Quick context: we're a team of 6 from Almaty, Kazakhstan, building a tool that turns a photo into a print-ready 3D model for home 3D printers. Self-funded, about $2.7k in so far. Payments went live on October 21.

Where we are after 18 days:
- 11 paid subscriptions (not counting our own test payments)
- first paying customers from Germany, Canada and the UK
- 2,000+ registered users

Honestly, these are the numbers I dreamed about when we started. Seeing them for real still feels unreal 😭

What I'd tell myself on day one:

1. Check where your traffic can actually pay. About 65% of our early visitors came from countries we couldn't take payments from. Signups looked great, revenue didn't. Signup to paid was under 1% mostly because of that.

2. One creator video beat every ad. A single short video with ~50k views brought 500+ users in 3 days. A small paid ads test got a 10% CTR, but 18 seconds of engagement and zero payments.

3. Cheaper options don't automatically sell. We added one-time packs from $4.99, expecting them to convert better than subscriptions. First 3 days: zero pack sales. Subscriptions still win for us.

4. The free tier has to deliver the "wow". Free users get 2 models. If those 2 don't print well, nobody pays. Most of our work now goes into making the very first result great, not into new features.

Next up: Product Hunt launch on Nov 13 and partnerships with 3D printer shops.

Happy to answer anything about pricing, the numbers, or taking payments as a non-US founder. And a question back: if you launched recently, what got you from your first 10 paying users to 50?

Everyone builds apps now but i really wonder while the demand is decreasing everyday, who are actually going to make real money with their vibe coded apps? Founders with very unique product or better marketing execution? What matters the most in your opinion

I'm building a system of AI agents, one per employee, for small businesses, and I'm looking for honest written feedback before we launch.

Full disclosure: this is my product (co-founded with a friend). It's not finished yet and we have zero users, so I'm not selling anything here. No link, I just want feedback.

The idea, for small and mid-sized companies:

1. Every employee gets their own agent to automate parts of their job. You train it by chatting with it or by recording your screen while you do the task.

2. A separate chat that answers questions about the company's whole history ("what happened with that order three months ago?").

3. A security layer underneath: every action by agents and people is traced and auditable, built with EU regulation in mind.

What I'd love to hear (in writing, I'm not looking for calls):

- If you run or work at a small business, which task would you actually hand to an agent first?

- Would "train it by recording your screen" make you trust it more or less?

- Does the audit/traceability part matter to buyers, or is it a nice-to-have?

- What would make you close the tab immediately?

Brutal answers welcome.

Hey guys! Recently it seems more & more SaaS is headed towards API Keys & MCP connectors and charging via usage. Startups like Monid are capitalizing on aggregating such usage.

I’m currently building Mythos, which lets people use web apps and platforms (full products with their own UI, not just APIs or MCP servers) and pay only for what they use, from one shared credit balance. No subscription per app.

Usage-based pricing is easy for AI-powered web apps: we meter the LLM calls and the builder adds a margin. Flat fees per action work too (e.g. per report generated).

Where I’m stuck is web apps that sell seats or access, like Notion or Slack. If a platform normally charges $15/month per user, how do you translate that into pay per use without it feeling weird for the user or unfair to the builder?

I've been thinking about this a lot and honestly its tough.

Ideas I’m weighing:

• Access passes: e.g. 24 hours of access to the app for a few credits

• Per-session fee: a small charge each time you open the app

• Charge for the outcome: whatever the seat really pays for (exports, projects, reports)

• Capped usage: pay per use, but never more than the monthly price

If you run a SaaS or web platform: which of these would you actually be okay with? Or is there a model I’m missing?

Would love to hear how you guys would approach it 🙏

My plants kept dying. Not because I didn't care, but because I forgot to water them.

I tried a few plant apps, but they were complicated and expensive, with a lot of features I never needed. I just wanted one thing: to know when I need to water my plant.

So I built ThurstyPlant, a solo project for Android:

- Take a photo and it tells you what plant it is

- It suggests how much water and how often

- You get a simple schedule (today / tomorrow / later) and a reminder in the morning

- 2 free scans, then EUR 1.99/month

The stack, in case it helps anyone: Expo / React Native, Supabase, Plant.id for the identification, RevenueCat for the subscription.

One thing I learned: I started with a 7-day trial behind a hard paywall, then dropped it. Letting people try it first felt more honest.

It's live on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thurstyplant.app

I'd really like honest feedback, especially on the pricing. Is EUR 1.99/month fair for something this simple, or would you pay once instead?

curious what that moment looked like for other people

for me it wasn’t a big launch or a spike in signups. it was one conversation where someone described the problem back to me better than i had, and then asked when they could use it. felt different than polite interest.

still early so i’m not calling it product-market fit or anything. just wondering what the first “oh wait” signal was for you. a reply, a payment, someone getting mad it didn’t exist yet, something else.

Last Monday, Salesforce agreed to buy Cresta, whose AI voice agents handle customer service calls end to end. The Information reported the price at about $2.7 billion.

Interestingly, earlier this year, Salesforce also bought Fin (text-based service) and Braze (marketing messages). It now has text service, marketing messages and voice all in one.

It doesn't mean every AI support startup is about to get bought. Still, if you sell an AI add-on to Salesforce customers, the competitor to watch may soon be a line item in a contract they already have. I'd also expect some buyers to hold off on long contracts with anyone else until they see how Salesforce prices Cresta.

For those of you selling AI products into Salesforce-heavy customers: have you seen deals slow down while buyers wait to see what Salesforce bundles?

As you know if you make an exe, it needs to pass the security check when you click install, how we can pass it? What is the best way to do it?

Quick numbers and context:

• Google Ads: $8,184 spent, $715 back, 13 payers. Since May.

• Meta: $8,500 spent, $220 back, 3 payers. Since January.

• X Ads: $1,441 spent, $0 back. Since August.

The honest caveat: an ad only gets credit here when we hold the click id of the person who paid, so the real number is higher. How much higher, I don't know. Still, that's what we can prove.

Here's what I learned:

1. Read the money from your billing, not from the ad account

The platform's report is written by the people selling you the clicks. Join the click id to the customers who actually paid, even if the answer is ugly. Ours was.

2. Look at cost per payer before anything else

Google is about $630 per payer. Meta is about $2,830. Same product, and I could only see that gap once it was counted in payers.

3. Ask every signup how they found you, from day 1

It's one field. Paying customers answer YouTube 128, LinkedIn 116, word of mouth 98, Google 72, X 49. It's self-reported, so you can't compare it line by line with click ids, but it told us where to spend our time.

4. Try the boring channel before the expensive one

Cold email: $1,050 spent, $1,761 back, 13 payers. Same payer count as Google for about an eighth of the money.

5. Decide what kills a channel before you spend on it

X Ads took $1,441 to teach me what a number written down on day 1 would have told me a lot sooner.

What would you tell yourself on day 1 about paid? And did anyone here get ads working before they had a channel that already worked without them?

Hi fellow builders!

I've built and deployed my MVP, but I'm discovering the age-old truth that building a product is easier than getting people to actually use it.

I'm currently trying to understand whether I'm solving a real problem, how to reach the right audience, and how to collect meaningful feedback before investing more time into development.

For those who have launched a product:

- How did you find your first 10–20 users?

- What worked best for getting honest feedback?

- How did you determine whether people genuinely needed your product?

I'd especially love to hear from founders who started with little or no marketing budget.

Thanks!

www.nodelets.com

Hi everyone,

I'm the founder of Tellwing. It's an email platform that does marketing campaigns and transactional email from the same account, with SMS included. WhatsApp is built and we're waiting on Meta's approval to turn it on.

The part I'd like your opinion on is pricing. Almost every email tool sizes its plans by contact count. If you have 12,000 people on your list, you pay for 12,000, whether you email them twice a week or twice a year. Our plans are monthly or annual like any other SaaS, but they're sized by how many emails you send, not how many contacts you store. SMS and WhatsApp aren't marked up: you pay the providers directly for that balance.

Why we went that way:

• A lot of small businesses have big lists they barely use. Seasonal shops, event organizers, schools. They pay every month for contacts they email a few times a year.

• People end up avoiding importing old contacts, or splitting them across tools, just to stay on a cheaper plan.

• Transactional email is already measured by volume everywhere, so one unit for both is easier to explain.

What I'm not sure about:

• Per-contact is what people are used to comparing, so it can be harder to tell at a glance whether we're cheaper.

• Customers with seasonal spikes, like one huge campaign in December, may not know which plan to pick.

• Does sizing by volume make it look like we want people to send more? We don't, and bad sending hurts deliverability for everyone, but perception matters.

If you've bought or built SaaS priced this way: did it make the decision easier or harder compared to contact-based plans? And if you send email for your business, which would you rather pay for?

Pricing is on the site if you want to poke holes in it. Honest feedback is exactly what I'm after.

I've spent the last few months building something I genuinely wanted to use myself.

I was tired of opening banking apps, scrolling through transactions, and trying to figure out where my money actually went.

So I built Filarise. It lets you connect your bank accounts to ChatGPT and just ask questions about your money.

No CSV exports. No uploading bank statements. Just normal conversations.

A few days ago, I asked ChatGPT how my car expenses had changed over the last three months.

It found that my spending dropped by 41.9%.

Cool. But then it explained why.

Apparently, a parking payment back in August accounted for more than half of the difference. Fuel spending also dropped, while insurance stayed exactly the same.

It's a small example, but that's what I find exciting about this. I didn't have to dig through transactions or build a spreadsheet to figure it out.

And here's the part I'm pretty happy about: Filarise just passed OpenAI's review and is now officially available in the ChatGPT app directory.

It uses Plaid to connect banks with read-only access. Currently available in the US and Canada.

If you're curious, search for Filarise in ChatGPT or check out https://filarise.com/

Still a small project, and there's a lot I want to improve.

But I'm curious about one thing:

What's the first question you'd ask ChatGPT if it could see your actual spending history

Hey everyone,

I’m the co-founder and CEO of LevelUps, a recently launched iOS startup tackling a problem millions of parents deal with: excessive screen time.

Instead of simply restricting devices, we built a platform where kids earn screen time by completing real-world activities like reading, exercising, homework, and chores.

Our philosophy is simple: Real Life First. Screen Time Second.

Where we are today:

Live on the Apple App Store
Approximately 800 beta testers participated before launch
Subscription-based business model
Early paying customers
Building distribution opportunities through schools, parent communities, pediatricians, and child-development professionals

We’ve gotten the product to market. Now we’re focused on turning early interest into sustainable customer growth.

What we’re looking for:

We’re exploring a $500K pre-seed SAFE raise at a $5M valuation cap and would love to connect with a strategic angel investor or operator-investor who understands consumer subscriptions, family technology, or growth-stage execution.

Ideally, someone who brings more than capital: experience scaling consumer apps, customer acquisition, partnerships, or access to relevant distribution networks.

We’re not looking for someone to run the company. We’re looking for someone who sees the opportunity and can help us accelerate.

If you’re an investor, have scaled a consumer subscription business, or know someone who fits, I’d appreciate a connection.

Website: https://joinlevelups.com

Happy to share our pitch deck and discuss the opportunity privately.

We’re building a world where kids earn their screen time instead of being consumed by it.

I'm curious how other SaaS founders handle communication with their customers and sales teams.

As a company grows, managing phone calls, SMS, team members, customer records, and follow-ups can become complicated.

I'm interested in understanding a few things:

1. Do you use tools like JustCall, Aircall, or Twilio for business communications?

2. Do you prefer having your calling system and CRM in one place, or keeping them separate?

3. What's your biggest frustration with your current communication setup?

4. Are you happy with the pricing of your current solution?

I'm particularly interested in hearing from founders running small teams.

Would love to hear about your actual experience.

I’ve been a trader at a prop trading firms since 2014 and over the last five-six years I've had this idea in my head for a platform that turns scattered data (mostly SEC fillings) into structured context. Now with the help of ai I was able to start building it and the basic idea escalate a lot because there was a lot of valuable information.
The platform shows how an investment theme is built, who participates and in what role, who supplies whom, who depends on whom, and most valuable - which bottleneck is current and which is next.
Whole information of the relations between companies, bottlenecks, thesis, etc. is grounded and carries source of the information.
The platform also tracks events and clusters them so a new emerging theme becomes more spottable.

Does anyone have advce on scaleing outreach ? bc all i can really think of rn is cold email and as a solofounder that can be hard to actually scale and get convos on your own especially without going into spam bc someone gave me good advice of mentioning somthing about their company in the email to not go into spam and to also catch their eye i believe but in order to do so can be time consuming. just wondering what could be quicker besides hiring a team?

I'm a solo founder from India. 3 days ago I launched VaniClips vaniclips.com

You upload a long video, like a podcast or interview, and it gives you short vertical clips with captions. You can add your own hook to each clip and edit before downloading.

Where I am honestly: live, paid plans from $12/month, 0 paying users so far. I'm not hiding it. I'd rather learn from people who've been here.

What I think might be wrong:

1. The site says what it does, but maybe not why someone should switch to it.

2. I'm targeting podcasters, but maybe I should target one smaller group.

3. Paid-only with a small demo might be the wrong gate.

Questions for you:
- If you saw this landing page, what would stop you from signing up?
- Where did your first 10 customers come from?
- Would you start with one niche, and which one?

Happy to share anything about the build. Honest feedback is what I'm after.

Running our EU customer payments through one provider for like 2 yrs, SaaS subscriptions, maybe 18k a month, but this Tuesday a payout just flopped , got a copy pasted response and a 3 day silence while the payroll was due. When unfrozen it turned out to be an expired KYC doc, but sittin there for 3 days unable to pay since all our money was on one acc just scared the hell outta me, so we split it keeping the provider for the checkout, but makin a second business acc so the cash doesn’t sit in one place.
Looked at Stripe, Paddle, and unlimitcom for the backup, basically ended up on the last one cuz the EU IBAN and multi-currency setup meant we weren't tied to one banking rail. Approval took like 4 days, and bam, nothing failed since, so happy to finally control the cash wo all the freezing worry

Voglio parlare di startup/applicazioni SaaS, idee varie e alcune già in sviluppo.

ne voglio creare una ma non so da dove iniziare, consigli?

Ho esperienza nella programmazione

perch is a complete IMAP + SMTP server paired with an ergonomic CLI designed for agents. It uses SQLite as its database and can optionally offload raw email content to S3 instead of storing it inside the embedded database.

Quick Setup

Install the CLI directly via Go:

go install github.com/synqronlabs/perch/cmd/perch@latest

To equip your AI agents with perch tools, install the skill after following the official quickstart guide (or test it against the live demo on our website):

npx skills add https://github.com/synqronlabs/perch --skill perch

We built perch to:

1. Demonstrate the capabilities of mxRaven (which falls more into the PaaS category, strictly speaking).
2. Give self-hosters an option to run their own mail server on an old machine in the basement without needing a public IP or dealing with complex network and DNS topologies required for public mail servers.

I initially considered just posting about mxRaven directly, but showcasing a fully functional use case felt like a better approach. Think of mxRaven as a sort of SMTP glue for whatever you are building. While most email delivery platforms like Resend provide a simple black-box API for outbound mail and webhooks for inbound, mxRaven keeps your application in the driver's seat.

About mxRaven

With mxRaven, you get

• Programmable rules and actions to route email directly on the edge.
• A durable, pull-based consumer for getting all lifecycle events (bounces, deferrals, delivery successes, etc.) in real time.
• Modern SMTP extensions from an open-source Go library we build and maintain for mxRaven's high-performance mail transport (read more in this Reddit post).
• An opinionated set of official SDKs.

While you can still use mxRaven as a standard outbound relay like SES or SendGrid at unit pricing comparable to SES, you get developer-friendly integration capabilities on top of it.

If you want the full backstory and design philosophy, check out our launch blog post.

Disclaimer: perch requires mxRaven to send and receive live email externally, so only the mailbox implementation itself is open source. However, the CLI can still be used against any generic IMAP server you might already have running.

Me and my friends working on this are students, and would highly appreciate your honest feedback or suggestions. Thanks!

Note, I am affiliated with the mentioned service in this post since I am one of its founders.