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Hey, thanks for being here.
I'm Chris. I live in Cape Elizabeth, Maine — the kind of place where you can watch the Atlantic from the grocery store parking lot and somehow still have decent 5G. I'm a dual US-Canadian citizen, a Climatebase Fellow, a former product manager at Litmus Software, and as of this year, a completely sleep-deprived new dad.
This newsletter is called Maine Nugs: Nuggets for Good. It's going to be a weird but useful mix: Maine sustainability, the border economy between two countries I love, payment accessibility compliance, AI's role in commerce, and the occasional observation from someone who is perpetually doing too many things at once.
The throughline is simple: digital equity and community resilience are the same problem.When a checkout page breaks for a screen reader user, a caregiver completing a transaction on someone else's behalf, or an AI agent buying on a customer's behalf — we lose a real human on the other end. That matters to me.
So what am I building?
The flagship product right now is SmarterTariff — an AI-powered compliance scanner that audits checkout and payment pages for accessibility violations, WCAG conformance issues, and digital accessibility gaps. Think of it as a stress test for the part of your website that actually makes you money.
Here's the thing about checkout accessibility that most teams miss: everyone audits the homepage. Everyone scans the landing page. Nobody tests the payment flow. It's behind authentication, it's rendered in third-party iframes, it changes with A/B tests, and it gets shipped on Fridays. It is the last mile of your product — and it's almost never tested.
That costs real money. The Domino's lawsuit, the DOJ's push on digital accessibility under the ADA, the European Accessibility Act coming into full enforcement — the legal exposure is real. But even without lawyers in the picture, a broken checkout is just a broken checkout. Someone tried to buy something and couldn't. That's a loss.
I built SmarterTariff because I kept seeing the same blind spot, project after project, company after company. Product managers ship great features, designers do careful work, and then the checkout sits there — untested, non-compliant, bleeding conversions quietly.
We also commit 1.5% of revenue to Stripe Climate — channeled into permanent carbon removal. If we're going to build a technology company in 2026, we're going to build one that takes the externalities seriously.
A little more about me
I'm building all of this out of Cape Elizabeth, with a baby who has very strong opinions about nap times. My background is SaaS PM — a decade of shipping product, running roadmaps, and trying to be the voice in the room that connects customer needs to engineering capacity. I did that at Litmus Software and came away with a deep belief that the most important interface in most SaaS products is the billing page.
I'm also a Climatebase Fellow (Cohort 8), which means I spend a lot of time thinking about where technology, climate, and communities intersect. That shapes everything I build.
Beyond SmarterTariff, I'm also working on sustain207.ai — a circular economy marketplace and hub for Maine and the Canadian Maritimes — and ZealaPet, a mobile vet platform designed to make veterinary care more accessible in rural communities. More on both of those in future issues.
For now: if you run an e-commerce site, a SaaS product with a checkout, or anything that takes payments online — go give your payment flow an accessibility audit. Most teams have never done one.
Thanks for reading. This is going to be a fun one.
— Chris, Cape Elizabeth, ME 🇺🇸🇨🇦
Renew EcoMe LLC | 1.5% for the planet via Stripe Climate