I’ve actually done something similar before - using stripe and Sendgrid to make a small (and unremarkable) email service.

I had a very basic management app in rails but nothing else. In the end, I spent maybe 40 hours of dev and less than $100 to make it (domain name and ssl cert). It was a proof of concept for myself.

The drawback was assembling the elements to make it resulted in little to no unique value in the product itself. It had no compelling value prop and as such I never released it.

So, you can do this but you’ll probably have to do some dev work and make sure the end product is both compelling, solves a real need and can deliver continuous value.

As an aside, a product that I did enjoy a while ago (the name escapes me) was really just a single person sending a newsletter with a curated list of web dev/design contracts. He used gum road to charge $40/month for it. While I used it, it was totally a valuable offering - and involved zero dev work.

Value can be created in other ways too :)

Thanks for the feedback and for sharing your personal experiences. I think your comment about value being created in other ways (and in sometimes incredibly simple, non-techy ways) is something important to not lose sight of. Also, just in that example alone, future enhancement of a service like that could be automating the newsletter into multiple formats, for viewing on the go (such as a kindle format, PDF, etc.), instead of leaving it email only.

But yea, like I said in my OP, I don't even have a business idea yet. Whatever it is, it will need to have a real value prop to be worth doing.

Here's a link to an article for something like that:

https://www.process.st/mvp-app/