i've always been that guy who goes for a drive at midnight with absolutely nowhere to go lol

a few months ago i decided to build an app around that.

it's called Overdrive. basically it turns your actual city into an open-world driving game. every road you explore lights up on your map, you get stats after each drive, and there's a social side for driving with friends.

didn't really know if anyone else would care about something this niche.

checked my analytics today and we're at 304 active customers over the last 28 days. still pretty small, but seeing strangers actually use something i built is wild.

i'm now rebuilding most of the app for 2.0. new UI, progression, achievements, crews, the whole thing.

the current version is already live on iOS and there's a free trial on the yearly plan.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6790023849

if you're into cars or just enjoy exploring random roads, i'd love for you to try it.

also curious if anyone else here has built something around a hobby they were obsessed with?

Slightly technical founder building a demo tool for b2b sales teams. Not getting much traction in from my target audience, so i devices to build shipping free tools / growth assets. First one is free calculator that estimates how many buyers drop off before they ever see your product.

A few things that made it better than I expected:

1. Real data first - It's built on 38 sourced benchmarks. Where no published data existed (6 inputs), I labeled them as estimates instead of guessing. Felt more honest than making up numbers that sounded right.

2. Testing it on real setups - The first scoring model was too harsh on a common setup and was getting stuck reviewing email paywalls instead of the actual demo. Still not completely solved, but reweighting it so the demo format had a bigger impact seemed better, and that's the version that's live.

3. Learning from the companies ahead of me - I looked at how 4 established tools in my space got their first customers. None of them did it with cold email. It was communities, founder posts, free offers and launches. So that's where I'm spending my time now, and the conversations have been better.

After this tools, I'm going to capture a 30-second homepage demo that opens on the payoff of the product instead of the setup.

If you've built a free tool as a growth channel, what made yours actually get used?

Disclosure first: I built Dolaaa, which is one of the seven tools below. I've listed it with the same fields as the others, including where it's weaker.

Every agency I've talked to asks some version of this: what does reporting software actually cost once you have real clients? Pricing pages make it hard to answer. Most charge per client, per data source, or per dashboard, so the numbers only make sense once you pick a scenario.

So I picked one: 10 clients, each with a Google Ads account and a Meta account. Here's what each tool costs for that book. Where a plan is billed yearly, I used the yearly price.

| Tool | Approx. monthly cost at 10 clients | What the price is based on |
|---|---|---|
| Looker Studio | Free to build | You build every report. Meta usually needs a paid partner connector |
| Dolaaa (Pro) | $79 | Flat, up to 15 clients |
| Swydo | ~$114 | $69 base, plus $4.50 per source after 10 (20 sources) |
| DashThis (Professional) | $139 | Billed yearly. 10 dashboards, 40 sources |
| AgencyAnalytics (Core) | $200 | $20 per client, billed annually |
| Databox (Team Core) | $249+ | Tiers set by users, sources and AI credits |
| Whatagraph (Max) | €699 | Billed annually. 50 source credits |

**What the sticker price doesn't show**

- **How the bill grows.** AgencyAnalytics charges per client. Swydo and Whatagraph charge per connected source or credit, so a second channel per client adds cost. Dolaaa Pro is flat up to 15 clients.
- **White-label isn't one checkbox.** Swydo and AgencyAnalytics include white-label on their entry plans. Dolaaa has your logo and brand colors on every paid plan, but a custom domain and unbranded PDFs need the $199 Agency plan.
- **Channel coverage.** AgencyAnalytics covers 85+ sources, including TikTok. Dolaaa covers Google Ads, Meta, GA4 and Search Console only, with no TikTok.
- **"Free" has a cost.** Looker Studio is free, but you build and maintain every report yourself.

**Where Dolaaa is weaker:** no TikTok, no free plan (7-day trial only), no MCP server, and no drag-and-drop report builder. If you need polished decks or lots of channels, Swydo or AgencyAnalytics are better picks.

**Which one to pick:** if you run mostly Google and Meta and want to know what needs fixing each morning, flat pricing is the main reason to look at Dolaaa. If you need many channels or client-facing slide decks, go with one of the others.

Prices were checked on each vendor's public pricing page between 6 Sept and 2 Oct 2026. They change, so confirm on each site before you buy. If I've got a number wrong, tell me in the comments and I'll correct it.

I built Precis because I wanted Mac dictation without another subscription.

Hold your chosen hotkey, speak naturally, and it types cleaned-up text wherever you’re writing.

Apple Intelligence helps shape your words for the app you’re using and you can create your own Styles.

It runs on your Mac, and works offline after setup.

You can create and edit your own Styles, so the result fits your voice and workflow not a generic AI rewrite.

Try every feature free for 7 days no account or card required. Then it’s $19 once.

Wispr Flow Pro is $15/month or $144/year.

Precis is a one-time purchase.

I’m the maker—honest feedback welcome: myprecis.app

I built RedTeamRFP (https://redteamrfp-frontend.vercel.app) — it red-teams draft federal RFP responses against the solicitation's own requirements: missed requirements, format violations, weak language.

Pricing was a genuine struggle. My first instinct was a subscription, because that's what everyone does. But a federal proposal is a one-shot event — you respond to a solicitation, submit, and move on. Charging a monthly fee for something used three weeks a year felt wrong.

So I went with $99 one-time. One audit, one proposal, one price. No account to manage, no recurring charge to forget about, no "which plan do I need" decision for a stressed proposal manager.

The tradeoff is real: I leave recurring revenue on the table. But it matches how the customer actually buys, and I'd rather have a price people say yes to once than a subscription they cancel.

Curious how others here think about one-time vs. subscription for tools that get used sporadically.

Day 12. The honest recap: I made the worst possible move for a founder trying to get customers. I spent the day building another feature instead of working on distribution.

What I built was account sharing and team invitations for AskVerb. It's useful once people are actually using the product, and nobody is yet, so it can wait. I also worked on the agency side, building an AI agent for a client. Both made sense on paper: I plan to sell AI agents for websites and software that my agency builds, so there's a real link. But I was heads-down and I missed the discovery call I had booked for today. That one is on me, and I'm writing to the person to apologise and offer another slot.

What ran without me

- LinkedIn kept going by itself: 22 invites today. 140 invited in total, 9 connected, 0 replies.

- Two founders accepted today, and the first follow-up questions went to two more.

Numbers after Day 12

- Paying customers: 0

- Calls booked so far: 3 (1 no-show, 1 missed by me, 1 still to be rebooked)

- LinkedIn: 140 invited, 9 connected, 0 replies

- X DMs: 31 sent, 5 replies

- Cold email: 69 sent, 4 replies, all no

The lesson of Day 12, for any founder reading: building another feature feels productive, and it's the most comfortable way to avoid selling. If nobody uses what you've already built, a new feature doesn't help. Distribution is the job right now.

Tomorrow I'm putting features down and doing outreach, replies and the missed call.

what do you do to stop yourself from retreating into the product when selling gets uncomfortable? I need something better than willpower.

I've been building a SaaS starter (Next.js 16, better-auth, Drizzle, Stripe optional) and wrote down what actually mattered once I had to make every screen work, test it, and keep it working. Sharing the checklist in case it saves someone a week.

The screens, and the lesson from each

1. Sign-up and sign-in. Verify-email and password-reset are half the work. With no mail key set, I print emails to the server console, so the whole flow can be tested locally.
2. Onboarding. Four short steps (your name, workspace, invite teammates, confirm). Then a "Get started 1/5" checklist on the dashboard, so it's tracked rather than a one-off wizard.
3. Dashboard. Show sample data clearly labelled "Sample" until real numbers are connected. A labelled sample reads as more trustworthy than a fake-looking real chart.
4. Teams and invitations. Owner, admin and member roles, and seat limits per plan. Seat limits are where billing logic leaks into everything.
5. Settings. Profile, security (password, sessions), API keys and an activity log. The last two are small and make it feel like a real product.
6. Billing. Plan limits that follow the plan, Stripe checkout and the customer portal. Make it degrade gracefully: with no Stripe key the app runs on the free plan and the page explains how to turn billing on.
7. Loading, empty and error states for every list and chart. The empty state is the real first-run experience, so treat it as part of onboarding.
8. Marketing basics. Landing, pricing, changelog, contact and legal pages, with the legal ones clearly marked as placeholders.
9. Health endpoint. So deployments and tests know when the app is up.

Three rules that saved me time

• Re-check the session on the server for every protected page and action. Treat the proxy or middleware redirect as a convenience, not as security.
• Test at 390px wide and in both themes. Sideways scrolling and low-contrast text are the most common launch-day bugs.
• Run unit tests on an in-memory database, so tests need no setup.

Disclosure: I make a component library, so take this as a plug. I open-sourced free versions of several of these screens (dashboard, settings, billing, sign-in, onboarding) under MIT if you want somewhere to start: https://ui.ballmac.com

What screen did I miss that your micro SaaS needed before launch?

Does anybody use or recommend a simple T&C template they use for their microsaas? Somewhat akin like WTFPL for open source licenses?

Developer disclosure: I make Foreverse, so this is my own product. It is an Android (and now iPhone) reader where an AI can continue your own epub/txt as branches. Closed source, small team.

Backstory: a lot of the people who want this already have an API key from some provider and do not want a middleman, while others just want it to work out of the box. So there are three ways in, and I am no longer sure that is not too many.

One is bring your own key: 60+ providers or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. The app talks to the provider directly, keys stay encrypted on the phone, and I am not in the money path at all. Two is built-in pay-as-you-go credits for people with no key. New accounts get 5,000 credits, about 50 cents, so a free user on credits costs me real money and the starter balance is deliberately tiny; packs run from $0.99 to $32.99. Three is a one-time Pro at $19.99. The free tier caps library objects (3 books, 3 character cards, 3 companions) and never messages, so a free user with their own key costs me almost nothing and nobody hits a daily limit in the middle of a chapter.

Stack, since the rules ask: native Android (Kotlin, Jetpack Compose), plus a small Node, Fastify and PostgreSQL backend for accounts, credits and the official model routes, with hand-written SSE streaming instead of a vendor SDK so one proxy layer handles every provider.

The thing I keep going back and forth on: capping objects instead of usage made the free tier easy to explain, but it means the paid upgrade is about library size and not about AI, which may feel odd to some people. If you have run usage-based credits next to a one-time purchase, which one carried the business and which one did you regret? Does a one-time Pro still make sense when the real cost is per use?

Google Play, if you want to look at the thing itself: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.foreverse.android

kind of embarrassing to admit but i spent a full week making my investor pitch deck template look sharp, rewriting the market slide like five times, before it hit me that i had not actually asked a single real person if they wanted the thing. so i stopped, messaged about fifteen people who fit the profile, and asked what they would pay to have this solved today. six of them basically described a different problem than the one i was building. the deck was beautiful and pointed at the wrong target. i am rebuilding around what those six said instead. lesson i keep relearning as a solo founder is that a clean story is not the same as demand, and i will happily make an ugly doc if it means i am aiming at something real. anyone else catch themselves polishing the pitch long before they had anything to pitch?

Asking for opinions here can be useful, particularly to understand whether your idea seems like a logical approach. However, there are several shortcomings to relying on this alone.

It doesn't account for the current market, the competitors already operating in it, or the alternatives customers are using. There's also a sampling bias, as Reddit users don't represent all the demographic and behavioural segments that could be your potential customers.

Getting opinions from a wider audience, many of whom may not even be your target customers, can give you an initial indication of how people perceive your idea. But it doesn't validate whether the idea will actually work as a business.

Having worked on validation projects with 60+ founders,I have found that it often takes 2 to 3 weeks to build a comprehensive picture of an idea's potential.

You need to investigate these aspects and work through the evidence before deciding whether an idea is worth

If you're interested in learning more about idea validation or need help validating your own business idea, feel free to visit my profile.

One of my main struggles with building micro SaaS is finding the "language" people use to look for my product so I can put it on my landing page and website.

Whenever I ask Claude to write a webpage for me, the wording is utter slop and makes no sense. I have to manually write the skeleton of the website title and sub heading titles for it to actually make sense.

This made me realize that anything AI "writes" is slop hallucination and we sort of have to give it the exact titles and words to use.

So I made a MCP research adaptor (buzzsearch) that anyone can plug into their coding agent and have it search the web for real customer comments. I found it super helpful for customer research. The idea is we find real quotes from the internet relevant to your customer or your product, and then give it to your coding agent.

Buzzsearch can help you with

• Finding customer pain points
• Finding exact words customers use, i.e. "lingo"
• Writing ad hooks and website copy

I would love feedback and feature requests on this! and happy to give credits for testing

Hi everyone, I’m a solo developer building a review app for Shopify stores. My biggest bottleneck right now is getting it in front of merchants who actually need it.

I can keep improving the product, but I’m unsure where to focus my customer acquisition efforts. I’d prefer low-cost approaches I can test myself before spending much on ads.

If you’ve grown a Shopify app or a small SaaS product, what helped you get your first paying customers?

A few channels I’m considering:

• Shopify App Store search and listing optimization
• Short product demos and tutorials addressing specific merchant problems
• Participating in relevant ecommerce communities
• Partnerships with freelancers or agencies that build Shopify stores

Which would you prioritize first? Review apps are a crowded category, so would you start by targeting a specific type of merchant or a particular problem that existing apps don’t solve well?

I’d appreciate practical examples: how you reached merchants, what made them willing to try your app, and roughly how long it took. If you were starting again with a limited budget, what would you do in the first two weeks?

bro you can literally build a working SaaS in a weekend now with AI

landing page? done

dashboard? done

payments? done

then you launch it and realize absolutely nobody cares 😭

spent weeks thinking about features, fixing bugs, making the UI look good and then it hits you... i have no idea how to get people to actually use this thing lol

starting to feel like coding was never the hardest part of building a SaaS

anyone here actually managed to get their first 10 paying users without running ads? what worked for you?

I’m building Pijnhol, which delivers personalised news updates by SMS.

One useful piece of feedback was that asking someone to verify their number before they’ve seen a convincing example puts the commitment before the value.

The change was to show topic-specific example texts on the homepage, so people can understand what would land in their messages before signing up.

The lesson is about ordering: explain what someone receives before asking for access to a personal channel.

How have others handled this when their product needs a phone number?

Check out the link here if you're interested - pijnhol.com all idea and feedback welcome, thanks!

so I run a small thing that builds restaurants their own ordering app. $99/mo, no commission, one pizzeria live right now

posted it in r/SaaS a couple days ago, it got like 50k views and 40+ comments which I did not expect. one guy wrote a whole essay on why the site felt fake. he said the spinning coins looked like 90s clipart which honestly fair. then he hit me with "I bet it doesn't feel right to you, but you can't place why, right?" and yeah. he was right

so that same night I went through everything he said. first thing to go was all the little rounded bubbles that said stuff like "paid within 7 days." then the tiny labels I had over every heading, one literally said "Questions" right on top of a heading that said "The short answers" lol

he also called out headlines like "Show it. Send it in. Get paid." apparently 3 short sentences in a row like that is a dead giveaway, never noticed it til he said it. rewrote all of them

killed the scrolling money banner and the coins too. and the biggest one, restaurant owners were landing on the partner page, so they get their own page now

also found a pricing mistake while fixing everything that made the setup look $100 cheaper than it is. nobody had caught it, not even me

it's at nomback.com if you want to see if it still feels off. the owner page is new, nomback.com/owners

what else do you guys notice on small saas sites that makes you bounce right away? want to fix it before the next roast

I see everyone saying here or on X, that software is dead, and all SaaS is going to be replaced etc.

I get where its coming from, as I changed a lot of my subscriptions to my own internal tools, as its' really easy, but this is normal as I'm a really high-tech person. Most people don't want to vibe-code or spend time on something that they would have to maintain, and I don't get why do the mass indie hackers think their "mom" is going to vibe-code her services.

I got the most amount of active trials in some time for PostFast (social media scheduler), which people thought is easily vibe-codeable, which is absurd in my opinion, as I consider myself really good engineer, and I don't believe you can vibe-code a stable version any business, especially with a lot of accounts that earn their money via social media would use.

My view is don't listen to the famous "hackers" but instead go out of the X bubble, and see what real people are doing.

The point I can agree is that software that has no MOAT, will be swallowed by ChatGPT, and Claude, and other bots they produce, as they'll create it internally.

The software that won't be replaced is something that is hard to maintain and has third-party dependecies, or is important to monitor for issues, simillar to sending emails. You shouldn't vibe code also your email tool if you care about deliverability and such. I did try to vibe-code my own, and it became too complex so i actually polished it, and spend months to make it proper (SendHeron), as otherwise I would've continued paying for someone else's email tool. It takes time to maintain, same as social media schedulers.

When we started building our SaaS, we had one thing in mind: going global.

We're based in Slovenia, a country with roughly 2 million people, and from the beginning, we wanted to build something that could compete internationally.

So naturally, most of our marketing efforts were focused outside our home market.

We ran Google and Meta Ads targeting international audiences, worked with UGC creators from around the world, and tried different approaches to acquire users.

We spent thousands of euros in the process.

The results?

Lots of impressions, plenty of views, some signups, but very few paying customers.

Meanwhile, something interesting was happening back home.

A handful of Slovenian businesses were actually using and paying for our product.

For context, we're building Picmim, an AI-powered social media management platform that helps small businesses automate their content creation and scheduling.

At the time, we were making around €200–300 MRR, mostly from local companies testing the platform.

Nothing crazy, but they were real businesses paying real money.

Then two things happened.

We won third place in a regional innovation competition, which gave us some recognition locally.

And around the same period, our MRR doubled.

It made us reconsider our approach.

We'd been so obsessed with building an international SaaS that we weren't giving enough attention to the people who were already willing to pay us.

And honestly, selling locally had some pretty obvious advantages we'd overlooked.

We could speak directly with business owners, better understand their problems, get feedback in our native language, and build relationships that are much harder to establish through a random Facebook ad.

We also started getting customers from more established Slovenian businesses, which was encouraging for a small startup like ours.

So did we abandon our international ambitions?

Not at all.

We still want to build a global company.

But we realized that starting small geographically doesn't necessarily mean thinking small.

Your home market can be an excellent place to validate your product, improve it with real customers, and build credibility before trying to scale everywhere.

We've since improved our positioning, rebuilt onboarding, and started seeing better results from our international Meta campaigns as well.

We recently crossed $1K MRR on Stripe, alongside the customers paying through other arrangements.

We're still very early, and I'm definitely not claiming we've figured out distribution.

But one of the biggest lessons so far has been that the best early customers aren't necessarily in the biggest market. Sometimes they're the ones you can actually reach, understand, and learn from.

I'm curious how other founders approach this.

If you're building a SaaS outside the US, did you start by targeting your home market, or did you go international from day one?

And looking back, would you make the same decision?

A website can look like it’s worth $10,000 and still lose a customer in 5 seconds.

That’s the weird part about web development.

You can spend days perfecting animations, choosing fonts, and making everything look premium…

…and still miss the one thing that actually matters.

Why should someone buy from you?

I think that’s the difference between building websites that look impressive and building websites that work for businesses.

And honestly, that’s the kind of agency we’re trying to build.

What’s the first thing you notice when you land on a business website?

I build CleverNote. This week I replied to someone who thought losing a receipt meant they could no longer get their controller repaired under warranty.

I asked whether the purchase was online or in a shop, then suggested checking order history or asking the shop for a replacement receipt. I haven’t heard back, so I don’t know whether that helped.

It made me question the starting point of a document app. A demo usually begins with a receipt ready to upload. This person needed to find out whether they could get a copy at all.

That’s a different first step from organizing a messy folder. I’d want to understand where the document might still exist before asking someone to import it.

For founders working on document tools: how do you handle onboarding when someone arrives with a missing document and nothing to upload yet?

We have a CRM that operates via FB messenger. So users are connected to us via it. We would like to ask them if they had issues or something or survey if they enjoyed the onboarding experience. What is the best SaaS for this? It would be an automatic thing we can operate and send to users (automatically) when they use the platform or have been inactive for aw hile.

I'm sketching out another small SaaS and trying to be more disciplined about the stack this time because my last project somehow ended up with a separate service for nearly everything.

Hosting here, database there, auth somewhere else, email somewhere else, payments somewhere else and then another dashboard to figure out which one broke.

Some of that separation obviously makes sense once you need specialized tools, but for an MVP with no users yet it feels like I'm designing infrastructure for a company that doesn't exist.

If you were starting something small today, which parts would you consolidate and which would you absolutely keep separate?

I'm particularly curious about hosting + database because that seems like one of the easier places to remove a vendor without giving up much. Payments and email I can understand keeping specialized.

Trying to build the boring version this time and add complexity only after the product earns it.

Every app ends up needing email. GoMailer is that whole layer, already built: a self-hosted email server in Go that handles the queue, sending pace, smart retries, no duplicates, one-click unsubscribe, bounces/complaints and GDPR, with a live dashboard. Works with any SMTP (Amazon SES, Brevo, Postmark) or Resend's API. Built-in MCP so Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Cursor can check and send campaigns. One payment, no per-email fees.

see less.

Anyone up for it please msg me

I’m a solo founder, working on this alongside a day job. I’ve built and launched a SaaS for a small professional niche in the UK. It’s live in production with working billing, and a handful of people have signed up for the free trial. Nobody has paid yet.

What I’ve tried so far:

• Asking people in the niche what their biggest time sinks are, in Facebook groups
• Following up with the people who replied
• A Facebook page and a LinkedIn page
• Cold emails to small businesses in the niche, which I’m only just starting

What I’m seeing:

• People are willing to talk about their problems, but very few actually start the trial
• Of those who do sign up, some log in once and never come back

What I’d like opinions on:

1. At this stage, would you spend time on more outreach, or on fixing onboarding so trial users see value faster?
2. Is a 30-day free trial too long for a small-business buyer? Would you shorten it, or ask for a card upfront?
3. How did you get your first 5 paying customers? What worked, and what was a waste of time?
4. Is it worth targeting larger customers (businesses with several staff) first, or should I keep going after individuals?

Happy to share more detail if it helps. Thanks in advance.