backend, but this time I tried my hand at a modern React frontend with NextJS.
While I’m really not a frontend guy, shadcn/ui has made building professional looking interface a real breeze and I’m actually enjoying this part of the build for the first time in years.
Finally, I’m hosting all of this with Coolify on a Hetzner VPS which is also really cool and easy to setup.
Conclusion
I don’t know if this app will be successful, but at least I went all the way and shipped something out in the world. That’s always a good muscle to flex.
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