So does automod not actually remove posts?
I've seen a bajillion projects in the last week self-promoing with the automod comment at the top. I'm working on my own app too but have been patiently waiting for a Sunday and trying to be helpful in here in the meantime. Is this subreddit used by any actual consumers at this point?
I'm wondering if I should just post my app in here anyway
I am a solo dev about to open up a personal finance app (bank sync, budgeting, some AI features). Closed alpha now, small number of testers, no paying users yet. Planning $10/mo or $100/yr for the base tier and $15/mo or $150/yr for the higher one. (Crowded market, I know)
---- This is not a vibe-code project. I am an SSE at a large publicly-traded company. -----
Do I price as low as I can stand to get an audience, and raise later if I ever need to bring on help, or do I start with room to breathe and accept slower growth?
What makes me nervous about the low road is that this is not a pure software product. Bank aggregation is billed per connected user, so every signup has a real marginal cost. My fixed costs are small (a couple of VPS boxes, domains, the app store fees) but the variable cost per user can scale against me. AI usage is currently a rounding error, though I assume that will change somewhat with volume. I do have guardrails and throttling in place for the worst cases. Specific things I would like to hear from people who have been through it:
If you launched cheap and raised prices later, how did it actually go? Did you grandfather existing users forever, and did that end up being a problem as those users became a bigger share of your base?
For anyone with a real per user cost (payments, aggregation, per seat vendors, heavy inference), what multiple of bare cost do you consider healthy? I have seen 5x thrown around for SaaS gross margin but that seems to assume near zero marginal cost. Is 3x sane when a chunk of the bill scales with signups?
Is there an argument for skipping the cheap phase entirely at this stage? The counterargument I keep hearing is that early users who came for the price are not the ones who stick, and low prices attract people who churn.
How do you think about paying yourself? Right now "profit" means revenue over infrastructure, which is obviously not real profit if my own time is worth anything. Curious whether people model a salary in from day one or genuinely treat the early phase as unpaid.
Happy to share concrete numbers if it's useful. Mostly trying to figure out if starting at the low end is a growth strategy or just something I'll regret later.
Seriously, if you made it this far, you rock. Thank you :)
I've been building a personal finance app called BuoyAI (you can find it on Google, a ways down haha) and the core mechanic is one inversion: instead of a category starting at your monthly limit and ticking down, each category earns a small allowance every day and the number goes up when you underspend.
The reasoning was that every budgeting app I'd used framed spending as depletion. By week three the number is a source of dread, and the app is effectively punishing you for living your life. Skipping a coffee should feel like progress, and a countdown can't express that. A count-up budget can.
On top of that there's the usual layer: daily streaks, 27 achievements tied to real milestones (first $100 saved, a goal reached, a full month with every category under budget), and levels from Beginner to Legend.
There are no leaderboards and no social comparison of any kind. Money is private, incomes are wildly unequal, and "you saved less than 68% of users" seemed more likely to make someone quit than try harder. But social comparison is one of the strongest motivators in the toolkit and I've given it up entirely.
So the questions I'd genuinely like feedback on:
Is there a version of social mechanics that works for money, or is comparison always toxic when the underlying numbers aren't chosen?
Streaks are great until you break one. For a budget, a broken streak lands in a month someone is probably already stressed about money. Has anyone found a forgiveness mechanic that doesn't make the streak meaningless?
Does an achievement for saving money cheapen the thing itself? I keep wondering whether I'm rewarding the behaviour or replacing the reason for it.
Happy to share screenshots of the count-up categories or the achievement screen if that's useful.