§ VII Chronicle

Journal.

Field notes from shipping Rails SaaS with AI inside. Process, tradeoffs, lessons.

2026.

Vol. 02

Stripe billing in a Rails SaaS MVP: the minimum viable schema

Store Stripe IDs and mirrored status, never derive money locally — the moment you add a price_cents column, you're reconciling two ledgers that disagree.

#stripe
#rails
#saas billing
#subscriptions
#mvp

30 MAY

Solid Queue in Rails 8 production: ditching Redis on a one-box deploy

Rails 8 ships Solid Queue as the default job backend. My rubric for dropping Sidekiq and Redis on one box: one Postgres, one supervisor, FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED.

#solid-queue
#rails 8
#background jobs
#active job
#sidekiq

28 MAY

Adding semantic search to a Rails app with pgvector in one weekend

Embeddings are just another column and the query is ORDER BY — no vector database, no SaaS. The chunking-and-dimensions decision that eats your Saturday if you skip it.

#rails
#pgvector
#semantic search
#postgres
#embeddings

27 MAY

LLM routing in Rails: OpenRouter with fallback chains and budget caps

Route LLM calls through OpenRouter with an ordered fallback chain and a spend gate — a service object and config file, no gem, with a tier-by-tier ordering rubric.

#rails
#openrouter
#llm
#fallback
#service objects

25 MAY

Zero-downtime Rails migrations: four moves that cover 90% of cases

A locking-aware rubric for safe Rails schema changes, down to why ADD COLUMN with a constant default stopped rewriting the table in Postgres 11.

#rails
#postgres
#database migrations
#zero-downtime
#devops

23 MAY

Rails multi-tenancy patterns: row-scoping vs schema vs database per tenant

A rubric for picking row-scoped, schema-per-tenant, or database-per-tenant in Rails — and what each pattern costs you when a query forgets the fence.

#rails
#multi-tenancy
#postgres
#architecture
#saas

22 MAY

Kamal vs Fly.io vs Render: a solo Rails founder's rubric

Five-axis scorecard for picking between Kamal, Fly.io, and Render when you're the only engineer running a Rails app, a DB, and a worker.

#rails
#deployment
#kamal
#fly.io
#render

21 MAY

Devise vs Rodauth in 2026: picking auth for a new Rails app

A five-axis rubric for choosing between Devise and Rodauth on a green-field Rails 8 SaaS — with the trade-offs you inherit on day 400.

#rails
#devise
#rodauth
#authentication
#saas

20 MAY

Hotwire vs React for a B2B SaaS dashboard: a Rails engineer's rubric

Five questions I score before picking Hotwire or a React SPA on a Rails API for a B2B SaaS dashboard — and the failure modes each one hides.

#hotwire
#react
#rails
#b2b saas
#architecture

19 MAY

Sidekiq vs Solid Queue in 2026: when to switch and when not to

A four-question rubric for choosing between Sidekiq and Solid Queue in Rails 8, with one falsifiable line on where the switch pays off.

#rails
#sidekiq
#solid queue
#background jobs
#redis

18 MAY

Fixed-price vs hourly software development: the MVP math nobody shows

Pricing model is a risk allocation choice, not a rate choice. Here's the variance rubric I run before quoting a SaaS MVP, with a worked example.

#pricing
#saas mvp
#contracting
#scope
#risk

17 MAY

A SaaS discovery call agenda that actually fits in 30 minutes

Seven blocks, three to five minutes each, that replace the consulting-firm script with the agenda I run on solo founder calls.

#discovery call
#saas
#consulting
#solo engineer
#sales

16 MAY

Atelier redesign and switching chat to Workers AI

Tossing the glass-blur AI-purple aesthetic for an editorial typographic system, and swapping the chat backend to Cloudflare Workers AI in an afternoon.

#design
#ai
#astro
#cloudflare

16 MAY

Postgres RAG with pgvector: skip Pinecone, ship on one box

How a single-box Rails setup with pgvector and ruby_llm replaced a managed vector DB — 180 lines, 50k chunks, three pitfalls.

#pgvector
#rag
#postgres
#ruby-llm
#rails