u/TaskPile_app

Hi, danish developer here. I'm doing a to-do app and I would really love to support small languages, including Greenlandic, but I'm not making money of the app and I'm guessing it to niche to ever make back what a professional translater would cost. So... I'm thinking, I would make the basic level of the app free for everybody running it in greenlandic, if somebody would help me translate it.

(I did write the Grønlandske Hus and asked of they have a way to get things like this translaged, but never heard back from them)

A couple of weeks ago I finished the import and got all my old notes in from Evernote and Zoho Notebook. Normally I just search my notes or have Claude find the relevant ones, but a default frontpage view with 600 visible notes, some of them decades old, is noise, even if the newest are on top.

So today I added a default filter for each notebook. For me that's "everything created or edited in the last month". And using it immediately exposed the next gap: I don't actually have a "last 30 days" filter. So I'm adding that as well, plus the variations other people may want.

Being a solo developer in a totally saturated market (to-do and note apps), the only way to find a niche where my product makes sense is to target everyone who is just like me and will love the product that I would love.

So that is how my development goes:

1. Use the product (eat my own dog food)
2. Identify features I'm missing (or bugs)
3. Extrapolate to a bit more generic version than just my needs (the "last month" view became a configurable default filter per notebook)
4. Develop (test/refine/etc)
5. Repeat

I'm a bit privileged in the sense that I don't need to sell this - I have a day job and I'm doing this because I want these apps for myself. But from a motivation angle it's absolutely gold. (From a depth and width of testing perspective it's absolutely horrible, I know.)

Anyone else building purely for their own usage?

A couple of weeks ago I finished the import and got all my old notes in from Evernote and Zoho Notebook. Normally I just search my notes or have Claude find the relevant ones, but a default frontpage view with 600 visible notes, some of them decades old, is noise, even if the newest are on top.

So today I added a default filter for each notebook. For me that's "everything created or edited in the last month". And using it immediately exposed the next gap: I don't actually have a "last 30 days" filter. So I'm adding that as well, plus the variations other people may want.

Being a solo developer in a totally saturated market (to-do and note apps), the only way to find a niche where my product makes sense is to target everyone who is just like me and will love the product that I would love.

So that is how my development goes:

1. Use the product (eat my own dog food)
2. Identify features I'm missing (or bugs)
3. Extrapolate to a bit more generic version than just my needs (the "last month" view became a configurable default filter per notebook)
4. Develop (test/refine/etc)
5. Repeat

I'm a bit privileged in the sense that I don't need the income - I have a day job and I'm doing this because I want these apps for myself. But from a motivation angle it's absolutely gold. (From a depth and width of testing perspective it's absolutely horrible, I know.)

Anyone else building purely from their own usage? How do you catch what dogfooding can't?

Jeg overvejer at få mine apps oversat til de små sprog - mest fordi jeg synes vi skal støtte dem som sprogområder. Men der er helt sikkert ikke nogen økonomi i det.

Findes der fonde støtter eller institutter der gør den slags gratis? Jeg kunne godt overveje at gøre produktet gratis (eller næsten, jeg har omkostninger), hvis man kører appen på det sprog.

Har I nogle ideer?

When Claude code is validating things with screenshots (or doing e2e testing), it will store them in a temp directory, that can be a pain to get to.

A simple:

Store screenshots in an untracked "screenshots" directory, so that I've easy access to them. Include timestamp in name.

Makes it a lot easier to review, what it's been building. Often saves me from testing on localhost...

I'm building a space trading and exploration game, included are a series of mini-games, you can mine (Astroids), land on planets (Lunar Lander), get attacked in ftl-space (Galaxian), skim the sun for energy and dock at space stations. The last two are not based on anything known.

They are simple and take 10-30 seconds, and there's a direct pay-off. I'm thinking about adding more for variety.

What kind of early console game - space themed - would you like to see?

I'm developing a set of tools that are MCP-first - some of them are only useful if you have a mcp setup and some a less useful, without it.

The catch: I'd really like to point my users to a free option, but every free tier I've tried gets stuck:

Claude free: You can add a custom connector, but there's only one connector slot, and in my case it's already occupied by a default remote connector I can't remove (I get an error and I can see other have the same experience) - so there's no room to add my own.

ChatGPT free: I can add an MCP connector, but the free model ("mini") doesn't seem to actually understand how to call it - the tool is configured, it just never gets used.

So my question for anyone who's been down this road: is there an AI agent that (a) lets you add a custom MCP server and (b) reliably calls its tools on a free tier?

I'd rather not force users into a paid subscription just to try the tools, so I'm hunting for at least one solid free path to recommend.

Thanks!

When asking Claude about more philosophical topics, take a moment to ask for articles or sources, and click them. Reading a full article about a topic will take you around angles you'll probably not get to on your own...

Update on this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/lovable/comments/1u9xtvj/price_of_run_credits_seems_twice_as_expensive_to

I've been digging further and noticed that some of my apps run at the samme cost everyday and it's 100% related to instance size. Here's what lovable chat said about it (after it spend a lot of credit trying to optimize my cron jobs)

Database compute is rented capacity, not metered usage.

When you pick an instance size (tiny / small / medium / …), you're reserving a virtual machine with a fixed amount of CPU and RAM. That VM runs 24/7 whether your app gets 0 requests or 10,000 requests per minute. Lovable Cloud charges you for the time the instance is provisioned, not for the work it does.

It looks right - for some of my projects.
It seems to be 2.5 credits / day for the mini

And 1.86 / day for tiny

All of this is more or less pure "database server"

But I also have this project:

https://preview.redd.it/wbnx9zqsp69h1.png?width=824&format=png&auto=webp&s=5afdd940f9e01c0153a652fd9d7c24f87818f5a1

This tiny project actually seems to be variable cost, based on actual usage.

And if the price of small instances is around 2credits a day, how are anybody supposed to run anything with 20 credits a month?

The variable credits project has used 2 credits over the last six days (doing mostly nothing), with goes to about 10 credits a month, that makes it possible to run two (tiny) projects...

I don't get it.

Working (solo dev, first game in may years) on a slow burn, explorer/trading game (think classic Elite, with a deeper story and more lore) and just want to cover a bit of my cost should it become popular. Maybe I can just cross that bridge when I get there, but I hate it when things go from free to payed, or even worse add ads pay-to-play later, so I want to think about this now and would love your thoughts.

So .. the topic: have you tried to go this way, and do people donate? What does it take and what are the options. I am thinking about multiplayer, later, and that would make it possible to sell "patreon" badge, other players could see in the game but that's for later.

My first 24 hours on run credits.

I had a hard time keeping under the "free" 25 ($) cloud limit, but managed...

I've been using 6,54 run credit in my first 24 hours. (95% database)

I'm on the 100€ = 400 credit plan = 0.25€ / credit

6,5 credit a day * 30 = (195 credits / month) * 0.25€ = 50€ / month

Edit: The old "25$ / month free" is now "20 credits per month" for cloud. That's about 10% of what I need and what I could do with the old credits. So a LOT more expensive... what am I missing?

So .. nice simplification, shame about the doubling in price...

I'll be looking at my cronjobs again.

What does your pricing calculations look like?

If you've got a low-traffic Lovable site but your database/egress numbers look way too high, check your pg_cron jobs.

TL;DR: quiet site but high DB usage → check cron.job for a 5-second process-email-queue, drop it to */3, and add a watchdog so the email setup tool can't silently undo it.

When you (or Lovable, automatically) run the email domain setup (setup_email_infra), it creates a process-email-queue cron job that fires every 5 seconds. That's hardcoded in the tool - you can't ask it to use a saner interval.

5 seconds = ~17,000 calls/day. Every 3 minutes does the exact same job and is ~480/day. For an empty email queue that's pure waste - HTTP calls, function invocations, and DB hits for nothing.

How to check (Lovable Cloud SQL editor):

SELECT jobname, schedule FROM cron.job;

If process-email-queue shows 5 seconds, that's your culprit.

Fix it to every 3 minutes:

SELECT cron.schedule('process-email-queue', '*/3 * * * *',
  $$ SELECT public.email_queue_process_post(); $$);

The catch: re-running setup_email_infra resets it back to 5 seconds (happens on key rotation, email breakage, new domain setup). So a one-time fix doesn't stick. I added a tiny watchdog cron that checks every 10 min and resets the interval if it drifted - set-and-forget:

-- function that re-asserts */3 only if it drifted
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION public.enforce_email_cron_interval()
RETURNS void LANGUAGE plpgsql SECURITY DEFINER
SET search_path TO 'public','cron' AS $$
DECLARE v_schedule text;
BEGIN
  SELECT schedule INTO v_schedule FROM cron.job WHERE jobname='process-email-queue';
  IF v_schedule IS NULL OR v_schedule='*/3 * * * *' THEN RETURN; END IF;
  PERFORM cron.schedule('process-email-queue','*/3 * * * *',
    $cron$ SELECT public.email_queue_process_post(); $cron$);
END $$;

-- watchdog every 10 min
SELECT cron.schedule('email-cron-watchdog','*/10 * * * *',
  $$ SELECT public.enforce_email_cron_interval(); $$);

(Or ask Lovable to do something similar)

The app is ready and stable, but I decided to keep the payment gateway turned off, while in beta. Everybody is just running the pro plan.

​

But I'm thinking, maybe it makes the site a bit less trustworthy. If I want people to switch from Todoist or anyDo, I should probably make the site seem as mature as possible.

​

What do you think?

Everytime I get a change in from github (which a lot as I do most of the development in claude), the in-lovable preview dies. "Restart the dev server" fixes it, but it will take between 0.5 to 0.8 credits doing it.

I know I'm watching this way later than everyone else, but I finished Love Is Blind Italy and I swear Giovanni's is the master of DARVO:

• Deny – it never happened, you're imagining it
• Attack – goes after the other person for even bringing it up
• Reverse
• Victim and
• Offender – suddenly HE'S the one who's been wronged and she's the bad guy

Just give me a half hour edit of nothing but his confessionals and arguments and I'll happily sit there with a bingo card. Free space in the middle is "I'm actually the calm one here".

Tell me I'm not the only one seeing this, even if I'm months behind.

What a despicable parody of a human being...