Question 1

What is the best AI coding assistant in 2026?

Accepted Answer

Cursor leads on integrated IDE experience and codebase-aware editing. GitHub Copilot is the safe enterprise pick. Cody from Sourcegraph wins for very large monorepos. Claude Code is the strongest agentic coding tool when you want the AI to actually run the loop. The right pick depends on whether you want a faster autocomplete (Copilot), a smarter pair-programmer (Cursor), or an autonomous agent (Claude Code).

Question 2

What is the cheapest payment gateway for a SaaS?

Accepted Answer

Stripe at 2.9% + 30¢ has the lowest raw fees but you handle global tax compliance. Lemon Squeezy at 5% + 50¢ is a merchant of record — they handle every tax jurisdiction worldwide. The 2-point premium is cheaper than tax automation under roughly $30k MRR. Above that, Stripe + an accountant typically wins. Skip Gumroad for real subscriptions in 2026 (10% fee).

Question 3

How much does running a side project actually cost in 2026?

Accepted Answer

Genuinely $0 to $5 a month at zero traffic — Cloudflare Pages plus Supabase free tier plus Resend free tier covers a real working app. Once you have any users, the realistic floor is $25–40/month for a 'real' stack. The biggest budget killer is AI API spend, not infrastructure — set per-user daily limits from day one.

Question 4

Which AI API is the cheapest in 2026?

Accepted Answer

Gemini 2.5 Flash at roughly $0.075 per million input tokens is the cheapest from a major provider. DeepSeek V3 ($0.30/M) is competitive at modestly higher cost. Groq's hosted Llama 3.1 70B is fast and inexpensive if you can use open-weight models. Production apps typically route 80% of traffic to the cheap model and only escalate complex requests to GPT-5 or Claude Opus.

Question 5

Are AI-generated apps production-ready?

Accepted Answer

The frontend usually is — Cursor, v0, Bolt, and Lovable can ship a working SaaS UI in an afternoon. The backend usually isn't. Webhooks, subscription state machines, edge cases in payment flows, monitoring, and compliance still require hand-coding (or careful AI prompting). Treat AI-generated code as a competent first draft from a junior engineer — it needs a senior review.

Question 6

How does Stripe actually make money?

Accepted Answer

The headline 2.9% + 30¢ is mostly pass-through to card networks and issuing banks — Stripe nets roughly 0.3% of payment volume on raw card processing. The real margin business is the layered products: Stripe Tax (0.5%), Billing (0.5%), Connect, Issuing, Atlas, Capital, Treasury. These have 70%+ gross margins and are why Stripe is valued at ~$70B vs. ~$15B if it were just a payment processor.