I counted six dashboards before lunch on Monday. Stripe. Brevo. Google Search Console. Shopify. Namecheap. Google Ads. Each one a separate login, a separate 2FA code, a separate context to reload.
By the time I’d authenticated into the third, I’d forgotten what I was doing in the first.
The Dashboard Tax
Every platform you use for your business has a dashboard. And every dashboard has a login. And every login — increasingly — has a two-factor authentication step that sends a code to your phone, which you have to find, unlock, read, and type in before the ten-minute window expires.
For one platform, that’s fine. Mildly annoying, but fine.
For six? That’s not security. That’s a toll road between you and your own business.
Every dashboard login is friction cosplaying as security.
I started noticing how much time I was losing to this. Not dramatically — insidiously. The five-minute job that takes twenty-five because I need to log into a client’s Stripe account and the client is in a meeting so they can’t read back the security code. The email deliverability check that should take thirty seconds but takes fifteen minutes because Brevo’s dashboard needs me to navigate through three menus to find the sending logs.
None of these individual moments feel like a problem. Added together, across a week, across multiple clients, they’re hours. Real hours that could have been spent doing the work the dashboards were supposed to help with.
What I Changed
I stopped logging into dashboards.
Not entirely — I still check a dashboard occasionally when I need to see something visually. But for the actual work? Diagnosing a payment issue. Checking email deliverability. Looking up keyword rankings. Registering a domain. Syncing stock from a supplier.
All of that now runs from the terminal. One command. No login. No 2FA code. No waiting for a client to be available to read back a security number.
The difference isn’t marginal. It’s structural.
Here’s a specific example. A client’s Shopify checkout was rejecting a particular card type on one product variant. To diagnose that through the dashboard, I’d need to log into their Shopify admin (2FA), navigate to the order, then log into their Stripe dashboard (2FA again, and the client needs to be available to authenticate me), find the payment intent, and cross-reference the metadata.
Instead, I ran one command that pulled the payment intent directly from Stripe’s API through my web development platform. Thirty seconds. The client didn’t need to be near their phone. I didn’t need to remember two sets of credentials. The diagnosis was in front of me before the dashboard would have finished loading.
Why This Matters For You
You might be thinking “I’m not a developer, I can’t work from a terminal.” And that’s fair. But here’s the question that matters regardless of how technical you are:
When you’re choosing software for your business, does it have an API?
That question might sound technical. It isn’t. An API is just a way for one piece of software to talk to another piece of software without a human clicking buttons in between.
When your accounting software has an API, your invoices can be generated automatically when a project completes. When your email marketing platform has an API, your deliverability can be monitored without logging in. When your payment processor has an API, failed payments can be diagnosed in seconds instead of minutes.
The question to ask
Next time you’re evaluating a tool for your business, ask: “Does this have an API?” If the answer is no, you’re buying a dashboard you’ll have to log into manually, every time, forever. If the answer is yes, you’re buying infrastructure that can eventually work without you being in the room.
The businesses that connect their tools programmatically will always be structurally faster than the ones that rely on a human logging into six dashboards every morning. That’s not a technology opinion. That’s physics.
The Bigger Picture
I wrote a full piece about this: The CLI Is the Interface. It covers the scaling problem (what happens when you have twenty clients and every platform needs a separate 2FA handshake), the accumulation argument (why every session in the terminal builds on the last one while every dashboard visit starts from scratch), and the consultancy comparison that made me rethink how I run the entire business.
The short version: I replaced SEMrush, multiple dashboard logins, and several manual workflows with API integrations that authenticate once and work forever. The first integration paid for the entire platform.
If you’re spending your mornings logging into things instead of doing the work those things are supposed to enable — you’re not alone. But there is a better way.
Tony Cooper
We Build Stores
tony.cooper@webuildstores.co.uk
07963 242210
P.S. I counted the 2FA codes I typed last Monday. Six before lunch. Since switching to API integrations for most of my workflow, that number is usually zero. The security is the same — better, actually, because API keys don’t expire mid-session. The friction is gone. If you want to know what that looks like for your business, reply to this email.
