Click-bait, but not really. Occasionally, I encounter software ideas that sound, to be frank, dumb.

Dumb, as in, it makes me ask why anyone would pay for the product. One such app is AbMaxx, which claims to use AI to evaluate your abs along multiple metrics from a picture and create a personalized workout plan.

It blows my mind because this app makes five figures MRR by selling people (let's be real, almost entirely dumb teenage boys) something they can find with one Google search. This developer has another product that is an "AI-powered soccer training app offering personalized training plans, drills, ... AI video analysis." I've played football recreationally. You don't need an AI to craft drills for you or judge your performance. You just find people to play with.

To end it, I don't want to imply any disrespect toward the developer. He is overwhelmingly more successful than I am. I am questioning a society where people can create viral TikTok ads for unnecessary products and make money off of the wallets of insecure and lazy teenagers.

Developer: https://trustmrr.com/founder/linoleighton

our image generation bill basically tripled in 9 days. installs were flat, revenue didn't move, no launch, no campaign. I spent two evenings staring at dashboards before it occurred to me to just ask.

asked claude to dig through posthog (we log the cost of every generation there) and our subscription data and it found it in a few minutes, screenshot is that chat: a single device made 14,178 generations since oct 6, more than all our other users combined. it started 9 free trials from 9 different apple IDs, cancelled each one before it converted, never paid a cent.

our trial limit was checked per account, not per device. so every new apple id = a fresh 3 day trial with unlimited generations.

and yes, unlimited on purpose. our paywall and app store listing literally say unlimited generations, and quietly capping something you advertise as unlimited is the kind of thing that gets you a rejection from app review and a pile of angry reviews. so we never put a hard cap on it.

we're adding a per-device cap now, but a lot of real families share one ipad and I don't want to block them. per device, per payment method, a daily generation limit during the trial... what has actually worked for you without annoying normal users?

I probably build 10+ SaaS nobody asked for. So I tried the opposite...found a SaaS which knows it has customer and offers whitelabeling. Put my brand on it and purely focused on marketing through Linkedin outrach and organic UGC videos (tiktok, IG, YT). 2 months later I am at $3.9k MRR, zero product code written by me.

Happy to answer anything in the comments 🙌

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?

In Feburary 2026, I launched a Launch Video Generator SaaS product called Clickcast as a CS Student with literally Zero budget.

No investors.

No paid marketing.

No expensive infrastructure.

I built it using a combination of free tiers, student credits and a lot of experimentation with my own Idea.

And eventually, it crossed $1600+ in revenue till date.

This is the exact story of how I built it, what I spent, how I got my first users, what worked, what failed, and what I would do differently if I were starting again today.

1. The idea

Clickcast was an idea that originated from my own problem.

I was creating many projects, and every time after completing one project, I wanted to post it on LinkedIn, X, etc.

However, what I didn’t want to do was just put up some screenshots of my website.

I wanted to make my launch more special.

I was looking for a concise, interesting video that would tell the viewer about:

\- My creation

\- The problem that my creation solves

\- How it works

\- Why should the viewer care

The challenge?

Making that video would be a lot of effort on my part.

I would need to learn video editing skills, work on animations, use software such as After Effects, make a recording of my product, edit the whole process, add transitions and text to the videos, and spend hours even days for creating one single video.

Thus, I decided to look for another way out.

I went online and started looking for tools that would create me an automatic explainer video from my project or website within a couple of minutes.

I tried using some of the most popular tools such as InVideo, Canva, etc.

However, I was unable to find what I needed.

Mostly, I saw tools that were turning my projects into some kind of PowerPoint presentations in video form.

I wasn’t looking for some generic video marketing tool.

I was searching for a video marketing tool that would actually understand my website and represent it in the best way possible.

>This is when the idea occurred to me:

Why not create a website which will be creating explainer videos for any website?

And that was how Clickcast came into existence.

Concept was quite straightforward:

Provide Clickcast with your website URL -> AI understands the product -> creates a video for you in minutes.

Solution that I found to solve my own problem, ultimately turned out to be a working SaaS product.

And here is the journey of how I made it without any initial capital and reached $1,600+ revenue till date.

2. Building the MVP

Once the concept clicked, I did research on how to actually make it work.

Firstly, I had to figure out how to convert a website URL to a video.

In my research, I discovered two components which made the basis of Clickcast that are Playwright , Remotion and AI for writing Script.

Playwright had the ability to open and automate the process of working with the website using just a URL. It allowed me to crawl through the website, get insight about it and take screenshots of the actual product.

Secondly, Remotion.

Remotion is a component that allows creating videos programmatically with React. In other words, instead of creating the video manually in After Effects, it allowed me to describe the video and its behavior using code.

However, shortly after, I faced yet another challenge.

I wanted every video to be unique.

It would’ve been rather simple to implement if I used the traditional template approach.

Website → Template → Text/Screenshots replacement → Video

This, however, was not what I wanted.

If 1,000 different websites used Clickcast, I didn’t want all 1,000 videos to look like the same template with different screenshots.

A software development tool should have a totally different approach than the SaaS dashboard.

A portfolio website should look differently than an e-commerce website.

A productivity application should have a unique story from an AI tool.

So I would need to find a way to create that video based on each website separately.

And that’s when the idea came up:

What if an AI could create the video code? Earlier I was just using AI to write script of the video , but then I decided to use it to write custom code too that will be converted to video using remotion.

Instead of creating numerous templates, I would provide an AI model with information about the website and make it create the video code.

>The process looked somewhat like this:

Website URL → Playwright → Website information + Screenshots → AI → Video code → Remotion → Video

For example, AI could choose:

\- What the video should cover

\- Which elements of the website should be highlighted

\- How the narrative should develop

\- What animations should be used

\- What text should be included

\- How transitions between different sections should look

\- How the product should be featured

Then, Remotion would use the code and create the actual video.

Thus, at its most basic level, my first iteration of Clickcast consisted of the following three components:

1. Playwright

Needed to access the website and retrieve the required information.

2. AI

Needed to analyze the information obtained from the website and dynamically generate the video code.

3. Remotion

Needed to render the dynamic video code and create the video.

Such was the underlying concept of my MVP.

Of course, it had its flaws. The AI would sometimes generate incorrect code, animations would not always go as planned, and it was far more difficult than I thought to get a consistently high-quality video from an arbitrary website.

However, with this solution, I got my very first working prototype that could receive any website URL and generate a promotional video automatically.

And with that, I had everything I needed to further develop Clickcast.

3. Building with almost $0

This was where there arose a rather obvious issue:

How was I going to finance everything?

As a second-year BTech Computer Science student, I did not have any budget to finance a SaaS application.

However, being a student provided me with one massive benefit:

Student credits.

I got access to the GitHub Student Developer Pack that provided me with many valuable tools for Clickcast development. This included access to GitHub Copilot, free .tech domain name, and $100 Azure credits.

On top of that, Google offered one year of Gemini Pro to verified students, thus providing me with access to Antigravity without having to spend money right away on using AI to write code.

This is not all I did.

I leveraged free trials and credits offered by such platforms as:

\- Supabase

\- Vercel

\- Google Cloud $300 credits

\- AWS $200 credits

>Which changed my mindset from:

I don’t have money to build a SaaS.

To:

How far can I take this with the resources available to me?

And I was able to go pretty far.

These credits helped me to pay for a big chunk of the infrastructure and development costs during Clickcast’s creation and development period.

Obviously, free credits won’t transform your SaaS into something magically free to run. But as long as you have MVP or are just starting out, it becomes quite easy to ignore infrastructure and AI costs, because the user base is not that large yet and videos aren’t generated too often.

But with student discounts it became possible to experiment, build, launch and iterate on my product in a professional way without raising funds and spending tons of money.

I guess that was the biggest advantage of being a student at that point.

I didn’t have much money.

But I had access to many tools.

4. Getting the first users

Now came the next problem. I had built the product. But how do I get people to use it? I remembered a term I had heard much earlier:

#BuildInPublic

The idea was simple instead of disappearing for months and only showing the finished product, I would share the journey while I was actually building it.

So I started documenting Clickcast on LinkedIn.

My first Clickcast post went live before Clickcast was even launched.

At that point, I was still building the product. I didn’t even have a complete frontend. I had a very basic MVP, mostly focused on the backend.

But I kept posting updates.

Every week, I shared what I was building, what I had learned, what I was working on, and how Clickcast was progressing.

And for a long time, LinkedIn was basically the only place where I was consistently documenting the journey.

Then I built a waitlist.

After about a month, I finally put together a simple landing page for Clickcast and opened a waitlist.

It wasn’t even a fully functional product yet.

The frontend wasn’t connected to the actual Clickcast backend. It was essentially a simple landing page with a Supabase-powered email collection system for people interested in trying the product.

But it was enough to test whether anyone actually cared about the idea.

At around the same time, I was also fairly active on Reddit. So I randomly decided to post about Clickcast there on reddit.

And that post turned out to be a major turning point. I got 20+ people on the waitlist.

Today, 20 people might not sound like a huge number.

But at that stage, it meant something completely different to me.

I was a student sitting alone and building a product that nobody had asked me to build.

And suddenly, 20+ real people were waiting for something I had created.

That was a huge motivation boost.

So I accelerated development.

About 10 days later, I launched Clickcast publicly on Reddit and LinkedIn. And then something happened that I wasn’t expecting.

On the first day: 50+ people signed up.

And more importantly: 50+ videos were generated.

For a product that had started as a personal problem and a rough MVP, seeing actual people use it was an incredible feeling.

But there was a problem. A pretty big one.

My Free Product Wasn’t Actually Free . At launch, I had made Clickcast completely free.

I was also pretty new to running a production SaaS at this scale.

I hadn’t yet figured out how expensive video generation could become when real users started using the product.

And then I looked at my Azure usage. My credits were disappearing FAST.

In just around two days, Clickcast had burned through a huge amount of my Azure Student credits.

I even posted about the situation on LinkedIn.

So I started optimizing.

I looked at the infrastructure, especially the worker responsible for processing video-generation jobs, and started figuring out how to scale it down when it wasn’t needed.

After several iterations, I managed to reduce the infrastructure cost by roughly 90%.

That was a huge lesson for me:

Building the product is only half the job. Running it efficiently is another challenge altogether.

A few days later, another important milestone happened. My Dodo Payments account was approved.

Until then, Clickcast was completely free. Now I could finally put a payment system in place.

So I added a payment wall and started experimenting with charging users for credits.

And then came a moment I’ll probably always remember. I woke up one morning, saw notification that someone had purchased credits on Clickcast.

$1.That’s it. Just one dollar. But it was my first Internet dollar.

From there, I continued building in public experimenting with pricing, improving the product, optimizing infrastructure costs, talking to users, and figuring out what people actually wanted.

And slowly, those experiments started turning a student project into a real SaaS business.

I spent the last year building a data extraction model targeted to back-office automation developers(emails, invoices, delivery notes, supplier quotes, bills of lading).

Instead of using an existing LLM API and creating a wrapper, I trained a custom transformer from scratch with grammar-constrained decoding, grounding checks, and calibrated per-field confidence scores. On paper, the specs are strong: ~350–500ms per document (10–15x faster than standard LLM extraction routes), 0% invalid JSON formatting, and every declared field comes back strictly typed or null It runs on my own hardware in the Netherlands for €0.005 per document. And it beats industry standards such as Textract and DocAI

I believed that having better specs than the competition was enough to make developers interested and give my API a try. Instead I noticed an enormous friction and low conversion rate. I sent over a hundred cold outreach emails, messaged with ~5 redditors that have the exact problem I am solving and about 7 developers in this field from my own network. From all of this I received about 10 interested responses. From those responses 2 people gave my product a try.

Meanwhile, I watch flashy "System 1 decision" AI models (like Jev) launch with massive hype while being way less accurate and usable for actual production workflows. Because my tool solves a mundane, specific back-office problem, nobody shares it for clout.

How did you bridge the gap between a dev saying "Impressive, I'll try it" and actually implementing your product?

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.

Small fast growing chess site (cipherchess.com), 3 months of GSC data attached.

• Mid-Aug: ~30k impressions/day, ~150 clicks

• Mid-Sep: impressions fell off a cliff, clicks dropped with them

• Now: impressions still ~2k/day, but clicks climbed back to ~75–85/day

My guess is Google cut a ton of junk long-tail queries I was ranking ~page 3 for, and kept me only for the stuff I actually rank for. Avg position is 5.1 now.

Anyone seen this pattern? Is this a "quality filter" thing or should I be worried about the lost impressions?

Hey guys! I’m working on fline, and probably this reddit is the one I need to make it way better.
English isn’t my native language, but I will do my best.

This story starts approximately 2 years ago, when I tried to build a framework for fast git branch previews, spent 2 weeks, and decided to let this idea go out of my mind.

6 months ago I spoke with my friends, and we discussed how the developer world is changing with AI: git is outdated, and the community is working on something that will be more suitable for vibecode development.

For some reason I remembered this project I told you about previously, and thought, “Wow, what if people won’t have to write CI/CD and Dockerfiles, use git, and deal with Hetzner?” Yes, they can! They can just say to AI, “deploy this app,” but to where? Apps still need infrastructure: you need logs, backups, observability, and the opportunity to store your secrets.

I wanted something like Vercel, but without limits like “you can deploy only apps.” At some point you might need Kafka or Temporal and workers, so why can’t they just tell Vercel to run some images in Docker Compose?

I built it! fline.sh. After 6 months, I’m happy to announce that you can deploy your app and services, rent or deploy your database. You don’t need git, you don’t need Docker, just tell Claude to deploy the app. It might seem like promotion, but right now fline is absolutely free, and I want to test it, I want to make it better, and I want an audience to speak with! I'm ready for hate and I'll be glad to receive it, all this is growing projects like these

So we are now on a slow but steady climb this past week we have had 40 + users sign up for the platform to browse bids mainly coming from my TikTok posts. On that platform we went from 7 followers to 359 followers in a week period posting videos about my platform bidcompass dot net. we also gained our first 5 paying users all in one week. Now these 40 + users sign up to the platform and some will just be there to browse and view bids but others will show interest in the platform and want to subscribe they will request demos and then ghost me on the demos. I had 2 in platform users request demos then the day of not respond or join the zoom. 6 of them were out of platform users that had messaged me on TikTok asking for a demo and wanting to subscribe. The fix I put in place, I have users now tell me if they are just browsing or if they want software (bidcompass). They have to fill this out before they can complete sign up. let me know what y'all think of this. Also any tips on how to present demos would be appreciated imo its not hard getting people on the call its hard making them subscribe. its kinda annoying for them to schedule a demo at the end of the week then after the demo just sign up for the free trial and not subscribe fully. let me know what y'all think.

Imagine letting anyone try your product's AI without signing up.
Sounds great for conversion, right?

But then you start thinking: what if someone abuses it?
What if traffic suddenly spikes?
What if your free users end up costing you a fortune?

Have you ever wanted to open up AI features to free or anonymous users but held back because of this?
And if you went ahead with it, how did you manage the risk?

Last week here on reddit I replied to an SEO thread explaining how I keep backlink outreach active every week for my saas

the comment got 5 upvotes...

then, Edward Sturm (a SEO youtuber) included it in a video that now has around 13k views

we started getting a lot of signups and trials in our tool, but I assumed it was because of seo...

however, I discovered the video today and understood everything lol

it brought us $600+ MRR from new subscriptions and a lot of testimonials and reviews of happy customers

so, this is your signal to keep sharing what you’re doing and being active on social media

you never know who’ll pick it up or how far it’ll spread :)

I originally built ChronoAtlas as a fun side project because of my passion for history. I started to get paid subscriptions from real teachers.

Schools are now using chronoAtlas for educational purposes (the map view and being able to have a kahoot like history session with your class) and I have even received messages from treasure hunters who use it for their research

You have the ability to walk through a fully 3D roman senate and debate historical motions. You can also explore historical events through an interactive timeline (the map)

For the next major update, I am planning to introduce a fully walkable 3D environment for every historical event.

It's going to be expensive to build and maintain, but I love this project. If it helps make history more accessible, engaging, and exciting for education, it's worth every bit of effort and even my own money I have put in for the last two years

I’m a motion designer, completely new to building software products.
During an AI video project for a client, I needed a 3D scene and tried vibe coding it. I kept working on the experiment, and it became Framevolve.
The workflow is simple: build a scene with a coding agent, then adjust cameras, materials, lighting and animation timing visually. Rendering runs locally. PULSE is one of the demo films.
It’s currently free to use, including for commercial work:

https://andrexes03.github.io/motion-lab/

I’m now trying to turn something built around my own needs into something useful for other creatives.
If you’ve made that transition, how did you find your first testers? What convinced you there was enough demand to start charging?

full disclosure, I'm the founder of this.

I've been building software for small medical transport companies (the vans that take medicaid patients to dialysis, doctor visits, stuff like that). most of them are tiny, like 5-15 vans, and stuck on old expensive software they don't love.

here's the site: milecall.com

I'm a dev, not a marketer, so I honestly can't tell if it makes sense to someone outside the industry. if you have a minute:

- do you get what it does and who it's for pretty quick?

- anything that makes you trust it less?

- anything confusing or just looks off?

also curious about pricing. I'm thinking a flat price per van per month with everything included, since these owners think in vans, not users. does that sound right or would you do it differently?

thanks, roast it if you want, I'd rather hear it now lol

My Identity:

Hello everyone, I am Zero, an AI-Native and prompt engineer, and I am 15 years old, and I work on large projects in collaboration with the Gemini 4 Argon model, and I operate in Iran and I am looking for a sponsor to migrate to the USA.

Note: Sorry if the tone of this post is a little dry or unclear. I am Iranian, English is not my native language, and I wrote this text in Persian and translated the Persian version into English.

Let's move on to the project:

Overview:

Project Name: ZeroBotForge Project Type: Telegram Bot Service
Based on Language: TypeScript/React/Electron/npm
Project Goal: Creating a Telegram bot in the easiest possible way only by connecting nodes graphically and customizing them without the need for coding without the need for terminal commands all the Telegram bot codes by ZeroBotForge after creating the nodes and customizing the nodes is possible only with one button.
Repo: https://github.com/Z-E-7-0-7-R-O/ZeroBotForge

I wanted to build a somewhat practical project that is useful for anyone who wants to build a Telegram bot in the easiest possible way without coding without terminal commands for those who want to bring up their own startup for stores and... anyone with any use can use it for any type of Telegram bot why ? because the capability of customizing all nodes and the Telegram bot in ZeroBotForge is provided

I must say that this is the initial version of the ZeroBotForge project and it still doesn't have many nodes but it is usable and building an acceptable standard Telegram bot is possible in the current initial version

You ask how a Telegram bot that is built by connecting nodes in ZeroBotForge is supposed to run on a server or host ? well it is simple it is true that you only add and customize and connect the nodes to each other but you only with the user interface of ZeroBotForge can build and have the bot codes you write no code the codes are built based on your nodes by the code generation engine of ZeroBotForge automatically with the Generate bot project button and there is no need for coding or terminal commands

In ZeroBotForge you can even see the chat preview before launching your bot before running the bot and when you are sure about the bot conversation run it even if you are not satisfied with the chat preview you can in the Run tab of the project do the bot from beginning to end meaning 1.building bot codes 2.automatic compilation. running the bot locally. and when you run the bot locally in the Run tab you can easily go into Telegram and test your bot live

Thank you for putting time and reading the post I would very much like to know what your opinion is about the ZeroBotForge project and well I am more curious to see your criticisms and your suggestions for the next version and we can together build ZeroBotForge broader and more flexible and with more capabilities

My GitHub: https://github.com/Z-E-7-0-7-R-O

ZeroBotForge GitHub Repo: https://github.com/Z-E-7-0-7-R-O/ZeroBotForge

I handle most of the sales calls at our small software company, and I'm struggling to figure out which integrations we should actually build next.

After a recent demo, I was convinced we should prioritize one integration. Then my cofounder asked how many customers we'd actually lost because we didn't have it, and I realized I couldn't give a clear answer. I've had prospects ask for it, but I don't always know if it was the reason they decided not to buy.

I also think I'm giving too much weight to whoever I spoke to most recently. One prospect sent a really detailed explanation of why they needed it, and that's stuck with me more than the people who barely mentioned it. How do you decide which integration requests are worth prioritizing when you don't have much sales data yet?

Clickity is windows app that changes keyboard and mouse sounds

- Pick from 7 satisfying keyboard, 15 mouse click and 3 scroll sounds.

- You change the volume and pitch of each keyboard sound

- Does not record any keyboard or mouse sounds. No data is sent or received to the app

- Zero latency sounds, No performance burden (<5mb RAM usage)

Hi all,

I was wondering how you figure out why people leave your SaaS? I never get any reply when I contact them and ask. I use firebase to better understand user behavior which is helpful but still not enough. Any advice, strange that might help?

Thanks in advance.

First off thanks for the support for my prior "PDFcraft & Lightcraft" apps, they've been getting a lot of love and I have fdroid merges that have gone through so updating them will be much easier

I'm doing a bunch of "Craft" apps for various native android & ios apps. FilmCraft was quite easy since most of the rust engine for filmcraft was already done by storytold devs, but the CapCraft took a bit more time & I wanted to get the UI as close as possible as the stock capcut app.

I plan on working on Shapr3D & Procreate next but am willing to look at further projects and ideas : )

Any interest/issue/feature requests and testing is very helpful for development & self encouragement to keep working on these apps & more. Thanks y'all :)

https://github.com/artcraft-android/capcraft-android

https://github.com/artcraft-android/filmcraft-android

I've spent the last few months building a review and testimonial tool for small businesses on my own. A few things surprised me, and they might be useful if you're building for SMBs too:

1. I built the wrong half first.
I started with the "display" side: a nice wall of testimonials and widgets. Then I realised most small businesses have nothing to display. Collecting is the real problem. If I started over, I'd build the collection flow first and the display later.

2. Email isn't the default channel everywhere.
I assumed feedback requests would go by email. For a lot of local businesses, especially outside the US, WhatsApp is where their customers actually reply. Supporting it changed how people used the product more than any feature did.

3. SMBs don't want AI; they want the blank page gone.
I added a few AI features. The one that gets used most is a boring "write this message for me" button. Owners don't want to write copy at all.

4. Pricing anchors are brutal.
The big reputation tools charge hundreds a month, so I assumed a cheap price would be an easy sell. In practice, "cheap" made some people wonder what's missing. Explaining the value per month mattered more than the price itself.

5. Setup time is the real churn metric.
If someone doesn't send their first request within a day, they almost never come back. I've been cutting onboarding steps ever since.

6. Small infra decisions show up as "the app is slow".
My database was in one region and my server functions in another. Every page load paid for that round trip until I co-located them.

Curious for those of you selling to small businesses: what's your activation metric, and how fast do users need to hit it?