Scattergun is open for new users once again

Scattergun is open for business again. I initially launched the product way back in October, 2021. A few months later, my accountant told me I couldn’t directly collect payments (using Stripe) for SaaS from EU consumers due to their ludicrous place-of-supply tax laws. I won’t get into the weeds here, but check out these articles if you’re curious about the specifics:

• https://benfoster.io/blog/vat-for-saas-businesses-in-the-eu
• https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-vat-rules-if-you-supply-digital-services-to-private-consumers#the-place-of-supply-of-digital-services

As such, I had to pause sign ups until I could migrate the billing system over to a Merchant of Record that would take the tax liability off my shoulders.

Now that’s done, and Scattergun is accepting new users again. There’s a new pricing structure of $9/month or $90/year for unlimited mailing lists and subscribers.

As part of the re-launch, I’ve added a feature to import and export your mailing list. You no longer have to contact support for this.

We’ve also ditched the dumpster fire that is Twitter for Mastodon and BlueSky; and swapped Postmark in favour of MailPace for transactional and inbound email because they share our privacy focused ethos.

Trusting SaaS is difficult. Services are frequently taken offline at a moment’s notice. And I understand that trusting Scattergun is a bigger ask since the product has been on pause for a such a long time.

As such, I’m making a commitment here that Scattergun will remain online and operational for as long as it has paying users.

What the hell took so long to re-launch?

Scattergun has been operational, but in effective hibernation since early 2022. It still worked. I’ve been using it. The Rails Foundation has also been using it, as have some of my friends. But since I couldn’t charge for subscriptions, I closed sign ups.

My book, The Rails and Hotwire Codex, took up all my attention and energy in 2022. Then, a rather difficult couple of years personally meant that Scattergun fell by the wayside.

Ignoring the app for so long had consequences. Even though it was always online, a lot of cruft had collected. Scattergun started life as a Rails 6.1 app. I’d hacked together a bunch of stuff that was missing in Turbo at the time. Worst of all though, it used Webpacker. It was a bit of a faff to clear away all the weeds and modernise the app before I could migrate the billing system over. Now that’s all done. Scattergun runs Rails 8 and Turbo 8.

Throughout 2025, I plan to improve Scattergun and find that balance between features and simplicity. A couple of ideas I’m playing with are:

• An API to add subscribers and send emails.
• Tagging subscribers so you can email a segment of your subscriber list.

I don’t yet know what shape these features might take, or if they’ll even make it into the app. Let’s see what happens when I start building them out!

Sign up for free and take Scattergun for a spin!