u/Orchapps

So I built my second saas after my first failure. Finally have some traction and our first 100 paying users. It’s a swift generation app allowing users to build the most complex iOS apps.

We’ve been live for around 8 weeks now, for the first few weeks we got a few sign ups nothing paid and I was (and still am) shelling out to fund the freemium version of our platform that less users generate a full first version of their app. This cost is fairly significant but my hope was enough people would see their app and think this is great and sign up and start paying. Even though the apps people were producing were visibly and functionally great we just weren’t getting any follow ups and payments .

I have scrutinised every single flow on our app, trying to balance the act between giving users enough to want to subscribe but without bankrupting me 😂.
We also have a fleet of macs which is fairly expensive.

After a month we had 10 paid users and 280 active users (marketing is a different story but most traffic came from Google ads and surprisingly ChatGPT). However this was still loss making and our conversion rate whilst ok I stil felt was low. Then I saw a post on here about free trials and I actually have combined the freemium and free trial and it’s worked amazingly, we got 3 free trial sign ups on the first night and 2 weeks later we had 150 trial signs ups which has led to today where we have just crossed 100 paying users 8 weeks after start.

The idea was the I wanted to lead them down the path with their app, ie

Freemium - get the first version, fully working can preview (limited time) it on our platform and make 1 edit and a couple of planning questions. Then prompted to sign up to free trial.

Free trial for 7 days - users can get their app on their phone still no charge but charged in 7 days. A few more edits and planning questions available before full subscription starts. So may hit limits on free trial and be asked to start free trial early to get full access.

Full access paid subscriptions - users can use their full token allowance for their paid tier generate multiple apps with multiple edits etc (minimum 3 apps and a bunch of edits at lowest tier) and most importantly the ability to use the system to upload to TestFlight and App Store with better chance of approval. (Using your own Apple developer cert).

So there is always something that users need for the next stage but trying to give them plenty to test and enjoy the product and increase chance of purchase. It’s tough as dependant on each users usage at these levels we will still be breaking even but got to start somewhere!

My question to other builders, am I giving too much away in freemium?

Do you do free trial or freemium and why?

If your interested - orchapp.dev

So after the pain of building a golf app through various other app builders and like loveable and bolt and then coding it solely through a rented mac I found all the other issues users like me get frustrated with bridges and capacitors to staple together react native then various issues trying to struggle with apples body tracking and vision technology.

Coding agents have gone so far now but the key has been to structure and prepare them for building in swift is imperative to generating working complex apps. The idea behind this was that i wanted to be able to A rebuild my own golf swing analyser within the app and B make sure that it works first time of build so the rest is iteration.

The big issue with all of this is the need for a fleet of macs (semi solved) so each users get a build built on Xcode 26, this at small scale is actually my biggest cost even vs llm costs per user which even with our free giveaway actually acts as a decently priced lead (wont disclose exact figures).

Weve only been live for around 4 weeks and have seen 300+ users with a bunch of paid sign ups as well. Still loss making but to be expected so pl;ease dont try and run me dry on llm calls (there are loads of provisions for limiting and api abuse etc and i am eagled eye and will catch you almost instantly!)

Whilst i love our system and its my blood sweat and tears over the last 6 months our customer service is what i believe is the most important and impressive part of our system with all messages being answered and fixed with 1 hour so far through a web of agentry work with human sign off.

Interested to hear thoughts and happy to share the link and a possible free pro account to users whoa re super interested so drop me a message be super critical generate a free app and let me know what you think!

Orchapp.dev

My third start up/app in a year or so and finally some traction.

It’s half vibe coded/half legitimate blood sweat and tears from a semi technical background ( I worked in quantitative trading/finance over the last 15 years) although I was purely python and vba focused and learnt JS and C++ to help get this done.

As with all new apps marketing is the next challenge. I read copious amounts about UGC marketing, paid vs organic etc etc. Everyone trying to sell you a program or an agency that wants 5k a month to run ads. It’s a minefield.

In the last month or so we’ve dabbled in a few. We’re targeting the younger-mid no-code devs, so we’re trying to push organic marketing on instagram and TikTok organically although as a one man band it’s a real struggle to find content and post as consistently as is needed to grow organically. Iv pushed paid ads out on meta and TikTok but results varied too much with little no conversions just cheap clicks.

Google ads has been our real winner so far and since switching that on a week ago we gained 20+ free and 7 new paying users including one who took our top subscription at 130 dollars a month.

Would love to know more about how people manage to wear all hats, iv managed to offload customer service to an excellent system using Claude where I essentially just accept or reject fixes emails and apps for users in slack. However along with this bug fixes, future updates it’s a tall ask to get it all done and sleep.

Also interested in how people have found their cac in their industries and if anyone with specific dev tools/no code industry experience would love some feedback on marketing techniques. Obviously I am early on and currently at around 500arr but that’s essentially still operating at a loss of around 200$ a month.

NB this isn’t actually an app on the App Store it’s a platform for building iOS apps.

I was learning coding when the ai phenomenon hit so I tried to build a few apps in loveable and bolt a couple of years ago and got stuck trying to use apple technology (specifically body tracking) to build a golf swing analyser. When it came to getting the tracking to work I fell in to an endless loop of capacitors and bridges and the end result was awful.

So to move away from web wrappers I built orchapp.dev, its builds in full native swift for iOS no Xcode or Mac needed (although our systems still use a hosted Mac for builds).

What makes us different from the few other companies around is that we focus on the complex side of app building making sure all the Apple tech capabilities like body tracking, vision, AR/LIDAR etc on first try as well as AI functions with no APIs to struggle with.

We’ve just launched so would appreciate feedback etc.

We offer a completely free trial so anyone can build one app for free now.