r/Aurajudge

Working on the onboarding flow for Aura right now
and trying to figure out where people actually drop
off versus where I assume they drop off.

The pattern I keep running into: it's rarely the
first screen. People will sit through an intro or a
permissions prompt if the value is obvious. Where it
actually breaks is somewhere in the middle, usually
right before the first real action, the moment where
the app asks you to actually do something instead of
just tap next.

A few specific things that kill it based on what
I've seen:

Asking for too much before showing anything. If
someone has to create a username, pick preferences, and grant three permissions before they see a single piece of actual content, a lot of people bail before they understand why any of it matters.

No clear first action. If the app explains what it
does but doesn't immediately hand you something to do, the momentum from downloading dies fast.

Empty state after signup. Finishing onboarding and
landing on a blank feed or an empty profile with
nothing happening yet is a bad first impression even
if the rest of the app is solid.

Curious what actually gets people to bail for you,
either as a builder watching your own funnel or just
as someone who's deleted an app mid onboarding.

What was the actual moment you checked out?

Been building Aura for a while now and the cost
curve has been interesting to watch, so wanted to
share some real numbers.

Early on, costs are basically nothing. Supabase free
tier covers auth, database, and storage for a small
user base. Claude API costs stay low because you're
not generating many verdicts yet. EAS builds have a
free tier too. You can genuinely build and launch an
app for close to zero dollars if you're doing the
work yourself.

The shift happens once real usage kicks in. A few
things scale faster than people expect:

API costs scale directly with usage, not users. One
active user posting ten times a day costs more than
ten users posting once a week. Volume matters more than headcount.

Storage adds up quietly. Photos, especially with
moderation passes running on each one, become a
real line item once you're not just storing a
handful of test images anymore.

Database reads scale with every feed, leaderboard,
and profile view, not just posts. A leaderboard
that recalculates on every load gets expensive fast
if you're not caching it.

The stuff that felt free in month one starts showing
up as a real number by month three or four, even
before you're at a scale where monetization makes
obvious sense.

The upfront cost to start is close to nothing right
now, which is genuinely great for solo builders. But
the cost curve as you grow isn't linear, it's more
like a series of steps where each new feature or
usage pattern quietly adds a new expense you didn't
plan for.

Curious what others have seen. Does the jump happen gradually or was there a specific point where costs spiked for you?

Been thinking about this a lot while working on
retention for Aura. Notifications can get you to
open something once, but they don't explain why
people come back on their own days later.

For me it's usually one of these:

Something changed since I left. A new comment, a
score update, a ranking shift. If nothing's different, there's no reason to check.

A reason tied to another person. Seeing what a
friend posted matters more than seeing a generic
feed. The social pull is stronger than the content
itself most of the time.

Low effort to check but high payoff if something's
there. Opening the app should take two seconds, and if there's nothing new that's fine, but if there is something it needs to feel worth it.

Curious what pulls other people back. Is it
notifications, habit, social pressure, or something
else entirely? Trying to figure out which of these
actually matters versus which ones just feel
important from the inside.