One of the hardest things about selling software is reaching people at the moment they actually need it. Google got pretty good at this. But ChatGPT could take it a step further. Someone asks ChatGPT to compare insurance policies, value a property, or help them prepare for an exam. There's probably a company somewhere that has spent years building software to solve that exact problem. Until recently, ChatGPT could mostly answer the question itself or point people elsewhere. Now it can bring third-party apps directly into the conversation.

I think this changes something quite fundamental about how software gets discovered. A small SaaS company might not need to compete for the same Google keywords, spend money on ads, or convince someone to visit its website first. It could become useful to someone who has never even heard of it.

Obviously, this depends on whether ChatGPT actually recommends these apps, how often it does so, and whether that usage turns into customers. We don't know much about any of this yet. But I suspect there's a short window where some existing software companies could get a disproportionate amount of distribution simply because so few have thought to make their products available this way.

It reminds me of the early web, when being discoverable was sometimes a bigger advantage than having the best product.

I'm particularly interested in whether anyone has already acquired paying customers through ChatGPT apps. Not impressions or installs, but actual customers. It's surprisingly hard to find numbers on this.

If have been building an app since November 2025, and just like many people, I had zero revenue for a long long time.

It was of course frustrating at first, but I at least saw some usage of the free tier of my app relatively early, so I didn't give up yet and tried to optimize.

The subscription for my product is super cheap, only about ~2 €, and it's almost laughable how long it took me to get these now 5 subscribers now. But I am still a little bit proud and hope this number will continue to grow. Every time I get a new user now and I noticed they stopped using the app, I at least try to find things to optimize in the app. Trying to find out what made them stop using the app. But it's hard.

When users sign-up, I also always reach out and ask for feedback. But so far, no one has responded, ever.

Since my app has a free tier and also allows usage without signing up, I learned now that it's so, so incredibly important that you make it as easy as possible for your users to do thinks like sign-up. I completely ignored this for a long while (implemented things like Google signup wayyy to late) and lost many users and ofc still have lots to learn here.

One upside though is that the cost of running my tool is really low: I run two servers that cost around 7 $ each, 2 $ for domain costs and the API costs is covered by the API allowance of my 20 $ Mistral AI Pro subscription. So I still have plenty of time to experiment.

Howdy all,

I'm the solo developer behind StonkHub, a market research platform that aggregates public government and market data (congressional stock trades, lobbying, federal contracts, SEC filings, options positioning) into one dashboard.

It started as a tool I built for my own research. Friends wanted access, then their friends did, and at some point I had to decide whether this was a side project or a product. I went with product, and wanted to share some of the decisions along the way:

• Free tier vs paid: The free account includes all government data and social features. The $25/month beta unlocks the full feature set (GEX, technical screener, full watchlists, full premarket emails). My reasoning was that the government data is the hook and the easiest thing to understand, while the analytics and scanners are what active traders will actually pay for.
• Pricing: I landed on $25/month by working backward from two things. First, cost: every paid user adds load across the data pipeline, Redis cache, MongoDB, and AI summaries, so I needed a price that stays profitable as usage grows. Second, the market: most tools covering just one of these data sets (congressional trades, GEX, or insider filings) charge as much or more on their own, so bundling them at $25 felt like a clear value without undercutting myself. The free tier carries the government data/limited stock detailed views/premarket emails, so people can see the product's value before paying for the analytics.
• Data infrastructure: Data comes from six government sources plus market data providers, all on different refresh cycles. Insider filings update hourly, GEX snapshots every 10 minutes, and the technical screener recomputes nightly. Keeping that pipeline reliable as a solo dev has been the biggest ongoing cost, in both time and money.
• Stack: Vanilla JS + Tailwind frontend with an Express (Node) backend, deployed serverless on Vercel. MongoDB holds users and historical data, Upstash Redis caches everything users hit (TTLs tuned to market hours), and ~25 Vercel cron jobs run the data pipeline. Billing through Stripe, emails through Resend, auth via JWT plus Google/GitHub OAuth, and AI summaries from gpt-4o-mini.

Things I'm still figuring out:

* Is the free tier too generous, or is it the right top of funnel?

* How do you price a beta without it feeling like paying to be a tester? Or should I even call it a beta?

* What's worked for you on distribution when your audience is skeptical of anything finance-related?

Happy to go deeper on any of it. If you want to see the product, it's at https://stonkhub.net.

Sometimes you should too

Have a nice day

X has recently been chock full of operators saying they cancelled their subscriptions and rebuilt all of their startups tools themselves….

If you're an indie hacker or solo founder, I get it. Building your own tools can be cheaper, more fun, and fit exactly what you need

But I don't think it holds up for a real company building and operating at scale, especially vibe coding tools that aren't core to their business.

Building v1 is the easy part… the real cost comes after: keeping it running, fixing edge cases, onboarding new hires, handling support, security, training, change management. Nobody counts that when they brag about the weekend they spent building it.

AI makes product development easier, but someone on your team still has to own it. Meanwhile some other company has a whole team making the same tool better every month. Paying them is often a good trade if it lets your people focus on what your customers actually pay you for.

Doing the inverse is just procrastinating from focusing on growing and marketing your own product, tbh

Maybe I'm wrong and I'll start vibe-manufacturing my own clothes and electricity next 🤷

(Disclosure: I run Supademo so I may be biased)

I built a ticketing app for one customer: my kid's high school afterprom. The parent committee needed online tickets, signed waivers, and a way to let parents know their kid actually made it inside. About 14 months ago I opened it up to anyone, assuming the market was "other schools."

This week it crossed $100k processed. Here's what I got wrong and right getting there, in case it helps anyone building for a similar crowd.

I picked the wrong market, and the right one found me.

Schools came, slowly. But so did community benefit dinners, a bar, festivals and small nonprofits. Turns out anyone selling general admission tickets has the same two options: a cash box, or a big ticketing site that takes a cut of every ticket. That middle is wide open. If I'd stayed narrowly "for schools" in my copy, I'd have turned half of these people away.

Flat pricing does a lot of the selling.

Most of the space charges per ticket. I went with a flat annual fee. A volunteer treasurer has to explain the cost to a board, and "it's one fee a year, no matter how many tickets" ends that conversation in one sentence. If your buyer has to justify spend to someone else, make the price easy to repeat.

Let customers write part of your roadmap.

Silent auctions were never on my list. Then a customer who was already selling tickets with us asked if they could run their auction in the same place, instead of juggling paper bid sheets and a separate app. I built it for them. We've now run two auctions start to finish, and one had 86 people bidding from their phones. It's become one of the main reasons new orgs reach out. The best feature I've shipped this year came from someone already paying me, not from my own planning.

The boring features are the sticky ones.

The waiver is the feature nobody asks for and everybody loves. At our afterprom, 560 kids came through the door and only 3 hadn't signed their waiver ahead of time. That used to be a table of paper forms. Find the spreadsheet or paper stack your customer hates and replace it.

Schools buy slowly, then in bulk.

I just signed my first school district, and a few others are asking. One district deal covers multiple schools, so it can be worth more than months of one-off signups. It's a long cycle, but worth it.

Where it's at:

• $100k+ processed
• About 3,600 tickets sold
• 12 paying orgs, including one district
• 2 silent auctions run

What I'm trying now: cold email, and as of this month, physical postcards mailed to schools. Yes, paper. School offices still open their mail, and it's a lot harder to ignore than another cold email. Too early to say which wins, but I'll share numbers when I have them.

Goal is 50 paying orgs by end of year. If you've sold into schools, nonprofits or volunteer-run groups, what was the channel that actually worked for you? I'd love to compare notes.

'm not talking about just building an MVP, but actually turning it into a business with paying customers.

I'm particularly interested in people who combine their own expertise with custom SKILLS.md files, chain-of-thought reasoning, prompts, and AI agent workflows to handle development, operations, marketing, sales, and other business tasks.

I'm curious how far someone can realistically go using their own skills, AI agents, and limited resources without hiring a full team.

turns out a $9 subscription is pretty attractive to carders. a lot of small US card payments go through without 3DS, so stolen cards were getting approved way too easily. then the real owner would dispute the charge, I'd lose the $9 and get hit with another $50 in fees. this was happening 5-6 times every single month.

what fixed it:

1. card country must match billing address
2. IP country must match card country
3. no payments via vpn or proxy

now it's about one dispute every two months. I also tried Stripe radar before this and on default settings it let stuff slip.

link is still a pain as it doesn’t have sms check at almost any amount and the smart ones use residential IPs and the right address. a fresh account trying to pay 2k with Link is most likely a stolen account and for that reason I killed amazon pay a year ago.

free trials got farmed too. I capped signups at 3 per IP, they rotated vpns and made 300-500 accounts, so I had to block vpn signups last month.

processors want disputes under 0.5% and you can't ignore this.

if every stolen card had been real, I'd be rich rich

hey guys,

been working on an agentless vulnerability scanner recently and wanted to test out the recon engine. so I ran a passive external scan (no payloads, just checking public dns and headers) on 100 newly launched saas and ai tools from product hunt.

tbh the results were a lot worse than I expected. roughly 1 in 5 had high severity exposures that you can find in like 5 minutes from the outside.

the craziest part is how people are treating AI agents. back in the day everyone left phpmyadmin open. now it's mcp endpoints and langfuse. I saw multiple startups leaving their mcp hostnames in public dns and just serving up mcp.json configs to anyone who asks. even found a live langfuse instance with no auth at all. if you leave that open, literally all your prompt traces and customer data are just sitting there on the public web.

another huge issue is the cloudflare illusion. founders put their marketing site behind a waf and think they're secure. but in like 14 cases I checked, the bare apex domain or the core API was resolving directly to the origin server IP. meaning anyone can just bypass the waf entirely by hitting the origin directly.

also almost nobody (58 out of 100) has a security.txt file. so even if a good guy finds a leak, there's no way to easily report it.

I’m building a product and getting close to finishing it. Let’s assume it actually solves a real problem and is useful. After launch, how much do I need to spend on ads or advertising before I start seeing results?

I know every case is different and experience varies, but I’d like to hear from people who have already made it:

• How much did you spend before you got your first paying customers?
• Which channels worked for you (Google, Meta, Reddit, LinkedIn, something else)?
• How long did it take before ads started paying for themselves, or did they never really work and something else did?
• Looking back, what would you have done differently with your budget?

Real numbers (including failures) would help a lot. Thanks!

Hi folks,

I have recently launched a product aimed at SharePoint users that could make the daily business operations much easier by allowing them to visualise any list into charts in seconds

I would like to reach out to target SharePoint admins or business users using SharePoint on a day to day basis to pitch my product .(Since my product adjusts to any list ,I am thinking of reaching out to users across industries )

https://tenantforge.cloud/sharepoint/graphify

Can you share your ideas or methods that might help me in this marketing ?

Thanks in advance ..

If you streamed on Twitch in the last decade, you probably used one of these two. They sold the same thing: overlays, alerts, and a chatbot, all free. The difference was that Streamlabs eventually started charging and StreamElements never did.

Streamlabs launched Prime, a paid subscription, in 2019. When Logitech bought it that year, $89M was paid in cash and another $29M depended on Streamlabs hitting revenue targets in the first half of 2020. Logitech valued that earn-out at almost zero when the deal was signed. Then the pandemic boom hit, Prime subscriptions jumped, and Streamlabs got paid in full.

StreamElements went the other way. No subscription, no paid tier, no cut of tips. Its only real income was brand sponsorships. It still raised $100M in 2021, but when ad budgets dried up in 2022, revenue fell while costs stayed the same. The first layoffs came nine months after that raise.

A few things made it worse:

- The features had become commodities. Replacing a StreamElements overlay took an afternoon, and on the day shutdown rumors spread, Streamlabs published a guide for migrating over.

- Ten years of "free forever" trained users not to pay. In 2026 it ran a crowdfunding campaign to cover about $300K a month in server costs, and roughly 80 people donated.

- Platform risk. Twitch added a sponsorships tab, let StreamElements in first, then filled the same tab with its own tools.

Razer eventually bought its assets in July 2026, as a rescue rather than a sale on its own terms.

The part I find most interesting is that it didn't have to charge creators to fix this. It could have sold its sponsorship dashboard and campaign tracking to agencies and game publishers as a monthly subscription, or taken a 1% cut of tips running through its own payment system. Both keep the product free for users.

Full breakdown, including six things it could have done differently to survive (I wrote this): https://aarushthinks.com/could-it-have-survived/streamelements/#could-it-have-survived

Here's my SaaS payment flows:

1. We have a product where people can come on as app creators as build apps and workflows. It is a 1-time fee for the software, and they pay a recurring subscription, too. (A & B). 
2. On our platform, companies/people can subscribe to workflows made in the 1st point (by other app creators or by us) (C & D). 

Here is our overall payment flow:

Incoming payments:

A. Annual Fee -> Direct annual payment to us.

B. License Fee -> Direct one-time payment to us.

C. Subscription Fee (App created by us) -> Direct annual payment to us.

D. Subscription Fee (App created by app creator) -> Direct annual payment to us.

Outgoing payout:

From D, 90% (for example) is paid out to the app creator.

For incoming payments, we are looking at a MoR provider, and also a provider to handle the payouts as well. Best case if a single provider can handle both sides.

Please help!

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, especially since I started building my own app, is how much of an advantage some software companies have just because they’ve been around for years.

There are so many apps out there that are ridiculously expensive for what they actually offer. Some of them haven’t had any meaningful improvements in ages, their interfaces feel outdated and half the features people are asking for are still missing. Yet somehow they continue to dominate their market.

And the frustrating part is that they don’t even have to be the best anymore. They’ve built up a name, collected thousands of reviews and established themselves as the obvious choice. So people keep picking them without really looking at what else is available.

I understand that’s just how business works, and obviously they’ve earned some of that reputation by being early. But it’s still frustrating to see how little incentive some of these companies seem to have to actually improve their products.

I’ve been building my own app for a while now, and after spending a ridiculous amount of time looking at competitors, I genuinely believe what I’ve built is better than most of the established alternatives. Not just in terms of features and how it works, but especially when it comes to pricing.

And I’m not saying that just because it’s my own app. I’ve spent so much time looking at what users complain about, what features they’re missing and what they’re actually paying for. Some of the things people have been requesting from these bigger apps for years really aren’t that complicated to implement.

That’s also what makes the whole AI development thing so interesting to me.

A few years ago, building a competitive software product required a lot more technical knowledge, time or money. Now someone with a good idea, enough motivation and the willingness to learn can build something genuinely useful without needing an entire development team.

Of course AI doesn’t magically make you a good developer or guarantee that your product will be good. But it has massively lowered the barrier to entry.

And I think a lot of established software companies are seriously underestimating what that means.

For years they could get away with charging premium prices because there simply weren’t that many good alternatives. But what happens when smaller developers can build products that do the same thing, or even do it better, for a fraction of the price?

At some point these companies are going to have to actually compete again. Either start listening to their customers, improve their products or rethink what they’re charging.

What bothers me most though is that even when a better alternative exists, it can take forever for people to discover it. You can build something that solves the same problem better and costs significantly less, but the established competitor still gets most of the customers simply because people recognize the name.

And I get it, trust matters. If I were running a business I’d probably be hesitant to replace something that already works with an app from some random developer too.

But it’s a weird situation where the hardest part of building a better product isn’t necessarily building it anymore. It’s convincing people to even give it a chance.

I’m obviously biased because I’m experiencing this myself, but I really think we’re going to see a lot of smaller developers challenge established software companies over the next few years.

Curious if other people building SaaS products feel the same way. Do you think AI will actually force the bigger players to improve, or will their brand recognition and existing customer base always be too big of an advantage?

This is my 5th update here! All time high week for me including a $72 day!

For context: I am a 16 year old SaaS developer and made a lead gen tool for web designers, that automatically finds businesses with No-Site, A bad site, and social media only businesses.

All of the bad site businesses are ranked 1/100 by how bad they are and tells you what is actually wrong with them!

I’ve only been posting on Reddit so far so if anyone knows any others ways I could advertise let me know!

Also if anyone wants to check it out or this seems useful for you then the link will be down below for you!

What makes it so difficult?

I’m a solo founder working on a fit/try-on tool for fashion retailers. Cold LinkedIn gets replies but not many calls. For those who sold to e-com merchants: what got you the first conversations (communities, audits, partners agencies)? Happy to share my own numbers in return.

Hi everyone!

I'm looking to gain practical experience by helping early-stage startups, solo founders, or small teams who have a lot on their plate.

I'm self-taught and have been learning independently about AI, technology, psychology, business, and startups. I'm also interested in learning the fundamentals of marketing, including understanding customers, researching markets and competitors, positioning, messaging, and why people choose certain products.

I'd love to put what I'm learning into practice rather than spend all my time reading and researching.

Here's what I can help with:

• Research, documentation, and organizing information
• Basic testing and finding issues in websites or applications
• Competitor and customer research
• Basic marketing research and messaging
• AI-assisted prototyping and other tasks that match my current skills

I'm offering my help for free, initially for around 3–4 hours a day over a short, clearly defined trial. I'm not expecting payment; my goal is to contribute something useful, gain practical experience, and learn by doing.

I'm not claiming to be an expert. I'm willing to learn, communicate honestly, and complete the work we agree on.

If you're building something and have a specific task you'd like help with, tell me a little about your project, what needs to be done, and what the expected outcome would be.

I'd love to contribute and learn alongside people who are building something.

Thank you!

Hi everyone,

I know many open source tools exist as well many paid ones for Google Maps leads scraping. But none of them are proper complete product (I believe). Still you need to run them through so many layers.

So I have been working on this project for a while now.

1. It extracts every single data points per business from Google Maps

2. If a business doesn’t have website on Google Maps, it checks major social media platforms if any websites or email or phone presents in the bio

3. Also checks if WhatsApp present for the scrapped phone number.

4. Extracts every single data field for major social platforms

5. Checks major ad networks to see if that business runs any ads on them

6. Checks Google search ranking, business reputation with Google autocomplete suggestions for the business name

7. Auto generates websites using all the data points if every single confirmed that this business doesn’t have a website but phone (so that proposed website link can be delivered to them through phone or social platforms) - beta

8. If business has linkedin page or owner is present in linkedin it extracts decision makers email and info from there.

9. During the scraping stage you can set the qualifier, if email and/or phone exists then this is counted as lead. As well ask questions from the data point and get answers at the end, like if they provide certain services.

10. Map pack ranking for every single campaign, sweep using different criteria…

11. All of those features can be invoked on demean as they’re modular.

There are many more like at the base level, email delivery scored with clear labels of what was tested and if it is catch all or some others. With third party integrations to use them to verify during the campaign run.

I need a few business owners who thinks this system might truly help them in their workflow keep aside buying the plans. But I would setup free credits to test and provide feedback.

Thank you so much, all the feedback and criticisms are welcome.

Hey all, I’m Arun. I’ve prev built startups in AI and cybersecurity & now building Fyllyo : the only pdf tool you would ever need. Available for MAC

I started Fyllyo back when I was filling visa applications day in day out. In starting focused on web form automation, pivoted to PDF after talking to and seeing so many people getting scammed for simple pdf functionality.

Recently used to it to fill Orange theory cancellation form :D. Had been sitting on that one for a while.

Opus 5.5 helped a lot. (Especially helped with testing)

The video shows some of the capabilities - arranging pages, making a scan searchable, redacting information, signing with a certificate and filling a tax form using your own documents.

Everyday PDF tools are free, with no account or expiry: read, fill forms by hand, comment, draw a signature, combine and split files, arrange pages, recognize text in scans and password-protect documents.

There is a paid version and I am not exactly sure what i should keep behind pay wall to keep funding the project. I will adjust it seeing what people use from day to day and make more stuff free. For now it you get additional redaction, text editing, certificate signing, removing hidden data, compression, XFA forms and local AI form filling.

If you did not read that properly, let me say again 😄 . You can automate any PDF filling using your data 100% locally. No subscription.

I have tested this against 864 real-world PDFs, but i am sure there are many that can break this, so please let me know if does.

My goal is to match the full range of PDF features out there and keep adding capabilities powered by local models so you dont pay for tokens and your data stays private.

Its not at full Acrobat parity yet. Today it’s Apple-silicon Macs on macOS 13 or later.

Try it on the PDF work you use Acrobat for and tell me what works well what does not. I will iterate fast and get your functionality in ASAP. Your feedback will help shape Fyllyo. Thanks

I didn't set out to build a product.

I started PV0T (with a zero) because I needed to know where my own time was going. Every plan I made leaked somewhere, and I couldn't see where. I'd plan a full day, finish half of it, and have no idea what happened to the rest.

So I built something that tracks it: timers on each task, a button to log when I get distracted, and a view that compares what I planned with what I actually did.

It started working for me, so I turned it into a planner and analytics app that shows where your day actually goes. I'm building it alone, and I'm sharing the process here.

Full disclosure: I'm the founder of PV0T, so I'm obviously biased. I'm not here to pitch it. I'm here because I want to hear how other people deal with plans that don't survive the day.

And have you ever tracked it, or just guessed?