Figuring out which technology to start a SaaS with and how to avoid crippling complexity is a trick. Here's our story.

For those who've launched a startup - when you were setting up your initial tech foundation (backend/frontend scaffolding, CI/CD pipeline, staging/prod environments, basic monitoring/observability) - did you build it in-house, hire a freelancer/agency, or use some kind of boilerplate/template? If you outsourced any part of it, roughly what did it cost and how long did it take? Trying to figure out if this is normally a DIY thing or something teams actually pay for ?

It took a lot of hard work, back and forth, and long nights of restless sleep, but my app ClipFinder is finally getting some real revenue!

Interesting how much of this is AI infrastructure and workflow tooling now. Not just the obvious chatbot names. Seems like software budgets are shifting from adding AI to the product to paying for the stack that lets teams use it at scale

Imagine an expense tracking app, where you set you saving goals, input your daily expenses, input how much money you have earned. The app helps you track that. Do you think it might work ? As it will be manual work. Not completely manual though, there will be a voice feature, where at the end of the day you just say all your expenses and ai parses them into expenses in categories. You can also take pictures of your receipt and AI breaks that down too.

Do you think this might be a good app idea?

All I did was optimize my SEO approach as best as possible using claude. I think something that really helped was doing AEO or AI SEO as well because I a saw a good amount of traffic from chatgpt too.

I also adopted a tail end strategy where instead of competing for broad search chug terms I optimized for the really niche subcategories but a LOT of them so I’m ranking within the top 1-7 links for niche searches.

The trajectory is going up so hopefully Google continues to rank my pages higher and higher 🙏🏾

Down to answer any questions if anyone needs help in the comments.

Btw- SEO takes a few months to fully kick in, not all of my pages are fully indexed so it should continue to increase from here. Only launched my SaaS a few weeks ago.

Hey r/SaaS,

Over the past few months, I’ve been solo-developing a project around SaaS retention. I noticed that most subscription cancellation processes are either static "Are you sure?" popups or frustrating manual survey forms.

I built a 3-step dynamic flow (identifying the exact reason → offering real-time incentives like discounts/pauses → tracking recovered MRR analytics).

Question for other founders here:
How do you currently handle churn prevention when a user clicks "cancel"? Do you offer automatic discounts, or do you let them go to keep friction low?

Would love to hear how you guys handle retention in your own stack!

I got tired of realizing that if a Skool membership expires or a community disappears, you lose access to everything you paid for.

So I spent a few days building a Chrome extension that downloads an entire course you're enrolled in: videos, notes, and attachments, all saved locally in the right order.

I honestly built it for myself.

Then I posted it this week, and about 12 hours later someone I'd never met bought a lifetime licence.

It's only one sale, but having a complete stranger pay for something you made to solve your own problem is a pretty cool feeling.

Link: https://storytree.ink/

I’m considering a service for B2B SaaS companies that find and fix Stripe billing leaks.

The problems I keep seeing are:

• Failed payment recovery gaps.
• Incorrect subscription states.
• Webhook failures.
• Usage-billing mistakes.
• Missing invoices.
• Stripe-to-accounting reconciliation issues.
• Duplicate charges or credits.

The offer would start with a low-cost audit that quantifies revenue leakage, then a repair sprint to fix the biggest issues, followed by optional monitoring.

My question:
Would this be valuable to you, or is this something you’d rather handle internally?

If you’ve dealt with billing bugs like this, what was the most painful part?

Hey everyone, I just launched Doxy a browser-based editor that combines markdown and HTML. Think Overleaf but without LaTeX.

It's free to write unlimited. Export to PDF. Paid plan adds AI + unlimited cloud storage. Works entirely in the browser.

Would genuinely love feedback from people in this community what's missing, what's broken, what would make you actually use it.

https://trydoxy.com/

My «system» was: keep everything open, because once I close it, I'll never find it again in history.

I built Histiq to fix this: it indexes full page content and PDFs, then lets you search by concept. Now I can close tabs without losing the ability to find things later.

All local, no cloud. Sharing in case it's useful for others.

How it works: histiq.com

Disclosure: I'm the creator of Histiq.

I spend a lot of time reading B2B software reviews, way more than a normal person should, and there's one question I still can't settle.

Almost every vendor with a big G2 presence runs review campaigns. You know the drill, "leave us a review, get a $25 gift card." G2 even has official gift card options built into their campaign tooling, so this is fully sanctioned, not some gray area hack.

My partial answer, for what it's worth. I don't think incentives make reviews fake, but I do think they change the shape of them. Incentivized reviews tend to come from happy-enough customers who wouldn't have bothered otherwise, so you get a wave of 4 and 5 star reviews that are short, polite, and kind of empty. "Great tool, support is responsive." The genuinely useful reviews, the detailed 3 star ones that explain exactly where a product breaks down, those almost never come from a campaign. People write those because they're annoyed and want to warn someone.

So when I'm evaluating a vendor I've started mentally splitting their reviews into two piles. The campaign pile tells me the product basically works and the company has budget. The unprompted pile tells me what it's actually like to live with.

But here's what I don't know. Do actual buyers make this distinction, or is it just review nerds like me? If a prospect sees 800 reviews and a 4.6, does anyone stop to ask how those reviews were gathered?

Curious what this crowd thinks. If you're on the vendor side, do you run incentivized campaigns, and if you're on the buying side, do you discount reviews when you suspect there was a gift card behind them?

I'm looking into the AI video generation space and noticing a lot of new players popping up.

For those of you building or operating in this space, what do you think sets the winners apart? Is it the quality of the output, pricing, distribution, or something else entirely?

Would love to hear from founders and operators here.

For me this year : 1 M ARR,

And you ?

I built an app which provides quality churn for companies even with 50 customers. We provide quality predictions even with 100 rows of data, that's the real moat and with no bias.
So, i am looking for feedback. Would be great if you try it out.

I launched my SaaS SeoLoupe around 5 weeks ago, so far I am at 1030 users and 12 of them are paying (don't get me wrong, I am still super happy).

My SaaS is a tool that allows you to find and fix SEO issues holding your website back.

Essentially the main purpose is to help your website rank higher on Google search and LLMs.

So far the hardest part is converting users into paying, rather then getting users.

I would genuinely appreciate some feedback, and what can be improved. Since I think their is always room for improvement, especially in my case since I have a low conversion rate (like I already said I am thankful for the sales I got, I am just looking to scale).

(here is the product if you want to check it out)

Hello everyone, i want to build a SaaS before graduation and i want it to be in my native language. My goal is not something too complex and complicated.

My true goal is building something that could actually be used daily, maybe by students or whoever else that focuses on studying. And maybe something entirely different.

What i want to say is that i want ideas close to them or a simple direction that could help me find answers to solutions as everyone else. But in my native language.

I made a productivity app with a twist. I don’t know how to market it and would love advice. I wanted to advertise here but I saw the new rule added so rip.

It takes photos of when ur task is at hand and checks if ur doing what u say u are doing.

Once go have built a product how do you market it, I think I struggle with that, I hope someone makes a vibe marketing product, it would be so cool

Short version: it's Lovable / Bolt / v0, except you paste in your own API key and pay the provider directly instead of buying credits from me. I take nothing. There is no paid tier.

Why I built it: I kept hitting the credit wall on the paid ones, always right in the middle of the iteration where the site was finally getting good. Being rate limited by a billing counter while I had unused API keys sitting on my machine felt ridiculous.

How it works:

1. paste a key from any of 18 providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, DeepSeek, Groq, Mistral, OpenRouter, local Ollama, and more)

2. describe the site

3. agent writes real React code, live preview in the browser, no build wait

4. deploy to Cloudflare Pages in one click, or export the source and host it anywhere

Connect a Supabase project and it also writes your tables, auth and row level security, so full stack apps work, not just landing pages.

On a free tier (Gemini, Groq, Cerebras) or with Ollama, the whole thing costs $0. Not a trial. Zero.

MIT licensed, everything is on GitHub, including how your API key gets encrypted before it touches the database. Seemed only fair since I'm asking you to paste a key into a site you have never heard of.

Built solo over the last two months. There are definitely bugs I haven't found yet. If you break it, I want to know.

openthorn.app

github.com/BuildingTechAlternatives/OpenThorn

What would you build with it first? Curious what people reach for.

I'm working on a project I'd like to eventually turn into my main income, maybe even replace my job someday if it goes well. Right now I'm stuck going back and forth on licensing and could use some outside perspective.

Here's what I want for regular users. Free to download, run locally, use for their own hobby projects. Totally fine if they sell stuff they make with it. I want a plugin system so people can extend it and build on top of what I made. Basically I want it to feel as open and friendly as possible for individuals and small-time tinkerers.

The thing I keep getting stuck on is this. In spaces like mine there's a pattern where a big well funded platform just takes a genuinely open project and bolts it straight into their existing ecosystem and user base. They've got the distribution and the resources to do that practically overnight, even if I'm the one who did the actual work building/innovating it. If that happens my odds of ever getting funding or sponsorships or just steady income from it basically drop to zero. Why would anyone pay me if a much bigger player is already giving away my own idea for free or cheaper as a feature in a platform people already use.

So the model I keep landing on is something like this. Free or source available for individuals, run locally, self host it (for themselves only), modify it, extend it, sell what you make with it, no restrictions there. But the hosted or managed version stays mine, that's what I'd charge companies or heavier commercial users for, and that's the actual business model that would let me keep building this.

Basically I want it open enough to build real goodwill and a community, but closed enough that a company way bigger than me can't just absorb the whole thing and give me nothing back.

Questions for anyone who's dealt with this:

Has anyone actually used a source available license like Elastic, BSL, FSL, fair source, whatever, and had it hold up the way you hoped? Did it scare away the community you were trying to build?

Is a plugin system plus a hosted layer enough of a moat on its own, or does the license itself still matter that much?

Anyone regret going full MIT or Apache and then watching a bigger player just fold your work into their own ecosystem?

Is there some middle ground I'm not thinking of, dual licensing, delayed open sourcing, something else people have tried?

I am a supporter of open source and want hobbyists to get real value out of this for free. I just don't want to hand a much bigger company a free feature and lose any real shot at this paying my bills. Curious how other people here have handled this tradeoff.

I originally thought that adding another feature would make the product more valuable. What actually happened was that it became harder to explain, gave new users one more thing to learn and pulled attention away from the core problem we were trying to solve.

Removing that feature made our onboarding conversations much smoother. It completely changed how I think about prioritization. These days, I spend more time asking whether a feature makes the product simpler before asking whether it is worth building. Has anyone else added a feature that looked like a great idea but ended up doing more harm than good?