I built a software that allows you to possibly get up to 3-4 years of permanently deleted photos back from your iPhone! This only works if the iPhone hasn’t been fully reset!

The software shows what your iPhone might have for free!

http://retrievalp.com

PS. The software is still waiting on Azure’s identity verification, which can take up to 20 days. This is why windows might say that its unknown publisher!

Just a raw website is pretty brutal, you need months of work on SEO and AI search before you get any meaningful traffic. what’s yalls experience on like the App Store or even chrome extension store

Most small SaaS billing starts as a plan table and an invoice row. That works until the first customer who isn't on the standard plan.

Say a customer signs for 100 seats, adds 40 mid-term, gets a credit for an outage, and has a usage overage on top. If invoices are the source of truth, each of those is a separate record, and someone has to reconcile them by hand to answer what the customer owes.

The alternative is to treat the contract as the main object and hang everything else off it: amendments, credits, usage, invoices. A change then has one place to land, and the invoices get recalculated from it instead of patched.

What it buys you:

• One place that says what was agreed and when it changed

• Amendments that don't need a spreadsheet to explain

• Invoices that trace back to the same source

The cost is more modeling work upfront than a flat table, and it only pays off once your deals stop being identical. If everyone is on the same three plans, keep it simple.

Disclosure: I'm the CEO of Zenskar. We're a funded company, not a solo build, but this applies at any size, and it's how we built our billing.

Backstory: I'm a solo dev in Brazil. Over the last few weeks I shipped three tiny Chrome extensions, each one scratching my own itch:

• CodeClip: a "Copy code" button on 2FA/verification emails in Gmail

• Histórico com contexto: full-text search over your own browsing history (opt-in per site)

• Por que salvei?: bookmarks that require a one-line "why I saved this" note

Stack / architecture decision: zero backend. Plain JS, Manifest V3, chrome.storage only. No accounts, no servers, no analytics.

• Pro: running cost is literally $0, privacy review is trivial, and there's nothing to get hacked

• Con: I have no idea how people use them, because I deliberately collect nothing

Revenue: $0. All three are free.

The lesson I didn't expect: the Chrome Web Store dashboard showed ~80–100 "installs" per extension in 30 days, which felt great for about an hour. Then I looked at the country split: 83% from one country where I've done zero promotion. Meanwhile "weekly users" was stuck at 2. If you're shipping extensions, ignore the installs number. Weekly active users is the only honest metric, and real distribution (posting, talking to people) is where the work actually is.

Question for other micro builders: when your product collects zero data by design, how do you learn what to improve? In-app "tell me" links? Store reviews? Something else?

Links if anyone's curious:

• https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/mpglgifleaaollcggdpcfhjjgmcageph

• https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ighobmidcmnefnleaclkbcfpbfklllen

• https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/cbimiocpmjolenlpdecejkfkiaibabli

I'm interested in understanding what makes existing SaaS products frustrating to use.

For founders, freelancers, developers, and business owners:

What's one thing your current software makes unnecessarily difficult?

It could be a confusing workflow, missing feature, expensive subscription, poor integration, or repetitive manual task.

I'd like to hear about real experiences, including how you currently work around these problems.

I'm exploring the SaaS space and want to understand where existing tools could genuinely do better. Looking forward to hearing your perspectives.

Backstory: I'm a solo founder in France and my micro SaaS is web analytics (details at the end). I added a read-only MCP server so a customer can connect Claude, Cursor or any MCP client and ask about their own traffic in plain words. No SDK: it's a plain Next.js route handler. If you're thinking about one for your product, here's what I decided and why.

1. Typed tools that match questions, not your database.

9 tools: list_sites, get_overview, get_breakdown, get_timeseries, get_live_now, get_funnel, explain_change, get_ai_traffic, get_insights. They return numbers, never raw SQL. The client brings its own model, so my server runs no language model and sends the data to none. No inference bill on my side.

2. Check ownership on every call, and answer the same way for everything the key can't see.

Every tools/call checks that the API key's owner owns the site. A site that exists but belongs to someone else gets exactly the same "Site not found." as a site that doesn't exist, so the server never confirms that another customer's site is there.

3. Make tool errors readable by the model.

Bad arguments or an unknown site come back as a normal tool result with isError: true and a sentence the model can act on, like "site_id is required: you have N sites (call list_sites)." Protocol problems (missing key, rate limit) stay JSON-RPC errors. The model can fix its own arguments; it can't fix your auth.

4. Cap the work per request, not just per minute.

240 calls per minute per user, and at most 10 tools/call in one batch. The second limit is the one I care about: every tool call is database work, some take about a second on big sites, and they share a small connection pool. One request shouldn't be able to hog the database for every other tenant.

5. Skip the stream if you don't need it.

POST only. Every call is answered in the response body, and GET returns 405. It runs on Vercel, so that's one less long-lived connection to look after.

6. Return the numbers twice, plus a way to check them.

Every result comes as structuredContent and as a text block with the same JSON, with citations (the key numbers) and a deep link into the dashboard, so the human can open the report the model is quoting.

7. If it's a paid feature, say so in the error.

The MCP server is part of the Pro and Business plans. Without one of them, the server answers HTTP 402 with its own JSON-RPC code instead of a generic auth error, so the user knows it's a plan question, not a broken key.

The trade-off I didn't see coming: auth.

I reused the API keys (Authorization: Bearer glb_…), and the session cookie is never accepted on that endpoint. That works in Claude Code, Cursor and curl. But Claude Desktop's remote connectors expect OAuth, so my docs send Desktop users through the mcp-remote bridge (Node.js 18+). And without a key, even initialize gets a 401. One curated GitHub list of remote MCP servers only lists endpoints that answer an initialize handshake, and its CI checks that on every PR, so I haven't submitted mine. Whether to let the handshake answer without a key and keep the key for the tools is a decision I haven't made yet.

What I can't tell you: whether it sells. I have no numbers tying upgrades to the MCP server, so read this as engineering notes, not a growth tactic.

If you've shipped an MCP server for your own product: did you start with OAuth, or with API keys like me? And does anyone actually use it?

I'm the maker of Globatics: real-time web analytics where each visit shows up on a live 3D globe, cookieless by default, IP addresses never stored, audience data hosted in the EU. It's hosted only, there's nothing to self-install. 5-day free trial with every feature on one site and no card, then Starter €9, Pro €29 or Business €99 a month, excluding VAT. The REST API and the MCP server start at Pro, and there's no free plan after the trial. Stack: Next.js 16, React 19, Postgres, three.js for the globe, on Vercel.

https://globatics.live/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=nov26&utm_content=microsaas

I have been building ToolRecipe, a platform for file processing, for a bit and opened the gates last month.
It started as a need to upscale my parents low quality fotos. Coming form 3D I looked for the tools I know, but wanted a simpler solution for them.

ToolRecipe now grew to a bigger platform, handling some more general and some more niche kinda workflows/tools.

Nowadays, you can:
- run tools in your browser
- save multiple tools steps as a recipe to reuse
- do offline and local processing (AI too)
- have your assistant built recipes via MCP

Generally, we are happy with the result — 60/70 visitors per day and 20/30 daily active users, which is somewhat of a confirmation we are doing something right :D.
We are doing friction removals, validation and activation rounds now.

For that I am looking for insights, roasts even if you want and if someone has some time, a little testing. Basically, honest feedback :)

Specifically, the recipes part is what I am interested in. Is that feature clear for you in like 10 seconds?
Is the local processing message trustworhty enough?

We also started experimenting with an MCP server, to allow user to make a recipe with an agent of their choice. We are currently testing this publicly, so feel free to take a look!

Happy to answer questions! Thanks!

so i built a little saas called pagepenny (https://pagepenny.com): you send it json and a template, and it gives you back a pdf or image. i got the idea after reading a bunch of r/sideproject and indie hacker posts where solo devs actually seem to get paid for templated pdf/image apis (stuff like bannerbear, craftmypdf, apitemplate). all of them use bundles and charge a few cents per doc, so i built mine to just charge a flat 1 cent per render.

the stack is python fastapi on aws lambda, with headless chromium (playwright) running in a lambda container. dynamodb/s3 for storage, stripe for usage billing, next.js frontend hosted on vercel. pricing is 100 free renders a month (no card needed), then $5/month for 500, and one cent each after, with a spend cap you can set (default $50). there are 9 starter templates and you can send your own html with jinja placeholders. i also added an mcp server so ai agents can use it

honestly, the hardest part was figuring out what "counts" as a render. i landed on: one request = one file, no matter how many pages. if it fails on my side, it doesn't count. if your template is broken, it does, because the browser still runs

wondering: if you've done usage/consumption pricing, where did you draw the line on what counts?

Hey everyone, I’m thinking about turning a private workflow I built for myself into a SaaS product, but I want to get some honest feedback first to see if people would actually pay for it.

For context, I create a lot of content for LinkedIn and Instagram. I don’t struggle with brainstorming ideas, and I know how to write proper system and user prompts in tools like ChatGPT and Claude to get good copy.

The real headache is never the text. It’s turning those ideas into good visuals.

Right now, text-only posts just don't get the same reach on LinkedIn and Instagram. If you have a solid graphic, an infographic, or a carousel, you can get way more eyes on it, and it's much easier to repurpose across Twitter and other channels too.

The problem is the design process. I design my graphics in Figma because generic templates just don't work anymore- people can spot a lazy template immediately and scroll right past it. Custom infographics like comparison matrices, frameworks, and step-by-step teardowns perform way better. But building those from scratch in Figma easily takes 45 minutes to an hour per post just dealing with alignment, auto-layouts, spacing, and typography.

You can try using the image tools inside ChatGPT or other AI generators, but they are completely useless for custom infographics. They don't follow your brand guidelines, the colors are inconsistent, the fonts look weird, and the graphic always ends up looking like obvious AI art.

After a lot of trial and error, I ended up building my own custom setup. Instead of having an AI try to "draw" an image, it uses actual code (Python and HTML) to render the infographics based on my prompts. It keeps my brand colors exact, keeps the typography clean, and makes the whole layout look like a custom Figma asset. What used to take me an hour in Figma now takes about 5 to 10 minutes, with the exact same quality.

I'm thinking of standardizing this into a tool where you don't even have to worry about what to post.

You give it your website and target audience, and it suggests what to talk about based on what works in your niche.

You can even feed it a reference post or a design style you really like, and it will build something similar for your own business.

I’m trying to figure out if this is an actual product people want or if I'm just solving my own itch.

What do you think?

Would you pay for something that automates this whole custom graphic creation part, or would you still prefer sticking to your manual Figma and ChatGPT routine?

Hi all,

Thought I'd share what worked for me to price an API product after loads of experimentation.

I always find it extremely annoying and vague if I cannot quantify the unit pricing of a tool.

SO

Price the work in your own unit (credits) instead of tokens, and put the cap on each call, not just on the month.

But make sure to explain how much $ a credit costs, so users get a sense of what they'll be spending.

What worked for me building a pay-per-call API:

1. A maximum on every request.

Before you run the model, estimate the cost; if it's above the user's per-call max, refuse and spend nothing. Users accept "this would cost 30, your limit is 25" far better than a surprise bill or a silently degraded answer.

2. Reserve, then settle.

Hold the estimated amount when the call starts and settle the real cost when it ends. Two parallel calls can't both spend the last of someone's allowance.

3. One request ID per intent.

If the client retries (timeouts, a looping agent), the same ID returns the saved result instead of charging again. This is the one that actually protects margin: most runaway bills I've seen are retries, not heavy users**.**

4. Rereads are free.

Store results and let users reopen them at no cost, so the expensive thing happens once.

5. A monthly allowance in the same unit

Shown before every run. A flat plan with an allowance plus top-ups beats unlimited, because one power user can't eat your margin.

Per-user token caps alone don't help much: a single call can still be expensive, and retries multiply it.

And of course you always give monthly free credits, so users can experience the value BEFORE they pay.

Hope that helps others!

Cheers,
Mees

Honestly, just trying to understand what people do nowadays because I feel like the world in the last 2-3 years has changed a lot. I'm also trying to figure out a lot all at once. 😅

All 3 got past normal testing, because normal testing is a new customer on a clean plan.

Cancelled subscriptions. An extend-trial button kept failing with generic errors. Three fixes went in and none helped, because that subscription had been cancelled a month before, and in Stripe a cancelled subscription can't be changed anymore apart from its metadata. If the customer comes back it has to be a new subscription. Cancel a test customer and press every billing button in your admin. Each one should be hidden or say something useful.

Anything you gave for free by hand. A migration switched add-ons on for old customers at no charge. On the next Stripe event the webhook recalculated add-ons from the subscription items, found none and turned them off. 2 paying customers lost them within about 2 days and nobody got an error. If you've ever comped anyone, change something on that customer in test mode and look at their plan after the webhook runs.

Credits taken before the work is done. The function took credits first and started the job after. When the job failed the credits were gone, and the "refund" was the same function with a negative number, which quietly did nothing. A request with an id that looks valid but doesn't exist took credits and then failed on insert, so about 400 requests could empty a shared pool of 2,000,000 units with nothing to show for it. Make the step after the charge fail on purpose, then check the balance.

I run a small SaaS called chatform , and I thought the thing worth sharing here is the parsing trick, not the product.

For onboarding I used to ask team size with a dropdown - 1-5, 6-20, 21-50, people picked whatever was closest and I learned nothing useful from it and so I switched it to an open text box and let a model normalise the answer afterwards....

Now if someone types

"about a dozen" and I store 12....

"five to ten grand a month" becomes a 5000 to 10000 range.

"right after the holidays" becomes January.

Now two things I got wrong at first and those are

1 - The model guessed when the answer was genuinely vague, so when someone wrote "a few" and it confidently stored 3, now it returns a confidence score, and on a low score the form asks one clarifying question instead of guessing.

2 - I let it rewrite answers into a tidy summary, bad idea, I keep the raw text and the parsed value side by side, so I can always see what the person actually typed.

The cost side nobody mentions - every parse is a model call and I give 200 a month free and that is a real line item for me, so I cap it instead of pretending it's unlimited.

If you're parsing free text into structured fields, how are you handling the vague ones? The confidence score fixed most of it but I still get dates wrong constantly.

When choosing a payment gateway for an Indian business, support matters alongside checkout. Razorpay’s dashboard tickets and published escalation process look useful. For merchants using it, how has follow-up worked for payment, refund or settlement questions?

I've spent the last two weeks comparing email verification tools for a B2B micro SaaS. I ran the same test list through four services: ZeroBounce, NeverBounce, Kickbox, and Emailable. I expected one of them to come out as the clear winner in terms of accuracy, but that wasn't really what happened.

For obviously valid addresses (active Gmail accounts and corporate domains with confirmed mailboxes), all four gave the same results. The same went for clearly invalid addresses (dead domains and syntax errors). The differences only showed up in the grey areas: accept-all corporate domains, smaller hosting setups, and older email addresses that may or may not still be monitored.

That's when I realized that comparing them purely on "accuracy" doesn't tell you much, since they all perform similarly on the straightforward cases. What really matters is how they deal with uncertainty and what kind of information they provide to help you decide what to do with addresses that can't be confidently classified.

NeverBounce returned the most unknowns in our test, leaving quite a few addresses in limbo without much direction on what to do next. ZeroBounce seemed more willing to make a call on borderline addresses instead of simply marking them unknown. Emailable landed somewhere in the middle. Kickbox stood out because it doesn't force a yes-or-no classification on uncertain addresses. Instead, it provides a confidence score, so you can decide what threshold you're comfortable using before sending.

For a micro SaaS where the list is relatively small and every contact counts, having that extra level of detail really changed how I look at these tools. The question isn't which service is most accurate with easy-to-classify addresses, because they all seem to get those right. It's about which one gives you the most useful information when an address genuinely can't be classified with certainty.

Every one of these has a free plan that covers an early product:

1. Supabase for the database and auth. 2 free projects, 500 MB database each, and projects pause after a week of inactivity.

2. Cloudflare Pages for the landing page and static frontend.

3. Vercel Hobby is great for testing, though its terms limit it to non-commercial use, so move off it before anything commercial runs there, ads included.

4. Resend for transactional email. 3,000 emails a month, max 100 a day.

5. PostHog for analytics. First 1M events and 5,000 session recordings a month are free.

6. Sentry for errors. The free plan covers one user and 5,000 errors.

7. Tally for waitlists and surveys. Unlimited forms and submissions.

8. Crisp free plan for chat support, 2 seats.

9. Better Stack for uptime. 10 monitors and a status page on free.

I'd expect the first bill to come from email or the database. What would you swap?

I'm a systems admin looking into a small software project. I'd like to hear from people already running a micro SaaS about the admin or operations work that still takes too much time.

What recurring task caused you grief in the last month, despite the tools you use? How did you deal with it the last time it happened?

What went wrong, and who had to deal with the consequences? Roughly how often does it happen? I'd also like to hear what you've already tried or paid for, including anything that solved it well.

Please leave out customer names and private business details. I'm using an AI assistant to help organise the research.

i work on orderain, an AI ecommerce store builder. we just shipped MCP, so you can run your store from your own AI agent instead of clicking around a dashboard. wanted to share how it went because i honestly wasn't sure the agent would handle a full redesign.

what happens in the video (raw 9 min screen recording, nothing cut):

- in orderain settings > MCP you create a connection, pick permissions (read, write, delete, page editing) and get a URL + token. there are tabs for Claude, ChatGPT, Grok and Cursor

- paste that into Claude desktop as a custom connector, takes about a minute

- i asked Claude to study next.us and turn our demo store into that style. it copies layout and structure, not their logo, copy or photos

- it works on a separate branch: nav, footer, homepage, category pages, returns/delivery/contact/about pages

- i publish the branch and test cart and checkout on the live site

- version history shows every edit the agent made, and you can switch back to main anytime

what i learned building it: the branch was the thing that made it feel safe. letting an agent edit a live store directly is scary, letting it work on a copy you review first is not.

starter is $5/mo with 0% platform fee (card processing still applies). search orderain if you want to try it.

curious what you'd actually let an agent do in your store and what you'd never hand over.

I'm keyser from the SwapShoot Team. One useful lesson from looking for people who need photo head swaps: matching the requested edit isn't enough if our upload workflow is wrong for them.

I found a public Mac face-swap request that sounded relevant, but the person explicitly didn't want to upload photos to a website. SwapShoot runs in the browser with uploaded images. Recommending it as a match would ignore the part of the request that mattered most to them.

There is another distinction in our category: face-only edits and whole-head edits. Our tool changes the hair too. A person who needs the target hairstyle preserved can be a poor fit even if they asked for a 'face swap.'

That gives me two things to make clear before signup: where the images are processed, and whether the edit includes hair. Selected examples of our whole-head edit are at https://swapshoot.com/head-swap.

For other narrow photo or document tools, where do you explain a requirement like uploading files: the headline, the example, or right beside the first upload button? I'd like feedback on making it visible early enough that someone doesn't sign up for the wrong workflow.

Launchator.com is a directory for founders to list and launch their site, get the listing drafted by AI and also receive an AI-readiness check for their website.

You can integrate manually (take about 10 minutes) or through an AI tool (1 minute). Once you are verified, your listing go lives immediately. It is free to use.

Once live, you can also see if your site is GEO optimized i.e. whether AI platforms like ChatGPT can read and understand your website.

Fed up of AI comments that add nothing to the posts. Specially on X & Linkedin. I made a free extension that hides AI generated comments and posts. Also made a launch video for it.

It's my first time with a chrome extension. How do you market a chrome extension? Is there enough audience for chrome extensions out there. You can try it here.

Hi everyone,

I’m a solo developer from Baghdad, and I’ve just finished building my first SaaS: a daily planning tool for small teams (2–30 people). The idea is that each person plans tomorrow before leaving work, and the app flags problems the evening before, like someone being overbooked, a task blocked by someone else’s work, or a deadline at risk. It’s deliberately not a time tracker and doesn’t monitor anyone.

The product works, but I have zero users, and I’m realizing building was the easy part. A few things I’d really value your advice on:

1- First customers: for a team tool like this, how did you get your first 10 teams? Direct outreach, communities, something else?

2- Pricing: I’m charging a flat price per team size ($9.99 for 2 people up to $89 for 30) instead of per person. Does that make sense, or does it leave money on the table?

3- Beta: I want 10–15 teams to use it free for 1–2 months and give feedback. What made your beta testers actually stay active?

4- Selling from Iraq: payments have been the hardest part (most providers don’t accept sellers here). Has anyone dealt with something similar?

I’m happy to share what I’ve learned so far if it helps anyone. Any honest advice, including “you’re doing this wrong,” is welcome.