The new album from Solar Blu โ 12 all-original tracks, 48 minutes, out everywhere now.
To celebrate the release of Spiraling, we made you something to keep:
a storybook to read while you listen. Flip through it below, or download
the PDF and take it with you. Free, always.
Running a one-man web shop means there’s no “not my department.” Today was a perfect example โ and yeah, it’s Monday, so of course it started like this.
Woke up (or never really went to sleep, depending on how you count it) to find one of my machines in a full-blown virtual machine update nightmare. You know the kind โ everything was fine yesterday, you let an update run, and suddenly you’re staring at a VM that won’t cooperate and a sinking feeling that today’s plans just got hijacked.
The actual culprit this time? An old Visual Basic script that needed updating to play nice again. Anyone who’s kept a business running for 30 years knows exactly what this is like โ there’s always some quietly load-bearing piece of legacy code sitting in the corner, doing its job for years, until an update comes along and reminds you it’s still there.
So that was the morning: digging back into old VB code, figuring out what broke, patching it up, and getting the machine back on its feet.
Here’s the thing about running your own shop โ you don’t get a day off just because your morning turned into a computer crisis. So once the machine was breathing again, I pivoted straight into lead gen mode: 10 cold calls to potential new clients.
No fanfare, no big production. Just picked up the phone and started dialing after wrestling a VM back to life. That’s the actual job โ not glamorous, but that’s how SolarBlu keeps moving.
Only Monday, and already a full VM crisis plus a round of cold calls. If this is the opening act, the rest of the week better be paying attention.
Some days are “fix the ancient script that’s holding everything together” days. Some days are “get on the phone and find new business” days. Today was both, back to back, no break in between. That’s freelance web life โ you’re sysadmin, developer, and salesperson before lunch, and nobody’s coming to save you if the VM doesn’t boot.
Tomorrow it’ll probably be something else entirely. That’s kind of the fun of it.
Every few months, another “hot take” video shows up telling you WordPress is dying. Dead. Over. Move to Webflow, move to Squarespace, move to whatever the sponsor is this week.
I’m calling it: that’s not analysis, that’s an ad. And it’s wrong.
WordPress still powers over 40% of the entire internet. Not 40% of “CMS websites” โ 40% of every website that exists. Yes, that share dipped slightly this year. A platform running four out of every ten sites on Earth cooling off by a point or two isn’t a death spiral, it’s gravity.
The loudest complaint is that WordPress is clunky, technical, only for developers. I run my sites on Elementor, and that argument hasn’t been true for years. Drag, drop, publish. My team edits pages together in real time, leaves notes directly on the elements that need changes, and tags each other when something needs a second look โ no code, no FTP, no calling in a developer because someone wants to swap a headline.
That’s the part the “dead” crowd conveniently skips: you don’t need to be a tech administrator to be a WordPress editor anymore. If you can use Google Docs, you can run a WordPress site built on Elementor.
The other half of the “WordPress is scary” myth assumes you’re on your own. You’re not, if you set it up right. Expert support exists precisely so a small business owner doesn’t need to become a sysadmin โ updates, security, backups, the boring-but-critical stuff, handled, while the team focuses on content.
Here’s what the “go build it somewhere else” crowd conveniently skips: hiring a developer for every little change isn’t free, and it isn’t fast. Freelance WordPress developer rates in 2026 swing from about $20โ33/hr in Southeast Asia to $47โ66/hr in North America, with senior US specialists topping $150/hr for custom plugin or headless work. Eastern Europe and Latin America land in between, roughly $26โ45/hr. On top of that, 45% of employers worldwide say they’re struggling to fill web development roles at all โ the talent gap is real, and it’s making dev time more expensive, not less.
Rates are broad market ranges for experienced freelancers; senior specialists on complex work bill well above these figures. Source: 2026 freelance rate surveys (Arc.dev, Index.dev).
That’s exactly the gap Elementor closes. Every hour you don’t have to pay a developer to fix a typo or swap an image is an hour your budget goes toward growth instead of maintenance. WordPress didn’t get harder to justify โ it got cheaper to run.
WordPress isn’t standing still. There’s active development on collaboration tools, better block editing, AI features with real guardrails โ it’s evolving, not decaying. What’s dying is the assumption that “open source and flexible” automatically means “hard and outdated.” That stopped being true once tools like Elementor made real-time team collaboration and no-code editing the default experience.
So next time someone tells you WordPress is dead, ask them when they last actually used it. My guess: not recently.
There’s a wave of ad creative right now that’s obviously AI-generated and unedited: awkward phrasing, misspellings, copy that reads like a first draft nobody looked at twice. It’s easy to blame the tool. The tool isn’t the problem. Somebody was handed a $5,000 budget, generated the copy, and shipped it without anyone checking the work. That’s not an AI problem — that’s nobody being held to a standard.
AI copy generation is a legitimate way to produce drafts fast. That’s what it’s for. The failure isn’t that the draft had errors — early drafts always have errors, that’s what makes them drafts. The failure is that whoever ran the campaign treated the output as finished work instead of a first pass that still needed a human to check it. Somewhere in that process, either nobody owned “review before launch” as part of the job, or somebody owned it and didn’t do it. Either way, that’s a standards gap, not a technology gap.
In a shop with real standards, AI-generated ad copy doesn’t go live raw. Someone reads it out loud before launch, checks spelling, confirms the offer makes sense, confirms it matches the brand’s voice — and that step isn’t optional or dependent on whether someone “gets around to it.” It’s built into the process the same way a final review is built into any other deliverable that costs money if it’s wrong. When that step is missing, it’s usually because nobody defined it as part of anyone’s job, or because it was defined and nobody enforced it.
It’s happening at scale right now because AI makes it possible to generate huge volumes of ad variations with almost no effort, and that volume creates an illusion of productivity. Producing twenty ad variants in five minutes feels like progress. But volume without a review step doesn’t produce twenty good ads — it produces the same uncaught mistake copied twenty times. The tool made the output faster. It didn’t make anyone more accountable for what went out the door.
The cost is real — sloppy, error-riddled ads get lower engagement, and Meta’s delivery system charges more per result for ads that underperform, so the mistake does show up on the invoice. But the invoice is a symptom, not the root cause. A team that lets typo-ridden copy go live on a $5,000 campaign would very likely let the same thing slide on a client deliverable, an internal report, or a product page — the ad spend just happens to be where the lack of a review standard becomes expensive enough to notice.
It’s a defined, enforced step: nothing generated by AI ships without a specific person reading it and signing off before it goes live. That’s not a technology upgrade. It’s a management decision — deciding that “good enough to launch” requires a human check, and then actually holding whoever owns that step to it. Skip that decision, and it doesn’t matter how good the AI gets. The next mistake just gets generated faster.
If you’ve spent any time bidding on Upwork or Freelancer.com, you already know the pattern: you quote a fair rate for real, skilled work, and someone underbids you by 50% within the hour. It’s easy to start thinking that’s just what the market pays. It isn’t. It’s what a specific slice of the market โ clients hunting for the cheapest possible bid โ pays. The rest of the market, the one paying actual professional rates, is mostly invisible on the first page of open jobs.
Here’s what the data actually says, and how to price yourself against it instead of against the bottom of a bid list.
For WordPress work specifically, freelance rates break down roughly like this:
Specialized skills carry a real premium โ security hardening and WooCommerce work typically add 15โ40% on top of a base rate, because fewer people can do them reliably.
For general freelance web development, the U.S. median sits closer to $85/hr, with experienced developers commonly billing $95โ160/hr.
Location shouldn’t gate what you charge a U.S.-based client, but it’s useful context for anchoring an ask:
If a client is based in a major U.S. metro, there’s no reason to default to a global-average rate just because the job is posted on a platform with a lot of $10/hr bids sitting next to yours. The client’s budget reality and the platform’s visible bid range are two different things.
Most freelancers underprice because they calculate rate backward from “what sounds competitive” instead of forward from what they actually need to earn. The standard formula:
Hourly rate = (Target take-home income + business expenses) รท ((1 โ tax rate) ร billable hours)
A few things people consistently forget when running this math:
Run the numbers with your real expenses and tax bracket, and $22/hr is very likely below what the math says you need โ not just below what the market says you’re worth.
Upwork, Freelancer.com, and similar bid-based marketplaces are structurally built for downward pressure: dozens to hundreds of freelancers competing for a single posted budget, often set by a client with no real sense of what the work costs. That’s a very different pool than the client base hiring through referrals, agencies, or platforms like Fiverr, where you set the price and buyers come to you instead of underbidding each other for your attention.
None of that means bid platforms are useless โ they’re a real source of work and relationship-building. It means treating every low-budget listing as “the market rate” is a mistake. The actual market rate is closer to $40โ80/hr for solid mid-level WordPress work, $85โ150+/hr for specialized or metro-market clients, and it’s worth pricing toward that number rather than toward whatever the lowest bid in the queue happens to be.
Underpricing doesn’t just cost you money on one job โ it resets the baseline a client expects to pay you on every job after it. Charge like the professional you are, and let the clients who can’t meet that number self-select out.
Building a Sustainable International Practice
The thing about freelancing is nobody tells you the real story.
They show you the Instagram posts about “digital nomad life” and “work from anywhere.” What they don’t show you is the 3 AM panic when a client goes silent. The month you land three projects and then six months with nothing. The slow realization that trading hours for money doesn’t scaleโit just exhausts you.
I spent 30 years building websites. Thousands of them. I learned WordPress before it was cool. I built proprietary frameworks. I managed teams. I watched the web evolve from static HTML to full-blown applications. And somewhere along the way, I realized I was still grinding the same way I started: one project at a time, always hunting for the next client.
Then something shifted.
For decades, I operated the traditional freelancer playbook:
It’s exhausting. And the worst part? You’re completely replaceable. Anyone can build a WordPress site with Elementor. Your only leverage is price or availability.
I started noticing patterns in the clients who stuck around. They weren’t the cheapest projects or the biggest budgets. They were the ones where I built something proprietaryโframeworks and tools they couldn’t get anywhere else. Advanced Themer was one of those. It became part of their workflow. They couldn’t just hire someone else and replicate it.
Those clients? They kept coming back.
Instead of chasing every opportunity, I started thinking differently: What if someone else did the sourcing?
Enter the recruiter model. Instead of spending 40% of my time on sales calls and vetting tire-kickers, a recruiter finds clients, vets them, and brings the good ones to me. They take a small percentage. I focus on delivery.
The beautiful part? Those clients started being internationalโEU and Australia mostly. Clients I never would have found on my own.
And here’s the thing about international clients: they value reliability over proximity. They don’t care that you’re in a different timezone if you deliver consistent, quality work. They care that you understand their business and that they can depend on you.
Once the recruiter started bringing EU and AU clients, something interesting happened.
Instead of one-off projects that ended and required hunting again, I started landing clients who wanted ongoing support. Monthly retainers. Standing relationships. They’d come back because:
1. The work is solid
30 years of experience means I know what actually works
2. The proprietary tools matter
Advanced Themer isn’t something they can replicate with a new freelancer
3. The relationship is built
When you deliver consistently across timezones and manage expectations, clients trust you
Suddenly I wasn’t a freelancer hunting for gigs. I was an outsource partner in a global supply chain. The recruiter sources clients. I deliver. The client gets reliable, skilled work. Everyone wins.
Here’s what most freelancers don’t understand about recurring revenue:
It’s not about the money (though that’s nice). It’s about predictability.
You know what’s coming next month. You can plan. You can breathe. You’re not constantly in survival mode.
And when you build with proprietary toolsโframeworks that are yoursโyou create a moat. A client can’t just replace you with whoever undercuts your price. You’re embedded in their workflow.
International clients get this immediately. They’ve worked with cheap outsources who disappeared. They’ve dealt with quality issues and communication gaps. When they find someone who delivers consistently, speaks their language (literally and professionally), and has built something special into their siteโthey hold on tight.
The traditional freelancer game rewards volume: hustle more, pitch more, win more. Burn out faster.
The partnership model rewards reliability: show up consistently, deliver excellent work, build relationships that last.
One scales by burning out. The other scales by becoming more valuable.
Your clients don’t want another freelancer. They want a partner who understands their business, delivers work they can depend on, and uses tools and frameworks that actually solve their problems. That’s worth paying for. That’s worth keeping around.
If you’re reading this as a freelancer, here’s the real talk:
You can compete on price. Thousands of people will undercut you.
You can compete on availability. Someone’s always hungry.
Or you can build something proprietary. A framework. A process. A reputation for reliability that crosses borders.
Then find partners (recruiters, agencies, networks) who can bring you clients who value that edge.
You’ll never have to hustle the same way again.
The web has changed a lot in 30 years. But the fundamentals are the same: build things people can’t build without you. Deliver consistently. Show up across timezones. Let the relationships compound.
That’s not a hustle. That’s a practice.
Let’s talk about how proprietary tools and strategic partnerships can transform your freelance career.
Follow the road. Face the darkness. Find your way home.
Before the boy ever walked a farm road or heard a rooster crow, he floated. A tiny baby in a wicker basket, wrapped in soft light, carried by a river that wound through a land he would not remember โ not yet.
The Emerald City glowed behind him. Something had gone wrong there. Something had sent him away. The river carried him toward a swirling vortex, and on the other side โ the amber glow of a city called Chicago, flickering with lightning.
The human world received him without fanfare. A farm. A family. A new life.
He grew up the way farm boys do โ slowly, honestly, with dirt under his fingernails and stars overhead that felt close enough to touch. He didnโt know where he came from. Nobody did.
He learned to walk in the meadow, to ride a bike down a sunflower-lined road, to stare in fascination at a glowing computer screen. He read in haylofts with a flashlight. He studied until the lamp burned low. Whatever was in him โ whatever the Emerald City had put there โ was becoming something.
Every great story starts somewhere unexpected. This one started in a chicken coop.
He was thirteen. Just doing his chores โ collecting eggs, talking to his favorite hen the way you do when you think nobodyโs listening โ when the hay shifted and something caught the lantern light. Gold. Ornate. Alive with a green glow that had no business being there.
An emerald the size of his fist, set into the bow of an old key, hanging from a chain. It pulsed like a heartbeat. The hen tilted her head at him. He picked it up.
Nothing would ever be the same.
โSome doors arenโt built to be found.
They wait until youโre ready.โ
The key led him into the woods. Deeper than heโd ever gone โ past the familiar paths, past where the light still reached comfortably. The chicken followed. She always followed.
And then he saw it.
An ancient tree, massive and impossible, radiating soft green light from deep within its bark. Runes carved in circles around a lock set perfectly at eye level โ a keyhole that could only belong to one thing.
He held up the key. It glowed brighter. The forest went quiet. He turned it.
The tree opened like a door. Beyond it โ the road. Gold and gleaming, winding through a world that breathed green light and smelled of roses.
He wasnโt alone for long. A girl with long blonde hair and a blue and yellow dress appeared โ Alice, she said, though she didnโt seem entirely sure that was her real name. Her black cat came with her, trotting along the bricks without invitation, as cats do.
The three of them walked. The Emerald City shimmered in the distance, impossibly beautiful. And between them and it โ a black silhouette under red lightning. A witch. Waiting.
Behind them, a tornado churned. Ahead, a reckoning. The road was the only choice.
Stream Spiral โ the single from the upcoming Solarbluseth album Sonata
This morning I woke up and did something I've never done before. I posted on LinkedIn and told the world I have AIDS.
Not in a dramatic way. Not asking for sympathy. Just โ the truth. I lost my job. I lost my benefits. I went almost a week without my HIV medications. And today I was taking an FMLA day to fight through the red tape and get things back on track.
By the time I hit publish I wasn't sure what would happen. Within hours it had over 100 views. And then my phone rang. It was Dan โ a sales manager from my former employer. Not calling on behalf of the company. Just calling because he's a good person who saw a post and wanted to check in.
That call reminded me why I posted in the first place.
I spent the first two hours of the morning buried in Social Security paperwork. Documentation printed. Calls made. Doctor looped in. My doctor reached out to the manufacturer directly to get my medications covered during the gap. By mid-morning the serious stuff was handled.
And then โ I pivoted. Because I had something to say. And I had the tools to say it.
Filed SSA paperwork, printed documentation, coordinated with doctor on medication coverage through manufacturer program.
Wrote and published the LinkedIn post. 100+ views by afternoon. Phone call from Dan.
Built the "Living with HIV+" blog article with AI-generated campaign images from ElevenLabs. Five images, five sections, Pride rainbow styling throughout.
Created the Gilead thank-you collage โ four AI images in a 2ร2 grid with "Living in yellow, with HIV+ in red" center text. Pride stripes top and bottom.
Wrote and recorded the 6-minute "HIV Don't Stop and Neither Do I" video script. Edited in Premiere Pro. Added captions. Layered in Glitterati from the Sonata project as the background score.
This blog post. Because the day deserved to be documented.
AI-generated campaign imagery from ElevenLabs โ part of the "You Need a Hero" series
The visual campaign came together fast. I'd been generating AI images in ElevenLabs using myself as a reference โ and what came back genuinely surprised me. The glasses. The beard. The expression. It looked like me. Living. Thriving. Not performing wellness โ actually being it.
Four images. Yellow hoodie. Campus scenes. A desk with a cat. A figure on a bike. Each one carrying little text fragments baked right into the illustration: Still here. Still me. Still thriving. HIV+ โ not just a label, it's part of me, not all of me.
The color language is intentional. Living in yellow. HIV+ in red. Warm. Alive. Not clinical. Not scary. Just real.
The video script came out of everything I've been sitting with. Fifteen years of living with this. The week without meds. The paperwork. The phone calls. The biking down country roads in Illinois just because I can. Because my body lets me. Because the medications work.
I wrote it in one sitting. Six minutes. No fluff.
And then when it came time to add music โ I almost went to YouTube Audio Library like I always do. But something made me pause. I've been working on Sonata โ my live piano practice album. And I had a new track called Glitterati.
My own music. Under my own story. About my own life. At 27% volume it sits perfectly โ present but never competing. It gives the viewer emotional permission to feel something without telling them what to feel.
I cried editing it. That's how I knew it was right.
I want to say this clearly and publicly: Gilead Sciences has been part of keeping me alive for 15 years.
And when I hit that coverage gap โ when the insurance disappeared and the clock started ticking โ their Advancing Access program is what bridged it. Real help. Real people. Real fast.
If you are living with HIV or AIDS and you are in a coverage gap, uninsured, underinsured, or just don't know how you're going to afford your next prescription โ please use this resource right now:
Support for patients who need help affording their HIV medications โ regardless of insurance status. Don't go without your meds because of a coverage gap.
Pride was born from people who were told they were too sick, too broken, too much. People who showed up anyway. Who marched anyway. Who loved anyway.
This year Pride means filing the paperwork. Making the calls. Getting on the bike even when your body is tired. Posting the truth on LinkedIn even when your hands are shaking. Making the video. Writing the blog post. Doing the whole damn thing in one day because you have something to say and you're still here to say it.
Fifteen years. Still here. Still building. Still creating. Still riding.
The video goes up on YouTube, TikTok, and across all my platforms. The campaign images will roll out across social media through Pride Month. The biking photos are next โ a whole series of "stopped on the road to document that I'm still moving" content.
And Sonata keeps growing. Glitterati is just one track. There's a whole album being built โ live, in real time, one piano session at a time. Come watch it happen.
If this post reached you โ share it. Tag someone who needs it. Post the Gilead link in your bio. Be loud about the things we're supposed to be ashamed of. Because shame doesn't save lives. But showing up does.
โ SolarBluSeth | June 12, 2026
Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program: hrsa.gov/ryan-white-hiv-aids-program
A Mental Health Day, FMLA, Pride Month, and What It Really Means to Still Be Here
This morning I posted something on LinkedIn that I’ve been sitting with for a while.
I told people I have AIDS.
I told them I haven’t had my medications in almost a week. That I lost my job, my benefits, and some of my stability all at once. And that today โ right now โ I’m taking an FMLA day to cut through the red tape and get things back on track.
I didn’t post it for sympathy. I posted it because sometimes the bravest thing you can do is say this is hard out loud โ and then show people what you do next.
Pop culture wants you to believe a mental health day means bubble baths and scented candles and journaling in a sunlit room.
For a lot of us, it looks like two hours of filling out Social Security paperwork. It looks like printing documentation and calling your doctor’s office to ask them to contact the manufacturer directly because you can’t wait for insurance to get its act together. It looks like navigating systems that were not designed with sick people in mind.
That’s not glamorous. But it’s real. And doing that work โ finishing that work โ is an act of self-care just as much as any spa day.
Today I checked off a lot.
It’s June. It’s Pride Month. And this year, Pride hits differently for me.
Living with HIV โ living with AIDS โ in 2026 is not a death sentence the way it once was. The medications work. The science has come so far. And yet, there are still days when staying alive feels like a part-time job. When the bureaucracy of survival โ the insurance calls, the paperwork, the benefits gaps, the advocacy you have to do just to access your own healthcare โ takes more out of you than the diagnosis itself.
Pride was born from people who were told they were too sick, too broken, too much. People who showed up anyway. Who marched anyway. Who loved anyway.
I’m showing up today. In my own way. At my own desk. With my stack of papers and my cold coffee and my determination to get it done.
That counts.
I know not everyone can or should be as open as I was today. There’s risk in disclosure. There’s stigma that’s still very real. I’ve felt it. I’m not naive about it.
But here’s what I know: when I was first diagnosed, I needed to see people living. Not just surviving โ living. Talking about it. Being loud about it. Refusing to be ashamed of something that happened to their body.
If this post is that for even one person, it was worth it.
If you’re reading this and you’re in a coverage gap, a benefits nightmare, or a health crisis that feels like it’s drowning out everything else โ I see you. It’s a lot. The red tape is real and it’s exhausting and you shouldn’t have to fight this hard just to stay healthy.
But you can do it. One form at a time.
Today I filed paperwork. I made calls. I got my ducks in a row.
Tomorrow I get back to building โ my business, my music, my content, my life.
That’s the thing about hard days. They’re not the end of the story. They’re just the part where you do the work nobody sees, so you can show up for the part everybody does.
Happy Pride. Stay alive. Do the hard thing first.
โ SolarBluSeth
SolarBluSeth is a web developer, entrepreneur, content creator, and streamer based in central Illinois. He runs SolarBlu.net LLC and creates across YouTube, Twitch, Kick, and TikTok.
If you or someone you know needs HIV care resources, the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program can help connect you with local services: hrsa.gov/ryan-white-hiv-aids-program
I spent four years as a web developer at a fiber internet company. I found $90 million in missing revenue. I reported it twice to leadership. Both times I was shut down. Then I was fired. This is the full story โ the technical methodology, the financial breakdown, the legal framework, and why I’m still talking about it.
This post is protected speech under the Dodd-Frank Whistleblower Act (SEC Rule 21F-17) and the Illinois Whistleblower Act (740 ILCS 174). No private agreement โ including any separation or release agreement โ can prevent reporting of federal law violations or discussion of personal witnessed experience. SEC Rule 21F-17 explicitly voids any such provision as a matter of federal law.
No company names, investor names, or individual names are used in this post. All dollar figures are based on my own audit calculations. This post does not constitute legal advice. I am not seeking compensation, damages, or any legal remedy from any party. I want to be heard. That’s it.
People are going to ask what I want out of this. Money? A lawsuit? My job back?
None of the above.
“I want to be heard. That’s it. I found something real, I reported it through the right channels, I was shut down, and I think the people whose money is on the line deserve to know what I know.”
I’m not bitter. I’m not on a revenge tour. I’m a web developer with thirty years of experience who ran a technical audit, found something serious, tried to do the right thing, and got told to mind my own business. Twice. So now I’m doing the next right thing โ which is making sure the appropriate authorities know what I know.
The formal disclosures have already been filed. That process is underway. This post exists because the public deserves to understand how this kind of thing happens โ and because if you work at a fiber ISP right now, there is a chance this is happening at your company too.
To understand what I found, you need to understand one piece of hardware: the ONT.
When a fiber internet company installs service at your home or apartment, a technician installs a small device on your wall called an ONT โ Optical Network Terminal. It’s the endpoint of the fiber optic cable running into your building. It converts the light signal from the fiber into data your router can use.
When that ONT is powered on and active, it reports back to the company’s network management system in real time. It’s essentially saying: I’m here. I’m at this address. I’m live. I’m delivering internet service.
Fiber ISPs manage thousands โ sometimes hundreds of thousands โ of these devices across their networks. To do that at scale, they expose an API (Application Programming Interface) that allows internal systems to query the status of every ONT on the network. Which ones are active. Which ones are offline. What address each one is at.
Now โ separately โ the company has a billing system. That’s where customer accounts live. Customer name. Email address. Service address. What plan they’re on. What they owe each month.
In a properly functioning company, every active ONT maps to a customer record in the billing system. One device. One customer. One invoice per month. That’s the contract. That’s the revenue.
An active ONT is proof of service delivery. It is hardware-verified, network-confirmed evidence that a real location is receiving live fiber internet. If that ONT has no corresponding billing record, the company is delivering service for free โ and has no idea it’s doing so.
As a web developer with access to internal systems, I had legitimate access to both the ONT API and the billing system exports. And being the kind of technically curious person I am, I decided to match them up.
Here’s exactly what I did:
ONT Data ExportI pulled a complete export of all active ONTs from the API โ every device on the network reporting live service delivery, including unit identifier, physical service address, and active/inactive status.
Billing System ExportI exported the complete customer database from the billing system โ every active customer account including name, email address, and physical service address.
Triple Cross-MatchI matched the two datasets against three independent fields: customer name, email address, and physical service address. A match on any one of the three fields counted as a valid billing record. I was being generous โ I wanted to eliminate false positives, not create them.
Triple VerificationAny ONT that returned no match across all three fields was flagged. I then went through the flagged results manually โ triple checking for data entry inconsistencies, address formatting differences, edge cases, and anything else that might create a false mismatch. I wanted to be absolutely certain before drawing any conclusions.
Rolling Revenue CalculationFor each confirmed unmatched ONT โ each device proven to be delivering live service with no billing record โ I calculated the revenue loss on a rolling monthly basis going back to the estimated service start date.
The result was unambiguous. Over 3,000 active ONTs had zero corresponding customer records in the billing system.
Three thousand physical devices. Delivering live fiber internet. To real addresses. Right now. With no invoice. No customer account. No revenue.
“This wasn’t a spreadsheet anomaly or an accounting estimate. These were hardware-verified, network-confirmed service deliveries with no billing record. The proof was in the devices themselves.”
The rolling revenue calculation was staggering. I built it month by month, going back through the estimated service period for each account. The number climbed fast. Really fast. Because that’s what happens when you multiply three thousand accounts by seventy dollars a month by dozens of months โ the math compounds in a way that doesn’t feel real until you’re staring at it.
Let me show you exactly how $90 million disappears. It’s simpler than you’d think.
| Description | Estimated Amount |
|---|---|
| Confirmed unbilled active ONTs (hardware verified) | ~3,000+ accounts |
| Average monthly service fee per account | $69.96 / month |
| Conservative unbilled period | 36 months (3 years) |
| Unrecoverable revenue per account (3 years) | ~$2,519 |
| Total unrecoverable revenue โ 3-year base | ~$7,555,680 |
| Additional 2 years since first internal report (2 yrs ร 3,000 ร $69.96) | +$5,037,120 |
| Ongoing infrastructure / support costs for 3,000+ unpaid accounts | Unquantified additional loss |
| Total estimated unrecoverable loss (conservative) | ~$12,592,800+ |
| Ongoing monthly exposure (still unresolved as of this post) | ~$209,880 / month |
That last line is the one that keeps me up at night. Every single month that passes without this being addressed, another $209,880 evaporates. Permanently. Because of the most important financial reality in this entire story:
You cannot retroactively bill a customer for service they received but were never invoiced for. They have no contract. They received no bills. They made no agreement to pay retroactively.
Under basic contract law and consumer protection law โ you simply cannot collect it. A court would throw that invoice out before you finished explaining the situation.
So every dollar represented in that table โ roughly $90 million and counting โ is gone. It was never real revenue. It can never become real revenue. The gap between what was represented and what was real is permanent and unrecoverable.
I did what any responsible employee would do. I brought it up.
I brought the findings to a vice president. Explained what I found. Walked through the numbers. The response I received: “Stay in your own swim lane.” No investigation. No follow-up. No acknowledgment that the issue was real. Just โ mind your own business.
I raised the same issue with my direct supervisor. Same result. No corrective action. No escalation. The billing gap remained open and the revenue kept not being collected.
I brought it to the person literally responsible for billing operations โ the interim billing manager. No response. The individual most accountable for billing accuracy took no action whatsoever.
A colleague independently discovered approximately 50 unbilled accounts and raised the issue internally. A corroborating witness observed the matter being dismissed without investigation โ for the third time. Same result. Swept under the rug.
To my knowledge, no formal audit has ever been commissioned. The affected customers remain unbilled. The revenue loss continues to compound at approximately $209,880 per month.
Here’s the part that keeps me talking about this even after everything.
This isn’t a sophisticated fraud. Nobody sat in a boardroom and hatched a scheme. What happened here is something much more mundane and much more dangerous: two systems that didn’t talk to each other, and a leadership team that didn’t want to hear about it.
The provisioning side of the business spins up service. A technician installs an ONT, activates it on the network, and moves on. The billing side of the business creates customer accounts. Somewhere in that handoff โ for thousands of accounts โ the billing record never got created. The ONT went live. The billing account didn’t.
Nobody noticed. Or nobody wanted to notice. And when someone did notice and raised it โ repeatedly โ the institutional response was silence.
Pull your active ONT list. Pull your billing records. Cross-reference them by physical address. If you find gaps โ and some of you will โ you now have the methodology to quantify them. The longer you wait to find this, the bigger the number gets. And the bigger the number gets, the worse it looks when it’s eventually found by someone who isn’t on your payroll.
This story would be significant on its own as a billing operations failure. But there’s a layer on top of it that moves this into entirely different legal territory.
This company received a significant preferred equity investment from a major institutional investor โ based in part on represented customer counts and revenue figures. It subsequently secured a $235 million debt facility from a major international bank โ also based on represented operational scale.
If the approximately 3,000+ unverified, unbilled accounts were included in any customer count or revenue representation made to either of those parties during due diligence or ongoing reporting โ then both transactions were consummated on the basis of materially inaccurate financial information.
Under ASC 606 โ the GAAP standard for revenue recognition โ revenue can only be recognized when performance obligations are satisfied and collectibility is probable. Customers who have never been invoiced fail that test. Their inclusion in any revenue or customer count representation constitutes a material misstatement of financial condition.
That is not a billing operations problem anymore. That is a securities and investor fraud problem.
I want to be clear about something: I am not a lawyer. None of this is legal advice. But I do know how to read case law, and the precedents in this area are not ambiguous.
| Case / Authority | Why It Matters Here |
|---|---|
| SEC v. Lucent Technologies2004 โ $25M Settlement | Lucent settled SEC charges for counting revenue that had not been earned. The parallel to counting customers who were never billed is direct and uncomfortable. |
| United States v. Ebbers (WorldCom)403 F.3d 173 (2d Cir. 2005) | CEO convicted of securities fraud for inflating reported revenue figures. Established that misrepresenting revenue to investors is criminal fraud regardless of the mechanism used. |
| Tellabs v. Makor Issues & Rights551 U.S. 308 (2007) | The Supreme Court standard for securities fraud claims under PSLRA โ the exact framework investors would use to pursue civil claims against company executives. |
| In re BarrierFree (FCC-20-123)FCC Enforcement 2020 | FCC proposed $163,912 fine against an ISP that “reported having vastly more broadband subscribers than there were housing units” in service areas. Sound familiar? |
| FTC v. Frontier CommunicationsFTC Enforcement 2021/2022 | FTC and multiple state AGs sued Frontier for ISP billing misrepresentation and unfair billing practices โ establishing the FTC’s active jurisdiction over exactly this type of conduct. |
| Illinois Whistleblower Act740 ILCS 174 | Protects former employees who report violations of law in good faith. Cannot be waived by private agreement. This post and the accompanying video are fully protected. |
| Dodd-Frank Act, SEC Rule 21F15 U.S.C. ยง 78u-6 | Original information sources are entitled to 10โ30% of SEC sanctions exceeding $1 million. Rule 21F-17 explicitly voids any agreement that impedes reporting to the SEC. |
I have formally submitted this disclosure to the appropriate federal and state regulatory authorities. That process is underway. I am not going to detail the specific filings publicly at this time, but the relevant agencies are aware of what I’ve described in this post.
I have also submitted a formal whistleblower disclosure letter โ addressed to the company’s HR department, with simultaneous copies transmitted to the SEC, FTC, FCC Enforcement Bureau, Illinois Attorney General, Illinois Commerce Commission, Champaign County State’s Attorney’s Office, the company’s Board of Directors, and both financial parties whose capital is at risk.
That letter includes a formal litigation hold demand. Every person who received it is now legally obligated to preserve relevant records. Any destruction of records following receipt of that notice constitutes obstruction of justice.
People will ask what I want out of this. The answer is simple. I want to be heard. Not compensated. Not vindicated. Not celebrated. Just heard. By someone with the authority and the obligation to do something about it.
I reported this internally โ twice โ and was told to mind my own business. A colleague reported it independently and was ignored. The issue remains unresolved. The revenue gap keeps growing. The investors and lenders whose capital is at risk have a right to know what I know.
So I’m making sure they know.
This is Part 1 of the Whistleblower Series on SolarBluSeth.com. When this story becomes fully public โ and it will โ I’ll be here to walk through every detail. Subscribe to this blog, follow me on YouTube, and drop a comment below if you’ve seen something similar at your own company.
Because I suspect this is more common than anyone wants to admit.
“They Told Me to Stay in My Lane. I Didn’t.” โ the full story with technical breakdown, financial analysis, and the moment I decided to stop staying quiet.
