u/xiaoi_

I'm a Procreate hobbyist and have finally set up my Payhip store to start selling my Procreate brushes 🎉

For anyone else in the same boat, i've tested a bunch of platforms and finally settled with payhip cuz there are no monthly fees, no upfront fees, and i get to fully customize my store. There are also a bunch of built in marketing tools that i have yet to fully explore. i see a bunch of other procreate brush sellers there, so i hope im in good hands.

Im still figuring everything out, so id love some advice from people who’ve sold brushes before.

Rn im mainly trying to figure out:

- What’s the best way to get traffic and sales?

- Which social media platform is most worth focusing on for procreate brushes?

I’m thinking TikTok, IG, and Pinterest seem like the main options, but im not sure where beginners see the best results.

My pockets are thin, so im trying to keep everything super low-cost, but im willing to put in the time creating content and promoting consistently.

If you sell brushes, templates, or other digital downloads, I’d love to hear what helped you get your first few sales.

We started getting hit pretty hard with signup fraud over the last few mo (free trials getting abused, fake accounts inflating metrics, some even testing stolen cards).

I’d share what we’re currently doing - curious what others are running.

Current stack:

- Email verification - Blocking disposable domains really helps.

- IP + geo checks - We flag suspicious regions / VPN-heavy traffic. Not blocking outright, just adding friction (extra verification).

- Rate limiting, esp on signup + trial activation endpoints.

- Device fingerprinting (lightweight)

- reCAPTCHA (only when needed) like instead of showing it to everyone, we trigger it dynamically when behavior looks off.

- Trial abuse prevention

-> 1 trial per card

-> soft checks on card BIN + country mismatch

-> delaying full feature access by a few minutes (surprisingly reduces bot success)

- Internal scoring system - Each signup gets a “risk score” based on signals above. High-risk users get throttled / limited.

I've also been looking into more dedicated fraud tools, like seon to unify some of these signals instead of duct-taping everything internally, esp for things like device intelligence + real-time scoring. Still evaluating if it’s worth it vs staying scrappy.

Curious what others are doing here, esp if you’ve found a good balance between fraud prevention and keeping signup smooth.

I'm currently re-evaluating our SIP trunking setup and testing a few providers side by side. Main things i care about are call setup time, media latency, and overall reliability under load.

far I’ve tried a mix of options (including Telnyx), but I don’t want to bias the discussion.

So

For those running production traffic:

- Which provider has been the most consistent for you?

- Any noticeable differences in latency or routing quality?

- Anything that only shows up once you scale?

Not a “Twilio sucks” post, it worked fine for me for a while. But costs + a few reliability quirks started adding up, esp once volume picked up on outbound + verification. About ~1.5 month ago, we ripped it out and rebuilt the comms layer. Thought i’d share the current stack since a few people here are probably in the same phase.

What we switched to:

- Voice + SMS: Telnyx

- Orchestration: lightweight internal service (Node) instead of chaining vendor logic

- Queues: Redis

- Routing logic: handled at app layer vs vendor configs

- Logging: everything centralized (before it was scattered across Twilio console + app logs)

Why we moved:

- Pricing got harder to justify as we scaled outbound

- Debugging flows across Twilio Studio / Functions wasn’t fun

- Wanted tighter control over retries, fallbacks, and routing logic

What got better:

- Cost per message/call is noticeably lower (esp intl)

- More control over edge cases (failed delivery, retries, etc.)

- Simpler mental model, everything important lives in our codebase now

- Latency feels slightly better on voice (could be setup-dependent tho)

What got worse (or at least not plug and play):

- Had to rebuild parts of flows that Twilio gives out-of-the-box

- Docs/setup took a bit more upfront effort

Net/net:

If you’re early or don’t want to think about infra -> Twilio still makes sense

If you’re doing volume + care about margins/control -> worth exploring alternatives

Curious what others here are running for comms infra right now...