Enlist vs. building your own waitlist

Building a waitlist is one of those things that looks simple until you're debugging why 200 people have position 1.

Here's an honest comparison of building it yourself versus using Enlist.

#What "build it yourself" actually requires

The naive version is a table, an insert, and an auto-increment. Takes an hour.

The production version requires:

Atomic position assignment. Two requests arriving within the same millisecond should get consecutive positions, not the same one. This means a SELECT MAX(position) + 1 inside a transaction, or a sequence, or a counter with a compare-and-swap. Whichever you pick, you need to test it under concurrent load.

Idempotency. A user who double-clicks "Join" or whose browser retries a failed request should end up with one signup, one position, and one welcome email. That's a unique constraint on email + waitlist_id plus handling the duplicate-key error gracefully and returning the original row.

Email delivery. Picking a provider (Resend, Postmark, SES), writing the template, handling bounces, and not sending a second email on re-signup. Each piece is small; together they're a day of work and an ongoing ops surface.

Delivery tracking. If you want to know whether the email actually landed, you need to wire up webhooks from your email provider and write those events back to the signup row.

Source attribution. Storing utm_source and referrer per signup, then aggregating them into a stats view you can actually query.

Quota enforcement. If you ever have a limit on signups (rate limiting, billing tiers, beta caps), you need that check to be atomic with the insert or you'll go over.

#The honest verdict

If you're building one waitlist, for one product, with no email, no tracking, and no scale pressure, build it yourself. It's a table and an insert. Shipping fast matters more than infrastructure.

If you need email delivery, tracking, source attribution, idempotency under concurrent load, and you'd rather not maintain all of it, Enlist handles that.

#What Enlist provides vs. what you build

#The integration

const response = await fetch('https://api.enlist.dev/v1/waitlists/WAITLIST_ID/signups', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: {
    Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.ENLIST_API_KEY}`,
    'Content-Type': 'application/json',
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({ email, utm_source: 'producthunt' }),
});

const { id, position, total } = await response.json();

Your form stays on your domain. Your design. Your copy. The infrastructure (positions, idempotency, email, tracking) lives behind one endpoint.

Whether that trade is worth it depends on how much you want to own the edge cases.