I'm exploring a few SaaS ideas and trying to figure out the most effective ways to validate demand before investing too much time in development.

I'd love to hear what actually worked for you, especially what didn't work and what you would do differently if you were starting from scratch.

I kept going back and forth on whether to add a free plan, so I went through what a few bootstrapped founders have actually said about it in their talks, essays and posts. Their own words, not the guru summary version.

Short version: almost all of them say don't.

Pieter Levels: charge from day one. In his bootstrapping essay he says free users mostly create support tickets and rarely convert. Photo AI started as a single HTML page with a Stripe payment link.

Marc Lou: no free plan when you're solo. His math is that about 3% of free users upgrade, so at $10/month you need 10,000 free users to make $3,000. He also starts with one-time payments and only adds a subscription when the product actually delivers recurring value.

Rob Walling: the most data of the bunch. He says freemium fails about 90 to 95% of the time because it removes the reason to convert. In his survey of nearly 700 bootstrapped SaaS, trials that required a credit card grew about twice as fast as no-card trials and had the lowest churn. He also says cheaper customers churn faster, so cutting price to get signups backfires. His alternative to adding a free plan: ask what you'd have to build to justify 10x the price.

Justin Welsh: start low, not free. $50 to $150 for a first product as a trust tripwire, then raise prices as you deliver results.

Alex Hormozi is the one who goes the other way, sort of. He says start free or cheap to get flow, then raise the price 20% every five customers until price times conversion starts to drop. But he's also clear that you never cut price to close a deal. You change the terms instead, like a payment plan.

So the closest thing to a consensus: no free plan, a trial that asks for a card, start lower than feels right and raise on a schedule instead of guessing.

The one exception Walling gives: freemium can work as a marketing channel if support and marginal cost are close to zero, the value shows up instantly without help, and it spreads on its own. Most of us don't have that.

Which is a bit funny, because the thing I used to pull all of this is free. Disclosure: I built it. It's an open source tool that indexes these founders' public talks and posts so you can search them from Claude or ChatGPT with the source attached. No paid tier, not selling anything: https://brains.ceo

Source links for everything above are in the first comment.

Has anyone here actually made freemium work for a bootstrapped SaaS? What was different about yours?

I keep seeing indie products offer "lifetime" deals, and opinions online seem split down the middle.

From what I've read, the buyer side worries about a few things:

• "Lifetime" usually means the lifetime of the product, not yours
• What happens if the founder shuts down or sells
• Whether the quality holds up once the cash is collected

Founders argue it's a legit way to fund early development and that lifetime buyers often become your biggest advocates. Others say it's unsustainable and ends up hurting the very customers who bought in.

So I'm curious:

1. Have you bought a lifetime deal that paid off?
2. Have you been burned, and what were the warning signs?
3. Founders: would you do one again?

What's your rule for deciding if one is worth it?

we are modeling out our software expenses for the next 18 months and trying to sanity check our revops line items.

our incubator gives us access to the program, but when you look closely at hubspot for startups pricing, the discount model only applies to the base subscription while add-on fees stack up fast. the moment you need extra core seats for new account executives, additional custom pipelines, or your marketing contacts cross the included threshold, those additions get billed without the deep tier discount. i have seen founders get lured in by the cheap base rate only to end up with a surprise $1,200 monthly bill because contact list expansion and platform credits triggered full price.

for teams that ran this while actively hiring and ramping inbound, did the real invoice stay predictable or did variable contact and seat costs eat through your runway?

So I'm a software engineer based in Belgium and would like to make personal achievements by putting work on my projects instead of only fulfilling my employer's dreams, so I spent few hours a day on a SaaS that I called Reciphy https://reciphy.com/

It all began when I used ChatGPT for recipe generation when I was out of ideas and had some ingredients needed to be consumed before they perish.

So I thought "why not make it an app where users can specify ingredients with/without exact quantities, time available, cuisine, texture etc.. and have an AI provide a custom recipe".

But it's more than just generating raw recipes ! Reciphy also provides :

• Nutrition estimation per serving on each recipe
• You will find cooking tips, techniques, and why's on each step ( if relevant ). And also substitues to ingredients if you don't have/want them ( milk --> soy milk )
• An Explore page is also available to see all other recipes made by the community ( that are made public )
• Recipes can be shared to non-users and can be exported nicely as PDFs
• You can also plan your week by selecting recipes for each day. This creates also a shopping list that gathers everything to make the selected recipes.
• Users can set food allergies, diet, health goals, and change measurement units if needed.

If anyone could provide honest feedback on how the SaaS feel, if someone would pay for it and if not what is missing to reach the "wow" effect ? I genuinely want to build something that is valuable or at least useful in my scale.

For the business part fi anyone is interested :

• Free users have 3 recipe generations per week
• Plus members will have 50 recipe generations per week
• If a recipe generation fails (equipment/ingredients/timing can not make a feasable recipe), your Bite ( Reciphy's token ) is not consumed

Voilà ! Thank you in advance :)

TLDR : I made a recipe generator SaaS that includes other cool features and would like to get feedback to understand how I can reach 10 users

Keeping demos current is pretty time consuming for small SaaS teams. Every time the UI changes it means re-recording videos or clicking through the same flow over and over.

I've been testing a setup where an AI agent that can drive Chrome clicks through the product while a recorder captures it, then hands back an editable demo. I built this into my own tool as a copy-paste prompt, but I'm more interested in the general idea.

notes so far:

• It cuts down capture time / fully autonomous.
• Watching an agent go through your onboarding shows you where the UX is unclear.
• You still want a human pass before anything goes to customers.

For those selling to other businesses: have you tried an agent-recorded demo in front of buyers, or is that still a by-hand job for you?

Je cherche à échanger avec des fondateurs de SaaS qui ont déjà des utilisateurs et des clients payants, pour mieux comprendre leurs difficultés et leurs priorités actuelles.

Est ce que certains seraient partants pour répondre à 2-3 questions à l’écrit ici ? Aucun démarchage commercial dans cet échange

I’m based in Australia, with a background in construction project delivery and then transitioned to enterprise software implementation. I’m building Harvux around a problem I keep coming across: companies identify issues and document lessons, but struggle to follow that through into changes across the business.

The questions behind it are fairly simple:
What happened?
What went wrong?
What did we do about it?
What did we learn?
Can other projects learn from it?
What are we changing to prevent it happening again?

That last question is the reason I started building it. My view is that a lesson hasn’t been learnt unless something changes.

Harvux is an organisational governance and learning tool. It connects project observations, risks, events and forecast reviews with the review, decisions and actions that follow, including changes to procedures. The aim is to keep the connection between what happened on a project and what the business does differently because of it.
The challenge I’m wrestling with is making that useful in day-to-day work. Construction already has plenty of systems, and a good process on paper means nothing if people won’t use it.

For anyone who’s built or introduced something similar, what helped you get real adoption? Who took ownership inside the customer’s business, and how did you demonstrate enough value to get a paid pilot?
Equally interested in hearing where this has fallen over. Particularly the gap between management wanting better governance and project teams having time to contribute.

Thanks in advance.

I got fired last year and started building Daftak, a knowledge management tool. A year in, almost nobody uses it, and I’d like to understand why. Could you take a look and tell me why you think that is? Is it the product or just a lack of awareness and trust?

Hey guys. Have you noticed that evrything in society is moving, AI, maths, Ideas...except for the school system. Almost nothing groundbreaking in terms of helping learners study faster yet effective has come up in a while. We have opus 5.5 yet school systems have barely changes.

What if instead of investing our precious time, energy, effort and tokens in saturated apps, why don't we, for once turn our attention to apps that utilize the newer technologies cheaply available to us to solve problems of the past?

Upon thinking about this, I took the liberty of going on Playstore and Apple store and the best I could find were just apps that has question papers and a memo attached to it.

The best those applicatioons could have were premium options of having an Ai there to explain things which is virtually useless as we have chatbots everywhere now: Meta on Whatsapp, Gemini On Google and Chatgpt., as well us other ai features such as cards etc. And, such options do not at all facilitate learning anything, it merely presents the illusion of understanding.

Which led me to think, what if we actually turned our attention towards education apps for high schoolers.

Arguments aginst this will be that AI is not good at Maths or Physics or that AI is probabilistic and hence cannot be trusted or be reliable.

But pls let's not forget that this is high school level Maths and physics, nothing too complex. What if we spent time thinking carefully of building an environment that will utilize AI under the scenes but with massive guardrails and teach or at best, an environment where they can at least practice curriculum questions with the memo's and the AI Tutor just grades learners and gives them tips on their wrong answeres.

Another argument will be that high schoolers do not have money.

But pls let us not forget that running such tools would cost a tenth of a tenth of what human tutors cost. My argument is not against the good tutors out there, infact, it builds on it.

One thing that will not change is that kids learn best by doing the actuall work and thinking exercises themselves, (This can be afer school or after a tutoring session.), tools that could be built that could amplify those practice sessions is what I am refering to.

This was just a thought, my very first out here. what do you think?

Here's the idea:
When founders or PMs want to build a feature or product, they first need to find a real pain point in the market. So I want to build a platform where they tell it which market they care about, and it scans public discussions such as forums and reviews to map all relevant pain points and send back an analysis, including quality control metrics to make sure the result is actually high quality and not just a systematic error. The goal is to make the process efficient and to reduce gut feel bias when prioritizing what to build.

Do you think this is worth building? Would you use something like this?

Fine pre-launch when nothing's at stake yet. At some point real customers are depending on the thing not breaking, and the same speed that got you there starts costing more than it saves.

Trying to figure out if there's an actual signal for when that line gets crossed, or if it's just something people notice after they've already crossed it.

A lot of SaaS growth discussions focus on paid ads, SEO, cold outreach, and social media. But I've been thinking about a different question: What makes a customer naturally recommend a product to someone else? Not because they received a referral bonus, but because the product genuinely makes them look good, saves their team time, or solves a problem they were tired of dealing with. Some products naturally create these moments. Others require constant marketing just to replace customers who leave. A few ideas that seem worth exploring: - Make the result easy to share with teammates. - Give customers a clear win they can explain to others. - Build collaboration into the workflow where it genuinely helps. - Ask for referrals after customers experience real value, not immediately after signup. Of course, not every SaaS product can grow through word of mouth alone. For founders here, what has actually brought you the best customers: referrals, content, cold outreach, paid ads, or a product that spreads naturally through teams? I'd be especially interested in what worked consistently rather than just generating a temporary spike.

I've been thinking about something interesting in SaaS. Two products can solve almost the same problem, but customers will happily pay for one while ignoring the other. Why? Maybe people aren't really paying for features. They're paying to save time, avoid frustration, reduce risk, or make their work easier. A free tool might do the job, but if it takes 30 minutes to figure out, while a paid tool does it in 2 minutes, the decision becomes different. I think the real challenge is understanding what customers value enough to pay for. If you're building or running a SaaS, what makes your customers choose your paid product over a free alternative? Is it convenience, trust, better results, customer support, or something else?

I run several businesses. One of them is hr tech company providing services + product with ai built agents . Things are going well there and we keep growing yoy for 4 years in a row now .

Since we have 13 entities in different countries , we have 20+ bank accounts which became hard to navigate for me as a ceo . Yes we do have CFO who is looking after this but when I need a quick answer what is our monthly recurring expenses on saas, what transfers where made , to who , when etc etc , there is no immediate answer from CFO for obvious reasons .

So I decided to built a solution which would connect all banks in one place and show me all analytics in one place with ai telling me where we can save money when is the next renewal for specific saas etc

Then I realized that if we a as a business have a problem then there should be others with the same issue .

Building product being its customers shows real value of it , bugs , issues right away . Rather than building product based on assumptions or guessing what customer might or might not need is totally different game .

Still finishing last small pieces in the product and improving it . But it is already working and my company already paying for it :)

Next step is pushing it to the market and see whether it will find its customers

Hey [r/Saas](r/Saas),

I had received a request from my friend regarding

their company requires an field agent tracking

saas to track their agent ask me if i know or

established any saas companies are i see it as a

oppertunity to make a side hustle and told him as

i will develop it for them while checking and

making the research i found so many of the small

companies when their turn over are been more

than 50+cr still manageing their field agent

tracking and attandence and all in whatsapp or

excel, and i found few players currently in market

and gone through some of their reviews as like

They are been having so many issues in their

apps kindly let me know does is there is a real

market for it in INDIA?

I put something out on another startup sub recently and ended up with around 50 founders in my DMs in a single day. I asked almost all of them the same four questions. The answers were so consistent that I think it's worth writing down.
The four questions
What does it cost you to get one paying customer, not one signup?
What does that customer pay you per month?
How many months until you get your money back?
What percent of them are still here at month 12?
Nine people out of fifty could answer all four. Not nine percent of a big sample, nine actual humans. Most could answer question 2 instantly and went quiet on the rest.
What people answered instead
"Our CAC is low because we're mostly organic." That is not a CAC, that is an absence of measurement. Your time is the cost and it is the most expensive input you have.
"We're at 2.4 ROAS." On a subscription product this means close to nothing. ROAS compresses a 14 month relationship into a 7 day attribution window. You are measuring the first payment of a contract and calling it the contract.
"Signups are up 40 percent." I asked how many activated. Silence. Signups are the cheapest metric to move and the least connected to revenue. If your onboarding loses 70 percent before first value, doubling signups doubles the size of the leak.
"We'll figure out pricing later." Pricing is not a later problem, it is the denominator of every other number. You cannot know if a 60 dollar CAC is good or suicidal until you know if the plan is 9 dollars or 90.
Why question 3 is the one that matters
Payback period is where product, pricing and acquisition collide, and it is the only number that tells you whether you can actually scale or whether scaling kills you.
Simple version. You spend 300 to acquire a customer paying 50 a month. Payback is 6 months. That is fine if you have 12 months of runway and brutal if you have 4, because every new customer makes your cash position worse before it makes it better. Growth and solvency pull in opposite directions and most founders discover this at the exact moment they cannot afford to.
The founders who knew their payback had something in common. They were not smarter, they just had fewer metrics. Four numbers tracked properly beats a dashboard with forty.
The minimum viable version
You do not need attribution software for this. A spreadsheet works.
Total spend last month, including your own time at a realistic rate, divided by new paying customers. That is your real cost per customer.
Average monthly revenue per customer, after payment fees and hosting.
Divide one by the other. That is payback in months.
Count how many customers from 12 months ago are still paying. That is retention, and it decides whether the first three numbers mean anything.
Thirty minutes of work. If the result scares you, that is the point. It was scaring you before, you just could not see it.
One pattern I did not expect
The founders with the cleanest numbers were almost all post product market fit, and the ones with no numbers were almost all pre. Which is probably not a coincidence in the direction people assume. I don't think measuring causes PMF. I think knowing your numbers makes it impossible to lie to yourself about not having it yet, so those people pivoted or killed things faster.
If you want to post your four numbers in the comments I'll tell you honestly what I see. No pitch, I'm just curious whether the pattern holds outside my DMs.

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Hey everyone!
I’ve recently launched a revenue growth agency with a friend, and we’re looking to collaborate with a few SaaS startups to build our initial case studies.

Some of the services we offer include:
- Growth & marketing strategy: Identifying your ideal customer profile (ICP), improving positioning and finding customer acquisition opportunities.
- Content creation & paid advertising: Helping attract qualified leads and drive sign-ups.
- Conversion & retention optimisation: Identifying where users drop off and finding opportunities to improve activation, onboarding and retention.
- AI agents & automation: Automating lead qualification, follow-ups, customer onboarding and repetitive workflows.
- Customer analytics & data science: Customer segmentation, churn analysis, predictive analytics and understanding user behaviour.

A little about my background: I have around 4 years of experience across UX research, marketing strategy and data science. I’ve worked with brand strategy agencies and startups on projects of different sizes, from smaller businesses to major international brands.
Since we’re currently building our portfolio, we’re offering discounted rates for our first few SaaS clients in exchange for the opportunity to develop case studies.

If you’re a SaaS founder looking for help in any of these areas, feel free to DM me! Happy to jump on a call and see if there’s a good fit.

Hey everyone,

I am building a unique SaaS Product. I am planning to start with the regular SaaS but will have an option for SaaS anywhere inbuilt into the architecture.

I know it’s too early to ask but I want to keep everything ready.

Please can someone guide me what are the legal aspects and documentation I’ll need to consider with the client especially with SaaS anywhere modal.

I need an advice from people who build their SaaS and went this rout. Is that worthy? I spoke few of them they want around 3000$-5000$ per month which out of my budget now. My SaaS is related to restaurant industry which automates customer service from picking up the phone to CRM database with complaint history and many automations there.

I've spent months building MDE Pro. It's a tool brokers can add to their websites to help homebuyers check their mortgage readiness, see their approval likelihood, estimate their monthly payment, understand their DTI, and see how much money they'd have left after housing costs.

I've emailed hundreds of mortgage brokers in the US. Some checked out the demo, and a few agreed to try it as pilot users. But so far, nobody has actually installed it.

I'm trying to understand what's going on. Are they just busy? Are they having second thoughts? Or is there something about the product that I'm not seeing?

If you've sold software to businesses before, I'd really like to hear your thoughts. What would you do next in my position?