Philip Findeisen

Any time I've had a question, I've been able to get a real, helpful human on the phone within minutes. That alone is worth the subscription price. The app is intuitive, but knowing there's expert help available if I mess something up gives me great peace of mind. The automated late payment reminders are also a lifesaver.

We needed to integrate with 20+ HRIS systems (Workday, BambooHR, Gusto, etc.). Building those one by one would have taken us two years. With Merge, we did it in three weeks. The unified data model is actually standardized well, and the 'Link' UI for our customers to connect their accounts is polished and professional.

The 'Request E-signatures' feature alone saves me hours a week. It's seamless to send a contract, have it signed, and get it back filed automatically. Editing text in a PDF is still a bit finicky (fonts sometimes don't match perfectly), but it's better than any other tool I've tried. The cloud integration allows me to start work on my desktop and finish on my iPad seamlessly.

We put all our sites behind Cloudflare and instantly saw reductions in spam traffic and random bot hits. The WAF rules and DDoS protection work quietly in the background. DNS is blazing fast, and we get basic protection for free on smaller sites. The Zero Trust tools for securing internal apps are an added bonus.

I use `npx playwright codegen` to scaffold most of my tests. It records my clicks and types out the code. It gets me 90% of the way there, and I just clean up the selectors. It makes writing robust tests so fast. It's also extremely stable in CI environments compared to Selenium.

Technically, Auth0 is amazing. It handles everything we throw at it. But the MAU (Monthly Active Users) pricing model is brutal for B2C apps with free tiers. We got hit with a massive bill just because we had a viral month, even though those users weren't paying us. Great product, but do your math carefully before committing.

We were on a legacy plan for years, and then they suddenly increased our price by 400% with very little warning. Support was unhelpful and just pointed to the new pricing page. The tool itself is okay, but there are so many competitors now that this kind of business practice is unacceptable. We switched to Agorapulse.

Smile is a great loyalty solution. The VIP tiers are a good way to reward our best customers. However, as our store has grown, the monthly cost for the paid plans has become significant. It's a powerful tool, but you need to make sure your program is driving enough repeat business to justify the cost.