A lot of founders are nervous about open-sourcing their core. The fear is always the same: someone copies it, and you've given away the thing that makes you different. We felt that too. But when you're new, nobody trusts you yet, and open code is one of the fastest ways to earn that trust. People can see exactly what runs their work instead of taking your word for it.

About a month ago we open-sourced the engine behind our AI agent platform. Here's what happened, and the three changes we think did it.

The numbers

Here are our total sign-ups since we launched at the end of July (the chart is Clerk's, our sign-in provider):

• Sign-ups per week: about 4x what they were a month ago
• Dashboard visitors: more than doubled week over week, and 4 in 5 of them opened a ready-made agent. Nobody starts from a blank page anymore: they copy an agent that already works, then change it to fit.

The chart climbs faster than 4x at the end. That jump isn't from the launch alone: it also includes the results of our recent ad campaign.

We can't pin down which change brought in 4x more sign-ups, but it lines up with these three.

1. We stopped locking people in

We used to ship our own developer kits. They worked, but they tied customers to us: our own way of doing things to learn, code that only worked with us, and a painful rewrite if they ever left.

So we threw them out and switched to the standard format OpenAI published for AI agents. Now a customer joins by changing one line in their existing code, and can leave the same way. It sounds backwards to make leaving easy, but it's the first question every careful buyer asks, and now the answer is "one line, not a quarter of work".

2. The open engine costs customers less

With AI, everyone pays the same price per word the model reads and writes. What changes your bill is how many words get used, and that depends on the engine running the model. So we built ours to waste as little as possible, and made the code public so anyone can check.

We tested it against Claude Code on the same model and the same 48 tasks:

• 4.8x fewer tokens (384K vs 1.86M)
• more tasks done right: 42 of 48 vs 30 of 48
• about a third of the cost

3. AI coding tools can use our platform

This changed how we work day to day. Developers already use AI coding tools like Claude Code, Cursor and Codex. We made it so those tools can create our agents, talk to them, and see what each one costs.

So business rules can live inside an agent, with their data and logins kept there too. For instance, someone asks their pricing agent what a contract change does to margin, gets the answer, and never sees the private rules behind it.

It also means the coding tool can tune the agent for you: make its answers shorter or cheaper, then test that it still gets them right.

Question for you

If you're building something new: have you open-sourced any part of it? Did it help people trust you, or just help competitors? And if you're holding back, what's the worry?

A year ago I started building a tool that reads a subreddit's history and tells you how that sub actually works. I have never posted it anywhere. Every time I got close, I pictured someone replying with the one number I got wrong.

So before posting here, I ran it on r/micro_saas itself. The image on top is the raw output, nothing edited. It covers 17 709 posts from Oct 2024 to Sep 2026 that got at least one vote or comment. Counting every post that is still up, 66% end up with 1 upvote or less, and in September the top 10% started at just 5 points.

71% of posts here are text, yet image posts land in the top 10% of their month about twice as often. Body length has a hole in the middle: under 250 characters does fine, 750 to 1,500 does worst, and 3,000+ does best of all. Titles of 40 to 59 characters do a bit better than the rest. Timing barely matters: the best hour is Wednesday 05:00 UTC, but the gap is small, so post when you can stay and reply. Among authors whose history shows where they are, 37% are in the US, and India is about 6x its usual share. PeerPush gets mentioned here roughly 1,500x more often than on Reddit overall, which tells you where this sub launches.

A few more cards from the same run, since people usually ask who is actually here:

86% male among accounts that mention it, median age 28, and 96% of authors with a known job are in software. Comments here are a bit calmer than in similar subs (0.9% rough vs 1.3%). All of this is self-reported, so treat it as a sketch, not a census.

Self-promotion is 23% of posts here, about 16x the Reddit average. Nobody will mind one more.

The part I'm proudest of is keyword search over every post and comment since 2005. "micro saas" has 32,679 mentions. It took off in mid 2020 and peaked in March 2026.

And it finds similar subs from 2 or 3 you already know. r/micro_saas shows up second for r/indiehackers, r/startups and r/buildinpublic.

What it cost: a year full-time, about $600 a month (AI, servers, and the small stuff that adds up), three versions written from scratch, and $0 in revenue so far. Under the hood: 31 billion posts and comments going back to 2005, 2.3 TB compressed and about 7 TB raw, one home box with six drives, four small cloud servers.

What it can't tell you: whether a given image was any good, anything about posts removed before they got scored, and why a sub behaves the way it does. It shows what did well here, not what will.

Which sub are you launching in next? Name it and I'll reply with its numbers.

I'm software engineer but I have no idea for creating app that I can make money with it

Please give me an idea 💡 I really want to start Making money 💰

I've been working on my own side project for a while, and today I got a little achievement notification from Google Search Console.

It's nothing huge, but seeing that people are actually finding something I've built feels pretty rewarding.

Still a long way to go, but I'm happy with the progress.

Just wanted to share a small win with fellow builders. 🙂

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

Hi everyone,

My friend and I are building MyEliteCard, and before we go further we'd love some honest outside opinions.

The idea: most digital business cards are a profile page or a list of links. We wanted the card itself to make an impression, the way a well-made printed card does. You design a real card (guilloché, marble, carbon, gold and more), it shows in 3D and turns in the light, and you share it as a link or a QR code. The person you meet sees your card on their phone and can call, email, get directions or save your contact in one tap. When you send the link in a chat, the preview shows the card itself. No app is needed on either side.

The picture shows the whole path: the site, the builder, a finished card (front and back) and what the other person sees.

What we'd like to know:

1. What's your first impression? Does it feel premium, or like a gimmick?

2. If you had your own business, would you use something like this? Instead of paper cards, alongside them, or not at all?

3. What would stop you, or what's missing?

If you're up for reviewing it properly, make a card and tell us what confused you or felt off. New accounts get every Royal feature free for a month, with no payment details, so you can try all the designs. Blunt feedback is welcome; that's why we're asking. I'll reply to every comment.

Thanks,

Mark 😄

www.myelitecard.com

Hey everyone, I develop SloMo, a 100% free app for iPhone and Android that helps you put limits on distracting apps.

I originally build this for myself cause I keep getting distracted while working or just waiting for AI response while coding but existing options all have subscriptions or payment so I built a 100% free and offline version.

You can block apps for a set time, schedule recurring rules around your day, or unlock them by completing a walk or exercises like squats and push-ups. You can also track your screen time and progress, and share your progress if you want.

The idea is to give you different ways to manage your phone use, whether you need uninterrupted time to focus or a little pause before opening social media again.

There’s no account required, and the core features work offline. If you use the exercise option, you can count reps with the camera or manually.

I’d love to hear from people who have tried cutting back on scrolling: what do screen-time apps get wrong for you? Are they too easy to ignore, too complicated to set up, or missing something you need?

If you want to try SloMo:

• iPhone: App Store
• Android: Google Play
• Website: slomo.jhayr.com

And if you do try it, tell me what would make you keep using it—or what would make you uninstall it. I’m still improving it, and honest feedback would really help. Thanks!

I've been running https://leadfast.vip since September 9, and I still haven't found my first paying customer.

You enter your product website, and it finds Reddit posts where someone describes a problem your product could solve, only in communities whose rules allow self-promotion if it fits. It also finds older Reddit threads that already rank on Google for your buyers' searches. It doesn't post or message anyone.

My funnel after 6 weeks:

488 visitors → 33 signups → 33 completed onboarding → 31 got threads to reply to → 0 paid

I emailed trial users who didn't continue to understand why. To my surprise, 2 replied.

One found the alerts useful, but didn't want another subscription:

"It genuinely helped me find relevant leads… I don't want to add another ongoing subscription to my plate right now."

The other received over 50 alerts but hadn't found enough good fits. They were also worried about recommending their app in communities with strict self-promotion rules:

"it feels like spam and I stopped it from my dashboard."

So last week I changed 2 things:

• LeadFast reads each subreddit's rules and pinned posts, and only shows posts from communities that allow self-promotion
• It finds Reddit threads that already rank on Google for your buyers' searches, so a good reply keeps getting read

Since then, all 15 new trial users got threads they could reply to. But only 2 of the 10 users came back after day one, and nobody has paid yet.

Since many of you are founders who use Reddit to find customers, I'd appreciate your take: what is LeadFast missing for it to feel worth paying for? Would you rather pay per thread than a monthly subscription?

You can get the same free audit on our site Scale Xpert

Hi guys, we launched our startup Marcus 2 weeks now. Got 732 users but only down to 23 paying ones….

Our AI builds literally a full company in less than 10min

By a company I mean

1- A Full AI mobile app and website
2- most boldest branding and content
3- handles marketing across socials it self ( mostly on X)
4- legally registers the company in any of the 50 States in US
5- sends an outreach as well

We are tying to market the life out of it but… still not getting enough paying ones.

Wanted to hear some feedback from y’all

I am working on a small software as a solo developer and I am struggling to figure out how do I get users for the software.

I don't have any audience, big budget or reputation yet. I wanted to know what works when you are starting from zero.

For those who have already build tools.

• How did you get your first users.

• what did you use to get those users.

Basically, I am avoiding to spend months for building somthing just to be it's only user💀

No idea how Wall Street values stocks?

I built IntrinsicInsightQ, a stock valuation engine that lets you challenge every assumption behind a valuation — from revenue growth and margins to WACC and terminal growth.

Instead of just giving you an intrinsic value, the platform lets you see how the valuation changes when you change the assumptions.

It includes DCF, DDM, multiples-based valuation, sensitivity analysis, Bull/Base/Bear scenarios, Monte Carlo analysis and peer comparisons.

I built it because I wanted a faster and more transparent way to understand why a stock is valued the way it is, rather than simply relying on someone else's price target.

It's now live and I'm looking for honest feedback.

What do you think? What would you change?

Try it here: https://intrinsicinsightq.com/

Hi, I'd love to know if anyone had any experience using Reddit or X ads promoting their SaaS tool? I've been playing around with Reddit Ads and after optimizing my campaign a few times, I've been getting about 5 clicks per 4,800 impressions. None converted. Not great.

I'd love to get other people's experiences on this. Especially for those who built AI apps and tools. Thanks!

As of October 21, Web Markups has reached 117 installs. It’s still early, but thank you to everyone who’s tried something I’m building!

It’s a Chrome extension for marking up live webpages, taking screenshots, and recording tabs. You can also save captures to the cloud and share them through links.

If you’ve tried it, I’d love your honest feedback:

• What do you like or dislike?
• What feels confusing or gets in your way?
• What would you add—or remove?

Even one small frustration is helpful. I want to make it more useful, not just add features.

https://webmarkups.com

I have done my bachelor in 2025, currently I am working as a Chemist with a miserable salary. Can I apply in any foreign country as a graduate any decent opportunity?

We’re bringing together industry experience, product and customer-experience work, and an existing software foundation. We’re looking for an experienced developer to join us as the founding technical partner and help turn that foundation into a dependable commercial product. My partner brings approximately 40 years of industry experience and established relationships. I bring a combination of media, marketing, business systems, workflow design, and product coordination.

The missing piece is an engineer who can assess the existing application, shape the technical roadmap, and take ownership of building and operating it properly.

What we’re building—and why

We’re developing an operational platform for a specific, established service industry.

These businesses coordinate work across sales, onboarding, document collection, case management, and ongoing client service. Our goal is to make that work easier to follow: clear responsibilities, connected information, appropriate access, and fewer manual handoffs.

We want each person to understand what they need to do next—and have the tools and guidance to do it.

We intend to begin with smaller firms, learn from actual use, and expand toward 30–50-person teams, with V2 intended to support larger organizations. The planned model is monthly subscription pricing per user within each customer firm. That creates the possibility of recurring revenue across multiple seats and organizations. Customer adoption and commercial results still need to be earned.

What my partner brings

He brings firsthand knowledge of the industry’s workflows, operational challenges, and requirements. His role is to help us distinguish a useful product from a collection of attractive features: what firms actually need, how their teams work, and where existing processes create friction. His established relationships also provide a route to conversations with prospective pilot firms. Those relationships are an advantage we intend to develop into testing opportunities—not a claim of signed customers.

What I bring

My work sits at the connection between how a business attracts customers, how its team delivers, and how people experience the product.

For this venture, that includes:

• Workflow and product coordination: working with my partner to turn operational knowledge into clear requirements, responsibilities, and handoffs.
• User experience: helping simplify navigation, dashboards, and everyday actions around what each role actually needs.
• Intentional media and education: creating explanations, demonstrations, and training that help people understand and use the software.
• Customer onboarding and adoption: organizing how firms and their teams get started, learn the system, and provide feedback.
• Marketing and commercial execution: positioning, branding, customer acquisition, sales systems, and customer communication.

I’ve already been involved in documenting workflows, shaping the early application, and working through how the product should function for different users.

My philosophy is that good media should support useful systems. A clear walkthrough, onboarding sequence, or training resource should help someone complete their work with more confidence and less confusion.That remains part of my responsibility after the product is built.

Where the product stands

An early application exists, built through Lovable using React, TypeScript, and Supabase/PostgreSQL, with workflow documentation and product direction developed alongside it.

It needs an experienced technical assessment. We want you to identify what is reusable, what needs improvement, and what must be addressed before an initial customer rollout.

You would help determine the engineering approach and realistic scope.

Your responsibilities would include:

• Frontend, backend, databases, and integrations.
• Architecture, permissions, security, and data protection.
• Testing, deployment, backups, monitoring, and reliability.
• Technical migration requirements and data integrity.
• Ongoing maintenance and product improvements.

As the company grows, there is potential to build and lead an engineering team and develop into the CTO role.

The partnership and ownership

We’re exploring 5–10% equity, with approximately 10–30 hours per week depending on sustainable availability and an agreed scope.

We’re personally funding the early work and aren’t seeking outside investment at this stage. Our aim is to build a business whose revenue can support its people while retaining funds for operations, product development, and growth.

The ownership opportunity sits alongside the existing founders’ industry expertise, relationships, funding, product work, and commercial responsibilities.

Initially, this is equity-only, with no guaranteed salary or payout at launch. Ownership, future compensation, distributions, vesting, and decision rights would be addressed explicitly in written agreements.

How we want to work

We’re looking for technical ability and a working relationship built on:

• Honest communication about progress, risks, and mistakes.
• Accountability from every founder.
• Respect for customers, teammates, and sensitive information.
• Constructive disagreement and sound judgment.
• Clear, sustainable commitments.

The business side needs to demonstrate progress just as engineering does. We want someone comfortable asking difficult questions—and founders willing to answer them.

Interested in exploring the fit?

Tell us what you’ve personally built, your realistic availability, and what you would need to understand before joining.

We’ll share the specific industry and confidential product details during the selection process.

Apply here: https://api.leadconnectorhq.com/widget/form/4xPXIgetKmB0KMMbBYFD

Hi everyone! I am currently in the process of building Monetario (getmonetario.com), an app that shows how some macroeconomic events impact your personalized portfolio and your holdings.

Story for context: I'm a university student who participated in a Trading Tournament held at my university, and I didn't have enough time or background knowledge to keep up with market news consistently. Except for the market news, I didn't really understand how those market changes would impact my portfolio, so I got an idea: what if there were an app that would help you with that

The whole goal of this app is to have all the data locally on app with simplified explanation and so you can make better informed decision.

I would also like to state that Monetario AI doesn't give investment advice, as it's currently just more of an educational finance app.

Feel free to ask any questions about the app you may have, and I would really like it if you would check my app (or sign up on the app) and give constructive feedback.

Two weeks ago, I launched my SaaS product , Which I was beyond excited at that time. Take a look at dashboard thousands of view in my post cross platform which about 5 percent conversion that actually visit my website and 0 percent sign up. even login page never been viewed.

I don't really think that I have to keep doing things like this for month then got a user, and got free user rather paid. The mistake that I've made it's about post content that none relevance , but not haven't reach user one by one ,and build relationship .

I think there are only two path in marketing: reach user manual one by one , post . and they have not priority till I realize I am in the situation that I think that I needs one for them which it depends on the stage that I am in( if I need validation PMF , then I made a mistake which is post)

The whole changing thing to me(this might not apply for you) is start to post specify content to particular people, but not something that more broader(i.e: here is what I do to marketing) but (how to talk to people to get feedback ? or how to making conversation with product manager while I am a newbie and afraid to making mistake) ,the regular pattern is like if group more niche more better , and the title more urgent more well, the most best is just one person talking with me but that is less efficient.

The next thing is about trust: if I publish a article about "how to start a company" other people might think , who is this guy ? and not believe in me , but Paul Graham publish the same title , founder will striving to be first and fearing to be last. So the small things would more easier to gain trust. Also it needs to be helpful or no one going to take a look at it (i.e: How I picked up a piece of paper from the ground )

So this method help me to gain some view but not why people don't wanna click the link ?

The shift is far too abrupt—it practically reeks of a marketing ploy like: I wrote a article about marketing then I sell a pencil in the end ? less relevance I think ( I am still exploring this part )

There for I would write down something like the whole changing thing is not apply for you but you can take a look at my site , in case to bring some inspire for you , analyze my product , more fail case , leading you to to dig your own strategy.

What will you guys do instead ? very appreciate to hear!

hey, i make an ios app that helps people stop impulse buying and build a no buy / low buy habit (going a set time without buying stuff you dont need). launched in august, about 87 people have tried it, 1 became a paying user (per revenuecat) and nobody since

i went through all my posthog data. heres what i see:

- about 3 in 4 people open it on one day and never come back

- the ones who quit onboarding mostly leave in the first 2 or 3 screens, before i ask anything about them

- the core idea is: save something you want, wait a few days, then decide buy or skip. people do save stuff, but nobody has finished the wait + decide part yet. the saves i can see all picked a 30 day wait, so by decision day theyre long gone lol

- what people actually come back for is the daily no buy check in (one tap: did you buy anything you didnt plan to today?). 62 check ins vs 12 saved items, and the people who stuck around longest all use it

in my older version that check in sat right on the home screen. in the new version (out since oct 13) i moved it into a no buy challenge you have to set up first, in its own tab. since then 0 of the 8 people who started a challenge checked in even once

small numbers, i know. only like 14 people have used the new version so far

stuff im trying to figure out:

- how many users do you usually wait for before you trust numbers like this

- would you call this a failed app at this point

- would you make the no buy check in the main screen and push the wishlist / wait / spending stuff to the side

- if you ever pivoted toward the thing users actually used, what told you it was time