Guides for automations that last.
Practical, plainly written articles about the things that make automations break or hold: platform limits, retries, planning and briefs.
Start with the most useful.
Five guides, from payment webhooks to choosing your first workflow.
Stripe webhooks: retries, duplicates and order
Why a payment event can arrive twice, late or out of order, and the handler design that stays correct anyway.
Read the guide · 8 minWhat to automate first
Four questions and a scoring table to choose the first workflow that pays for itself.
Read the guide · 6 minNotion API limits that break automations
Rate, size and permission limits that cause quiet failures, and how to design around them.
Read the guide · 7 minGoogle Sheets automation limits
API quotas, script runtimes and trigger gotchas that stall sheet-based automations.
Read the guide · 7 minHow to write an automation brief
Eleven things to write down before you ask for a quote.
Read the guide · 6 minGuides built on what actually breaks.
We write about the problems we see in real automations, and we date every fact so you know how fresh it is.
Practical first
Every guide ends in something you can do: a checklist, a pattern or a decision.
Sourced from documentation
Numbers come from each platform’s published docs, read on the date shown.
Honest about limits
If a platform cannot do something, we say so, and show the workaround if there is one.
No fluff
We cut the introductions. You get the problem, the cause and the fix.
Diagrams where they help
A picture of the mechanism beats a paragraph describing it.
Updated when things change
When a platform moves a limit we have documented, the guide changes with it.
What would you like to learn?
Browse by the kind of problem you are trying to solve.
About the guides.
Quick answers about how we write and update them.
How often do you publish?
When we have something practical to say. We would rather publish five good guides than fifty thin ones, so there is no weekly schedule. Each guide comes from a problem we met while building and testing real automations, and each is checked against the platforms’ official documentation before it goes live.
Are the guides free?
Yes, all guides, the glossary and the free tools such as the project brief template, the delivery estimator and the refund checker are free to use, with no sign-up. They exist to help you decide what to automate and how to ask for it, whether or not you ever hire us. If you want the work done for you, the catalog and the quote form are one click away.
Can I suggest a topic?
Yes, please do. Use the contact form and tell us the platform or the problem you keep running into, such as a rate limit that broke a sync or a confusing permission screen. Topics that many people ask about, or that expose a real gap in the documentation, move to the top of our list.
Who writes them?
The BoldBellows team writes them, from the work of building and testing automations. Each guide is based on behavior we have seen, and its figures are checked against the platform’s published documentation. We do not use unreviewed generated text for platform facts, because a wrong number in a guide is worse than no guide.
Can I share or quote them?
Yes, with a clear credit and a link back to the original. Short extracts are fine for articles, newsletters and internal wikis. If you want to republish a whole guide or translate it, ask first through the contact form. The details are in the copyright and intellectual property policy.
Are they legal or security advice?
No. The guides are practical information about how platforms and automations behave, written for general understanding. They are not legal, tax, financial or security advice, and they cannot account for your particular circumstances. For decisions with legal or compliance consequences, ask a qualified professional. The disclaimer explains the details.
Rather skip the reading?
Browse fixed-price automations or send us your idea. A person replies within 24 hours.