Hi I have been doing automation for quite some time need some guidance about the pricing strategies. If you have delivered live automations for several client hmu please need some help regarding the pricing strategy

So I'm a freelance designer and I've been trying to grow my personal brand on the side for around a year. The problem was never ideas. I have a notes app stuffed with half-written posts. The problem was I'd sit down on a Sunday, write 5 posts, schedule two of them, get pulled into actual paid work, and then not post again until the following Thursday. Same cycle every week.

I tried the whole "content calendar" thing too. Bought a Notion template, filled it in once, never opened it again. Classic.

The thing that finally changed

A friend of mine who does e-commerce kept nudging me to use AI to draft posts. I pushed back because every time I tried ChatGPT for social copy it came out sounding like a LinkedIn influencer mid-meltdown. "Let's unpack this." Hard pass.

But then I actually sat down and set up Claude with a proper system prompt. Fed it like 40 of my old tweets and linkedin posts and told it "write like this, not like a robot." Completely different output. It's not perfect but it gets me to roughly 80% and I clean up the rest.

The missing piece was actually getting those drafts out the door. I was still copy pasting into three different apps. Then I found adaptlypost which let me just push everything through one API. So now it goes: Claude drafts it, I approve it on my phone, it goes out everywhere.

My actual workflow (not a tutorial, just what I do)

Monday and Thursday mornings I spend about 15 min reviewing AI drafts on my phone over coffee.

I delete the bad ones, tweak the decent ones, approve the good ones.

They go out to Twitter, LinkedIn, and Threads throughout the day. I dropped Instagram because my niche doesn't really live there.

I also have a Google Alert set up for a few industry keywords and when something pops I'll draft a quick hot take while it's still fresh.

That's it. It's not some crazy 47-step Zapier automation. It's dumb simple and that's exactly why I actually stick with it.

What surprised me

The biggest thing wasn't saving time. It was that I actually post now. Before this I'd go a whole week without posting and then feel guilty about it which made me avoid it more. Awful cycle. Now I just review stuff that's already written and hit approve. The activation energy is so much lower.

My follower growth hasn't been insane or anything but my DMs have picked up noticeably. I got two freelance leads last month from LinkedIn posts that I honestly don't even remember approving. That alone paid for the whole experiment.

Mistakes I made

Biggest one: I let it run on full auto for about a week without reviewing. One of the posts had a take that was technically correct but came across as a bit tone-deaf given something happening in the news that day. Nobody dragged me for it but I caught it and pulled it fast. Lesson learned, always review.

I also tried to post on every platform at once from day one. Threads and Twitter are similar enough but LinkedIn needs a completely different voice. Took me a couple weeks to get the prompts dialed in per platform.

Would I recommend this approach?

If you already have a voice and just need help with consistency and output, yeah 100%. If you're still figuring out what you even want to say, no tool is going to fix that. Figure out your angle first, then automate the repetitive parts.

Curious if anyone else here has a similar setup or if I'm overthinking this whole thing.

I wanted simple analytics for my side projects, country, origin, some UTMs, per user attribution, entry page, pages, revenue, that's it. PostHog has all of that, but it's buried under 50 other features I don't need, and the dashboard is just overwhelming.

The dealbreaker was test data. I had a bunch of fake events from local testing, and turns out PostHog events are immutable, you can't delete them. To filter them out, you have to write manual SQL filters in every single query, every dashboard, every insight, forever.

I tried it for a couple of weeks, kept getting frustrated, found myself asking Claude to run MCP on my database instead of opening PostHog, that's when I knew it was time to look for an alternative. That's also how Flowsery (my analytics tool) started, just trying to scratch this exact itch for myself.

Don't get me wrong, PostHog is amazing if you have a product team that wants to dig into every user behavior. For a solo founder that just wants to glance at the dashboard once a day, it's way too much.

I've recently seen a post where a founder showed a screenshot from the Cloudflare console with ~500k unique visitors, the reality however is much more mundane.

I have a Cloudflare on my project, 100k Visitors in the last 30 days, impressive, and here is the reality - it was only ~4k real visitors, it's 26x difference, why you might ask?

Cloudflare counts hits at the edge, no JavaScript required. If something touches the CDN, it gets counted. All bots, AI scrapers. headless Chrome, link-preview fetchers, security scanners, and uptime monitors, all of them are counted.

The result?

merely 2-3% of what's reported in Cloudflare are "real visitors", how can you make any product decision based on that, you can't. what's the solution?

Use a PRODUCT analytics tool, obvious choice is GA4, it's great to have it, since you can then use it for retargeting in google ads, but to actually use it - it's robust and complicated.

There are 2 categories: self-host and paid.

Self-host: When to choose self-host? When you already self-host your app, serve the analytics directly on your VPS, good solutions are Plausible, Umami, Matomo. If you don't self-host, the benefit is questionable, it's still going to cost you money and time to set it up, it's not "free" solution in itself.

Paid: All above offer a paid plan, a good option also would be Flowsery with a freemium plan, or Fathom analytics, no self-host hassle, however keep in mind the usage, all tools increase in price the more events you get.

Honorable mention: PostHog, a brilliant all in one tool, with the downside, it's very complicated, it's free for millions of events, but you need to invest a lot of time to set it all up.

The main takeaway, don't use Cloudflare for analytics, it's a wrong use-case, and it gives you a vanity metrics that you cannot rely on.