I read this yesterday and thought "only a matter of time for us". We use Wise twice a month and have for a couple of years.
Today I was surprised to find out that matter of time was 12 hours, as I logged in and see:
"We've temporarily blocked your Wise account. We're missing important information from you."
When I click the link, it says: "That address doesn't look right" and shows my business address. That is right.
There's no way to contact nor do anything other than change the address. I of course don't want to change the address, because it's my business address. Lol.
The article you posted doesn't mention "offline" at all. We use SQLite as a cache in the browser when available and in iOS/Android/desktop apps, but we didn't have any guarantee that a page you want offline is actually available offline.
It would "mostly work" offline before, but you could have cases where some blocks in a page aged out of the LRU, or they changed online in a way that invalidated the page but new content wasn't downloaded. When that happens we show a "go online to view" error instead of risking you viewing/editing a known-incorrect local snapshot of the page.
With "available offline", we now proactively download and keep up-to-date the content you want available offline. It will either work, or show an explicit error if things go wrong in the sync process. No more guesswork.
Having used many of the 'Toyota Corollas' to build web apps, do any others feel a little pang of frustration that, here in 2025, teams have the choice of using TypeScript on both the client and the server and choose not to?
"Use this other language I know for the backend, it's the [reliable car model]. It's the {Latin, Swahili, English} of the programming world. It's JVM, it's PHP, it's Python, it's Ruby, it's C#'"
I feel that after a decade of jumping between systems, TypeScript is now the "good enough" language. We have to use it on the client. Now we can use it on the server.
The weird side-projects vibes node libraries had in the 2010's have matured into fully supported production systems in the 2020s.
And I've never been happier. It's a fine choice for the backend, and it's not really optional on the frontend. Which is important: like a lingua franca, TS/JS is not optional in a web app. This is not an attribute which PHP shares.
In my anectodotal experience, PHP is much, much more performant, even before I moved to Frankenphp - which is so much better than Express, it isn't even a joke.
And PHP is much easier to read and handle when the project gets larger. And more secure, as you aren't forced to rely on all these NPM packages (we use Composer, but nothing like the way we used NPM. PHP really comes with almost anything you need built in - and even if you use Laravel its still not a pyramid).
I have read through all the comments, and I really don't get it - I use Node and PHP a lot, and quite a bit of Python. Not to much experience with Go or Rust, but some with Java.
IMO, There is nothing that competes with PHP in speed, security (for web stuff at least), or ease of writing for the web.
My main gripe with TypeScript (and node/JS) on the backend, is that it's not trivial to scale horizontally. You start node and it's a single event loop.
Most people will tell you to use pm2 to start copies of the server. Well pm2 looks like a hack cobled together. And pm2 has conflict of interest with their paid pm2 server. There's incentive to keep pm2 free version limited.
Other's will tell you to use many docker containers. Seems a bit overkill for some applications.
Why can't it have a simple, mature, built-in multi-threaded server like .NET Kestrel or Go http?
Its unclear if Typescript has comparable backend ecosystem. For JVM you can find reliable, somehow well documented, widely used library for most of backend stories: driver for that database, SOAP-XML lib with support of niche security protocols needed for integration with some finance/healthcare institution API, logging, monitoring, etc.
But you kind loose the simplicity of these other languages. Like not needing a complex build setup, the unreliable dependencies. Compare to Django, Ruby on rails and Laravel. JavaScript doesn't have anything as feature complete
Congrats on the launch! I've been watching for products in this space and this looks really nice. The UX is really well thought through. Great product demo.
Hadn't seen that paper, thanks for sharing it. This is the one I see cited most often that's got some similar vibes: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.10109
I still have a different business checking with a Mercury-like fintech provider. Chase freezes accounts, Fintech startups go under.
Chase already froze my business credit card once. I had to send them a deed of a house that I had already sold. It made little sense.
On the fintech bank side, my biggest client cannot make transfers to that account. Their payment system throws an error when they try to ACH to it. That plus the news about Synapse going under made me want a chase.
So I don't really know what to do. I now have multiple business accounts, multiple personal accounts. I want to find like a good credit union maybe?
What's clear is being in small business requires building tolerance for money uncertainty that wasn't as necessary when I was an employee.
I feel for the author. That all sucks. I enjoyed the 'Yuppie Nightmare' reference. Many thanks for sharing.
There are a lot of AI startups that fall in the category of LLM API consumers (Anthropic/OpenAI wrappers). Or, as I heard the CTO of one of them joking, "we're actually more EC2 wrappers than OpenAI wrappers".
The problem we often hit when building apps on top of LLMs is managing LLM context windows (and sometimes swappable LLM providers). For which you need different types of worker/consumer/queue setups.
TypeScript is amazing for building full-stack web apps quickly. For a decade my go-to was Django, but everything just goes so much faster with endpoints & frontend all in the same place. But, finding a good job/queue service is a little more of a challenge in this world that "just setup Celery". BullMQ is great, but doesn't work with "distributed" Redis providers like Upstash (Vercel's choice).
So, in a roundabout way, an offering like this is in a super-duper position for AI money :)
Today I was surprised to find out that matter of time was 12 hours, as I logged in and see:
"We've temporarily blocked your Wise account. We're missing important information from you."
When I click the link, it says: "That address doesn't look right" and shows my business address. That is right.
There's no way to contact nor do anything other than change the address. I of course don't want to change the address, because it's my business address. Lol.