HackerPromos
Just built a new thing, hackerpromos.com.
It's a site that aggregates promo deals for SaaS/PaaS/IaaS developer tools (mostly for college students).
Why?
Long back story: I was spending $50/month on MongoDB Atlas for a project (mydesktour.com). A MongoDB product manager reached out to me for feedback, and I asked him if they could be more generous with their free tier. Turns out they offer $200 credits through the Github Student Developer Pack. I signed up with my 5 vanity rice.edu emails, and got $1000 in free credits! I wondered, how many other deals for popular developer tools are out there am I missing out on?
Short back story: I'm cheap.
But here's the kicker: I built damn thing in <4 hours and wrote 0 lines of code.
How?
Pory.io + Airtable (funny, I used an Airtable student promo you can find on hackerpromos.com).
I did the following:
Scrape deal information from the Github Student Developer Pack offerings website using a really handy webscraping tool (best I've ever used - stop using BeautifulSoup, damnit!).
Push that to an Airtable base.
Purchase a $12/month Pory.io subscription (had to in order for custom domain).
Purchase the hackerpromos.com domain for $8 using Namecheap.
Connect the data with the Pory.io template using their nice documentation
Done!
This project really made me hop on the #nocode bandwagon! I wrote some more thoughts on #nocode here.
What's next?
Hit up the main channels: HN/IH/PH/Reddit.
See if there's any interest in such a thing, and try to fill up that Airtable base.
I'll be writing more, stay tuned!
In the meantime, follow the HackerPromos twitter to get deals as we find em!