behind the scenes · 3 min read
One hundred days without charging anyone
The first commit landed on June 10th at 11:58pm. A hundred days later: 33,349 orders from 202 countries and not a single cent charged. The behind the scenes, with numbers from our own database.
by Arthur
published September 22, 2026
The first commit on this site is dated June 10th, 2026, at 11:58pm, carrying the dullest message in software: Initial commit from Create Next App. A hundred days later the store had recorded 33,349 orders from 202 countries, in 14 languages, and had never charged anyone a cent. This post is the back side of that, with numbers pulled from our own database.
A hundred days in four lines
| month | orders | distinct people |
|---|---|---|
| June (from the 16th) | 15,755 | 11,580 |
| July | 11,567 | 8,556 |
| August | 2,737 | 1,938 |
| September (through the 21st) | 3,290 | 2,431 |
Orders as recorded in our database. The first one came in on June 16th, 2026, six days after the site existed at all. People counted by distinct email within each month, so someone who came back in two months shows up in both.
The honest way to read that table is not the peak, it is the drop. June and July were abnormal months: the site went around on social, the international press wrote about it, a large news portal linked to us on a Saturday and the record day hit 2,079 orders on June 26th. August lost 76% of that. September climbed back on its own, with no event behind it, just people arriving through search. That unglamorous number is the one that tells you whether a store exists or whether an accident merely happened to it.
The whole store is files, not dashboards
There is no CMS, no product admin panel, no paid service spinning in the background. The catalog is a source file holding 6,866 products, the post you are reading is another file, and publishing means deploying. That charges a price: changing one comma in a sentence means shipping the entire site again. It also hands back a guarantee worth the trouble: if it is in the repository and the build passed, it is live; if it is not there, it does not exist. Nothing vanishes on its own, nothing needs waking up, nothing sends an invoice at the end of the month.
- •192 commits in a hundred days, nearly two a day, most of them after midnight.
- •6,866 products in the catalog and 6,949 images, each one background removed before it went in.
- •Around 291 thousand lines of versioned code, and most of that is catalog and translation, not logic.
- •14 languages written for the destination country rather than machine translated: the delivery driver joke changes along with the flag.
- •Zero servers to babysit. The site runs at the edge and fits inside free tiers, which is the only way a store that charges nothing stays standing.
What broke along the way
Behind the scenes with no defects is just advertising, so here are the three that cost the most time, all of them fixed or worked around by now.
- •The robot that moves your parcel along used to run every minute and burned through the database traffic quota in July. It now runs every five minutes, the cost dropped by almost 70%, and the trip looks exactly the same from the outside.
- •The last delivery step showed the wrong city on part of the Brazilian orders, because the city was missing from our own base. The tracking page now notices the hole and repairs itself.
- •Email is the most fragile part of the operation and still is. It took five providers chained together to keep the journey notifications going without leaving anybody free plan behind.
A hundred days, 33,349 orders, 260,816 items picked with care and handed back to nothing. No card was ever charged, which is the one promise this site has to keep.
The plan for the next hundred days is the same one: a bigger catalog, a funnier trip and the numbers published right here. Everything on this page comes out of our own database, and anyone writing about the subject is welcome to use it, just say where it came from.