Show HN: Five Letters – word puzzle game

I came across https://bert.org/2021/11/24/the-best-starting-word-in-wordle... on HN the other day, and decided to do my own take on the concept as a little weekend project.

Everything is a subscription these days.

Technology-wise, I wanted to try out two things that I hadn't tried before for this project.

One was to use Expo to release on web and mobile at the same time. I've used React Native quite a bit in a professional capacity, so I wanted to check out the Expo landscape. I discovered that the web part (react native web) didn't quite deliver on what I was looking for, so I scrapped it and ported to Vite/react-ts and dropped native completely.

The other was to see if I could find a low-friction way of setting up subscriptions for a static web frontend with no first party backend. That is the reason why there is a premium subscription tier for a small weekend game like this. Turns out that this was pretty straight forward with Gumroad! In the end, I was pretty happy with the way the flow turned out (except that Apple Pay isn't supported without stepping out of the flow and heading to Gumroad directly).

$3 is twelve plays at a 25¢ arcade game.

Very nice!

One hour later...