Faxterra

Faxterra is an online fax service. Faxing is still how a large amount of healthcare, legal and government paperwork moves.

I started it after needing to send two faxes and finding an industry of dated products charging $17/month for the privilege, with cancellation traps to match. The full story is at why Faxterra exists.

Faxterra is also an experiment in operating a standalone business solo: one bootstrapped person covering a large technical and operational surface area, with Claude at the core of all software development and all operations.

The surface area

This is the part that would normally require a team: a web app, an iOS app, subscription and pay-per-fax billing, carrier integration and deliverability, inbound numbers and porting, customer support, marketing and paid acquisition, a HIPAA-compliant tier for healthcare senders, accounting. All of it live in production, all of it operated solo.

How it runs

• A development harness with ticketing built in. Every signal (a support message, a monitoring alert, a feature idea) becomes one ticket on a homegrown board. Work ships through spec-driven plans, a git worktree per project, and Claude as the evaluator: post-deploy verification sweeps, plus tests that fail if a route, price, or public claim drifts from the code.
• Claude routines run operations. Support management, issue detection, and error detection are automated agent routines: pulse commits an hourly monitoring ledger, verify-sweep validates every deploy, support triage stages one-tap replies. A human gates anything outward-facing or irreversible; only spam auto-close and high-confidence replies are fully automated.
• An admin portal that sees everything. Real-time system health, every revenue event, and a granular P&L in one homegrown view.
• No third-party tools. No Linear, no external ticketing, support, or ops SaaS. Outside of infrastructure (hosting, database, fax carrier), 100% of the operational software is built by and operated with Claude.
• Operable from anywhere. Slack and Claude notifications reach my phone, and the whole dev stack is remotely operable through Claude Mobile and Claude Cloud for development and agentic operations on the go.

Traction

Trends as of July 2026: live since March 2026, first paying customer within days of launch, and a paying subscriber base that has grown every month since, mostly without paid acquisition. The most interesting channel is AI answer engines: people ask ChatGPT how to send a fax, it recommends Faxterra, and that is already a top organic channel. Being the best substance an answer engine can cite was the growth bet from day one. Infrastructure costs are small and per-fax margins are high, which is what makes the solo model viable.

Status: Live and growing

The operating patterns here are the reference implementations behind working with me, and the deepest application of my AI coding best practices.