What channel data costs in 2026Reddit closed its free tier, X went pay-per-use and LinkedIn shut the door. Here is what is still reachable, and what it costs.“Reddit deprecated unauthenticated .json endpoints on 2026-05-28. By 2026-05-30 every free unauthenticated path returned 403.”Read the noteWhy marketing fails for foundersWe read the threads where founders describe what happened after they shipped. These are their words, not ours.“marketing just gives you silence — you ship and wait a week for noise"
(contrasted with a compiler's immediate feedback)”Read the note
Why these are public
firstfoot argues that a claim you cannot trace to something true is a bug. That applies to its own marketing: nearly every assertion on this site — that founders cannot tell a bad post from a bad audience, that a fractional CMO costs $3,000–6,000 a month, that Reddit closed its free tier in May — comes from one of these notes.
They are working documents rather than articles. They are dated, they name what was unreachable as well as what was found, and where the research contradicted what we expected, that is in there too.