Guides and perspective on owning your storefront — pricing, payments, data ownership, and running an independent commerce business.
Niblr invoices have carried a logo since the day templates shipped. No invoice ever showed one. Two silent failures, a library that logs and carries on, and the test that finally looked at the PDF.
Read →Niblr's public repo is generated from the private one on every release: hosted code deleted, seams swapped, a leak scan, then CI that migrates and builds it. How it works, and what broke first.
What it means to hold your own payment gateway keys — money settling straight to your bank, rates you negotiate yourself, and the chargebacks and compliance of being the merchant of record.
An honest account of migrating a store off Shopify — which data moves automatically, what you rebuild by hand, who shouldn't move yet, and what staying actually costs in the UAE and India.
The phrase is on every commerce platform's marketing page, including ours. Four questions that tell you whether it means anything — with our own answers, including the unflattering ones.
We wrote a test that stops our pricing page advertising features we haven't built. It worked. Then a second, editable copy of that data drifted for five days on the page most people see.
Four bugs I shipped or nearly shipped in one week building Niblr — every one of them with a green test suite. What they had in common, and what I changed.
Connect Claude, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible AI tool to your Niblr store and run it by chatting — check orders, add products, and draft pages. Reads on every plan; editing on Growth.
Niblr is an open-source Shopify alternative that charges a flat hosting fee and takes 0% of your sales. Own your domain, payment keys, and customer data.