Version 12 for Chrome postmortem

The release of Lightning Autofill v12 for Chrome was, to put it mildly, quite a challenge. I was ill prepared for the spike in traffic, and the services I employed also struggled under the sudden load. Now that the dust has finally started to settle, I think it’s worthwhile to review everything that went wrong in the hopes of avoiding these mistakes in the future. All of the issues that you guys experienced were a result of a perfect storm of the following all converging at the same time that Google released v12 on the Chrome Store:

1. I had recently upgraded from the legacy G Suite plan for my tohodo.com domain to Google Workspace Business to prepare for the increase in email volume. Google Workspace Business allows you to send out 2000 emails per day — or so I thought. What I didn’t realize at the time was that when you start out on the trial period, you are still limited to 100 emails per day. What ended up happening was that after the 100-email quota was used up, the welcome emails stopped going out to new subscribers. That forced me to frantically send out the welcome emails manually one by one. 😅
2. Some code was added recently to allow for a trial period. The backend code responsible to determine whether something was a valid trial subscription depended on the text “Trial” in the product description. The problem was that Stripe localizes product descriptions (e.g., “トライアル期間: Lightning Autofill Pro Plan”), so this check failed and invalidated the subscription. This resulted in a bunch of people in non-English countries getting the 400 error when they tried to activate their plan.
3. My domain registrar was bought out by another company, and they chose the exact same time Google released Lightning Autofill v12 to do the domain migration. This resulted in me not receiving any emails to tom@tohodo.com or support@tohodo.com for a time, and emails being sent there were also bouncing. This couldn’t have come at a worse time because there were so many support emails that never reached me until much later. In fact, I thought the v12 release was going so smoothly since I wasn’t getting as many emails as I did with the v10 and v11 releases. I didn’t realize my domain was being migrated until I got an email confirmation from the new registrar, and then the angry emails started coming in soon after. 🙈

To avoid a repeat of fiasco 1, I have subscribed to external email services to use as a fallback in case I exceed the daily email quota in the future. Furthermore, once my Workspace Business trial is over, my email limit should be upgraded to 2000 per day. I don’t expect fiascos 2 and 3 to repeat themselves again, so we should be good there. Thank you all for your patience and understanding during this launch, and hope you can bear with me as I continue to iron out the remaining bugs within Lightning Autofill itself. 🙏