Elixir Mentor Levi Robertson on building double-zero
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Sep 28, 2024 Levi Robertson, the CEO and founder of double-zero, shares his journey in creating a self-hosted email monitoring service powered by Elixir. He discusses the learning curve of adopting a new programming language, the advantages of Phoenix Live View, and the obstacles in web development. Levi reveals strategies for sustainable income through hosting and SEO, the technical challenges of email processing, and the importance of user-focused software. His experience emphasizes the value of community support and innovative business models in the tech landscape.
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Provide Cheap Hosted Option Without Locking Customers
- Offer a hosted opt-in for customers but keep the product easy to self-host to align incentives.
- Levi plans cheap hosted tiers similar to Coolify so users can self-host or pay him to host without locking them in.
Middle Layer Apps Need Little Internal State
- Apps that act as a thin middle layer to managed services require minimal internal state, reducing complexity.
- Double Zero mainly proxies to AWS SES, so Levi avoided heavy stateful design and leveraged Elixir strengths.
SQLite Is Viable For HighThroughput Email Batches
- SQLite can handle high-throughput batched writes for many email use cases despite single-writer limits.
- Levi benchmarked ~11,000 recorded emails per second with batching and found AWS account limits are the real bottleneck, not SQLite.