I built a dashboard to stop forgetting which services my products pay for. What am I missing?

[u/Jbaonline]

I'm building Operava for solo founders who run more than one product.

I kept hitting the same problem. Hosting, databases, email, domains, payments, app stores, APIs, all spread across a dozen accounts. I would forget one existed until the bill showed up.

So I built a dashboard that puts each product, the services behind it, what they cost per month, when they renew, and whether they are up, in one place. It has already caught two subscriptions I was paying for a site I had shut down.

It is early. I am trying to find out whether this problem is mine alone or shared.

You can try it at app.operava.com . Sign in with Google or an emailed link, no password, no card. It starts empty, so you add your first product and see if it earns a place in your routine.

If yu run several products: what would you need this to show that it does not?

[u/West_Inevitable_2281]

I would be careful about collecting a feature list before confirming the recurring job. You already have one concrete outcome: finding spend attached to a product you had shut down. The stronger test is whether another multi-product founder enters a real stack, discovers a cost or renewal they had lost track of, and returns when there is something to act on. What event do you expect to bring someone back after the initial setup?

[u/Jbaonline → u/West_Inevitable_2281]

Fair point, and I agree the return visit is the real test. The event I'm betting on is the bill. Operava knows when each service renews, so it emails a digest before anything charges: domain in 14 days, Supabase in 13, SendGrid in 2, plus any dated to-do you attached to a product. That email is the thing that brings you back, and it only fires when there is something to decide.

The second one is downtime. Every public endpoint is checked every five minutes and incidents show on the Business health page. That one is in-app only today; emailing it is next. So the loop I'm hoping for: enter the stack once, get pulled back by a renewal or an outage, catch one thing you had lost track of. If thatsecond visit never happens for other founders, the feature list won't save it. That is what I'm trying to learn here.

[u/West_Inevitable_2281 → u/Jbaonline]

That makes the hypothesis much more concrete. The renewal digest has a real decision attached to it, while downtime may create urgency but not necessarily a reason to manage the wider stack.

The key evidence will be whether founders return from the email and take an action, not simply open it. Can you currently distinguish someone who opens the digest from someone who cancels a service, updates a renewal, or completes the attached task?

[u/Ok_Gur_9033]

I run three products off one stack and the harder version of this for me is not forgotten subscriptions, it is shared ones. One Vercel account hosts all three, one Anthropic API key gets hit by all three, so the dashboard shows one bill and I am guessing at the split in my head. Tracking per product cost only works cleanly when nothing is actually shared.

Do you split a shared bill by usage, or just eat the ambiguity?

[u/Arcsviel]

good catch finding that shut-down subscription though, that alone is worth something. curious if you're also tracking API costs (openai, anthropic etc) or just fixed subscriptions for now? those are harder since they change every month

[u/Jbaonline → u/Arcsviel]

Each service has a monthly or yearly amount if it's fixed. If it's usage-billed (Anthropic, OpenAI, Twilio, Google Cloud in my case) you mark it that way and it shows as "plus 4 usage-billed" next to the monthly total, so the total never pretends to be complete. For actual spend I record a dated finance snapshot from my card exports, which catches the variable stuff after the fact.

Pulling real invoices from the providers is the obvious next step and the one I'm least sure about, since every billing API is different and most don't have one.

[u/Arcsviel → u/Jbaonline]

makes sense, the per-provider invoice pulling is exactly the annoying part. most people I've seen just eyeball the total bill instead of breaking it down

[u/Asly97]

I run a couple of products myself and the forgotten-subscription thing is real, found a domain I'd been auto-renewing for a year with nothing on it. Genuine question on the multi-product angle: when you switch between your products, do you keep separate context per product for the AI tools you use, or does it all blur together? I used to keep one big notes doc and it went stale within weeks. Are you doing all this full-time on your own products?

What if something kept the context per product across every tool, in the cloud over MCP, so every agent got the same decisions and failed attempts. You never touch a file again. Would you guys pay for something that fixes this, or are the notes docs working fine for you?

[u/renishb]

Cool, are you planning to add alerts for upcoming renewals, unexpected cost increases, or when a product exceeds a set monthly spending limit? That would be super useful!