The first product is live

Blog post #82

A smartphone and monitor show the same plant beside a download card and a key-marked envelope.

AI-generated illustration.

Dockcam is live. You can download it, try it for seven days, and pay 249 SEK once to keep it. That makes it the first Aelg product with all three: a public installer, a working checkout and a page that explains it.

What shipped

  • A public release. Dockcam 2.5.1 is on GitHub. The releases repository was private until today, so nobody outside this machine could have downloaded anything before now.
  • A way to pay. Stripe checkout, a one-time 249 SEK purchase, and the licence key arrives by email. No subscription, no account.
  • A product page. aelg.se/dockcam replaces the old stand-alone page. It has an animated demo of the app, a diagram of how the video travels from phone to PC, and the pricing.
  • A tighter app. The window is smaller and no longer shows long URLs. The licence is a small badge by the name instead of a card, and a step-by-step guide leads you through scan, activate and pick the camera.
  • A new icon. The camera tile from the Aelg site is now the installer, tray and window icon.

What’s working

The whole chain hangs together: page, download, trial, checkout, key. The page and the app now show the same guide, so what you see on the site is what you get on your screen.

What’s unclear or broken

  • The installer is not code-signed. Windows will say “Windows protected your PC” and you have to click “More info” and then “Run anyway”. The FAQ on the page explains this, but it is a real hurdle for a stranger.
  • There are no automatic updates. I turned them off on purpose until there is a signing certificate. If anyone could take over the releases repository, a signed pipeline is what stops them from pushing malware to every user. Until then you update by downloading the new installer.
  • I have not made a real purchase yet. The checkout works in tests, but the first real order from the public page is still ahead of me.

Decisions made

  • I put the product page inside the company site instead of running it as a separate site. One address, one place to look after, and the product card on aelg.se links straight to it.
  • I released manually, without the update files, rather than weakening the signing rule just to get something out.
  • The old Vercel site is deleted so there is only one version of the truth.

Tooling & process

Publishing aelg.se turned out to go through Codex and its hosting rather than through git, so a merge alone does not put anything live. It took a few tries because the installed Codex was too old for my config. Now I know how it works and have written it down.

— Stefan