Captain's Log: Stardate 77569.1

No fun engineering today. I started working on creating an LLC and getting a bunch of annoying formal legal stuff set up, which was distracting enough that I didn't make any progress on Anukari itself. But, this is all good, as it slowly gets me closer to the prerequisites I need to do an early closed Alpha. (Still quite a ways off, but closer every day.)

On the other hand, I did manage to do a bit of research on the current landscape for creating a super-simple webapp for the sales website. The main conclusion that I've come to so far is that all the "no-code" solutions are really cool and shiny and awesome, BUT if you run into a single feature you need that they don't provide, you're hosed. Sometimes those features are provided by some 3rd-party integration, but then you end up with the no-code host + all the 3rd parties all taking their revenue cuts. One product registration provider wanted an extra $1k/year to use a custom domain for the product registration endpoint that the downloaded software contacts. Insanity -- there's NO WAY that I'm baking in a requirement for some bullshit 3rd party domain to be up for old Anukari binaries to work.

Plus I have deep concerns about lock-in. Having a 3rd party own things like the product registration database seems highly sketchy, or at least gives me PITA vibes when the 3rd party shuts down, gets bought, migrates, etc. Yuck. So I was hoping maybe there was some nice point-and-click website builder (like Webflow) where I could just plug in a little bit of custom code to reach out to an API that I owned to do the special logic. But that doesn't seem possible; Webflow is not flexible in that way.

I'm still not sure what direction I'll go, but it's been interesting so far to get a glimpse of this new no-code landscape. I hate it so far.