Built instant repo preview and safer billing for prelaunch demos

This week I shipped two things that make demos honest and prelaunch billing safer. You can now paste any public repo and see a realistic preview of today's post across X, Threads, and LinkedIn. I also added a reversible 14-day trial and visitor-friendly caps so I can let early testers play without risking billing surprises.

What shipped

• –Instant repo preview: paste a public repo URL and see a live preview of how a generated post would look on X, Threads, and LinkedIn. The demo uses realistic content, humanized captions, and PNG download for sharing.
• –Preview reliability improvements: captions are sanitized, drafts are isolated so they don’t interfere with pending posts, and the demo shows engagement and value-stacked pricing for better context.
• –Billing: implemented a 14-day reverse trial that computes entitlements and sends felt-loss downgrade emails. Visitor-friendly caps prevent surprise charges during prelaunch testing.
• –Safety and maintenance: disabled automatic deploys so I can batch releases from the CLI during prelaunch. Also bumped a dependency to fix a moderate security advisory and prevent a known crash window.

Why this matters to indie builders

You want to show progress without faking it. The instant preview means you can demonstrate the product on real repos and honest content, which makes your demos more credible in newsletters, Twitter threads, or onboarding pages. The billing changes let you invite people to try the product without the risk of accidental charges, which lowers the friction for early feedback and evangelists.

What's next

Next I’ll hook up activation analytics once I have keys and finish attribution so I can see which demos convert. I’ll also polish the waitlist and changelog modes for the public build pages and continue collecting feedback from early testers.