CloudGlue was my first (huge) big node.js based product experiment, and boy was it an ambitious and hard lessons learned experience.

Click for archived documentation and screenshots - note live app and blog links are dead.

In the early 2010s I was inspired by the flexibility of Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) platforms like Kinvey and Parse, and delightful frontend UX platforms like Shopify + Liquid templates.

These platforms provided a bunch of out of the box functionality and were richly customisable, providing users a great starting point, and easy customisation down to custom code that ran on their servers.

At the time I was a subscriptions/payments consultant, utilising payment platforms like Paypal and Stripe, and subscription platforms like Chargify.

My clients often wanted to provide a custom subscription experience for their customers to start and manage their subscriptions.

Chargify provided a barely configurable portal, Chargebee was in it's infancy,and Cratejoy was pre-launch.

So I decided to build my own hybrid platform to serve this opportunity.

I hastily went deep into building my own BaaS and Shopify style platform.