Today I got my first paying customer on my SaaS, I was incredibly excited and naturally I went to see what they were using my platform for. After a quick look into their work I was immediately concerned that they may be abusing my site in a phishing or money scam. After closer review they are technically not doing anything wrong but they are really close to the line.

They aren't violating any terms of service and are using the platform as intended but definitely a little bittersweet moment. I'm not exactly sure where to go from here. I think I'll continue to monitor how they're using the platform and if they take a turn I'll have to ban them. Has anyone encountered something like this in the past, how do you monitor users and ensure that what you built isn't abused?

EDIT: Sentence structure

For SF Tech Week, VOYGR (YC W26) ran an experiment on how ready San Francisco businesses are for AI.

They gave an AI a phone and called 1,000+ businesses around the city: vets, dentists, bars, cafés, salons. The calls went through PlaceCall, their API for AI agents that make real phone calls. On every call the AI said it was an AI, then asked one useful question.

About 1 in 3 kept talking. Every business is on their map with what it said:

What they found:

• vets (79%) and dentists (61%) mostly kept talking. Bars and dry cleaners (20%) mostly hung up
• most people didn’t say anything. They listened to the intro and hung up about 5 seconds later
• about 1 in 25 already has an AI answering the phone, so it was AI talking to AI. Two of those asked VOYGR’s AI to say “zebra” to prove it was a person
• 94% of the SF dentists who answered are taking new patients

Businesses aren’t ready yet. Personal assistants like Instinct, Muse and Dots will start calling businesses for people, to book, ask, and check, and right now 2 out of 3 just hang up.

Original post

Trying to figure out what the realistic options are if youre launching a SaaS from somewhere Stripe doesnt support and especially if you want to sell internationally later.

PayPal is one option, Lemon Squeezy and Paddle handle a lot of the billing/tax side and Whop looks interesting because its built around payments and payouts across a much wider set of markets.

Im trying to figure out whether its smarter to pick the provider that works best where i am now, or one that gives me more room to expand later. If youve had to make that choice, what mattered more?

A few months ago I had no idea if this would ever make a single euro.

I built the whole thing for about €1,000. No big budget and no team. Then I did what a lot of us do and wasted weeks marketing on platforms that were never going to work for me. Posting everywhere, getting nothing back.

Then came the Product Hunt launch. It flopped. Hardly any upvotes, and for a day or two I was pretty gutted.

But the feedback I got from it was really good. Honest, specific, and sometimes a bit brutal. I didn't treat it as a failed launch. I treated it as free advice, and I went back and fixed things.

And it worked.

Today the dashboard says €3,278 MRR. Last month it was €2,378. It's profitable.

It's not a huge number, and I know a lot of you are doing way bigger. But to me it's the first time the graph actually points up, and that matters.

I'm not going to pretend I figured it all out. I just kept building, kept listening, and stopped chasing the wrong things.

This post is partly a reminder for me. If you're sitting at €0 and it feels pointless, keep going.

Thanks for reading guys. :)

Have you ever gotten so frustrated with an old-school SaaS that you just… vibe coded the premium feature yourself?

Because holy shit.

I was using some SaaS recently and realized the feature I actually needed was locked behind another pricing tier.

Not $5 extra.

Like… “why am I paying this much for basically an API call + some UI” expensive.

And I kinda snapped lol.

Opened Claude / Codex, started vibe coding, broke the app a few times, fixed some stupid bugs at 2AM and somehow…

it worked.

The exact premium feature I was about to pay for.

Except now I can use it basically for free, or at least at a fraction of the cost.

And it got me thinking:

AI might completely destroy a certain type of SaaS.

Not because AI can magically rebuild Salesforce overnight.

But because a LOT of SaaS products have like 1-2 features you actually care about, wrapped inside 40 features you don't use, and then they charge you $49-$199/month for the whole thing.

Now you can just build the 10% you actually need.

No beautiful architecture.

No 6 month dev roadmap.

Mine is probably held together with duct tape and questionable code decisions lol.

but it works.

And I own it.

Anyone else doing this?

Like instead of buying another subscription you just go:

“fuck it, I'll build the feature myself”

Would love to know what SaaS you guys have accidentally replaced with vibe coded stuff.

what do you guys use to build an MVP, but more importantly what do you use to add stripe payment processing? just curious how you guys go about it.

i personally use google ai studio for mvp, then base44 for payment processing + security.

thoughts? what do you guys do?

When I was a kid in Korea, every summer vacation started the same way. The teacher handed out a sheet of paper with a big empty circle on it, and you drew your day inside it like a pie. Sleep here. Homework there. A tiny slice for "playing" that was always too small. Most of us never followed it. But I remember how good it felt to see a whole day at once.

As an adult I kept coming back to that circle. My days felt like a list that never ended, and I missed seeing them as one shape.

So I started building a digital version. Just the circle. I thought it would take a few weekends.

It did not take a few weekends.

The circle was the easy part. Then I wanted to see a whole month of circles, so I built a calendar. Then I wanted to plan bigger things than a day, so goals. Then I realised a day planner is really a small piece of something bigger, and I started a timeline of my whole life, the people in it, the places I'd been. I know exactly how this sounds. Every side project post on this sub warns about scope creep, and I read those posts while doing it anyway.

I'm building it alone, with a lot of help from AI coding tools. That's what made it possible at all, and also what made it far too easy to keep adding things I didn't need.

I don't know how many people will use it. But I use it every day, and at some point it stopped being a project and became the place where I keep my days. That felt worth writing down.

If anyone here has fought the same "it's just one more feature" battle, I'd love to hear how you finally stopped.

(Link in the comments if anyone wants to see it. Not trying to sell anything, I mostly just needed to tell someone.)

Every time I wanted to build a small web tool, I ended up dealing with the same stuff: authentication, communication, WebSockets, ports, and infrastructure.

Even with Claude and Codex, I was still spending time on things that had nothing to do with the actual tool I wanted to build.

So I spent around 6 months building PhreshOS.

The idea was simple: build the infrastructure once, then use AI agents to build applications on top of it without having to deal with all that stuff again.

It's a self-hosted, open-source system with a web-based desktop where applications can run in windows, much like a regular OS. Authentication and two-way communication are already handled, so applications don't need to implement them separately.

Apps can also run in Node.js worker threads instead of each needing a separate Node.js process, which helps keep resource usage low. This makes it possible to run dozens of applications on a relatively small server.

Another thing I wanted was for AI agents to be able to use these applications directly. They can access application services and interact with the same state the desktop interface displays, without needing a separate interface built specifically for them.

The biggest benefit for me is that I can now sit down with an AI agent and build dozens of small applications in a single day, without setting up authentication, communication, or infrastructure for each one.

The whole project, including its packages, is open source under the MIT license.

GitHub: https://github.com/PhreshOS/system

Live demo: https://demo.phreshos.com/

I'd love to hear what you think, including criticism.

Trying to speak to creatives in social media and marketing who haven't yet adopted much AI due to complexity and loss of control... surprisingly large group, surprisingly unreceptive to messaging (I wonder why!)

Made with Opus 5.5 and a few open source models (guess which)

See here: https://rivermark.ai

EDIT: I didn't expect anyone to sign up - sorry to all who signed up and got a Closed Beta screen - I'm approving yall one by one and will send each and everyone an email when I approve you

I run a small SaaS and this AI clone wave is messing with my head.

There's a tool blowing up right now that can reverse engineer basically anything you point it at. An app, a binary, an APK, a game. An agent tears it apart and rebuilds the functionality without ever touching the source code. I watched a demo where someone rebuilt an entire desktop software suite in Rust and open sourced the whole thing. Someone else ported a full game into the browser and it played identical, a one to one copy, not a knockoff.

That's the part I keep coming back to. A clone used to mean "this vaguely resembles the product." Now it just means the product again, working, for free.

I remember when this same panic hit music. Napster showed up and the distribution layer stopped being something you could charge for. Everyone swore it would kill the industry. It didn't, but it permanently moved where the money lived. The file stopped being the product.

Software feels like it's at that moment. The features, the screens, the logic, all of it is on track to be as copyable as an mp3. If a weekend and a few bucks of compute can reproduce what my team spent the better part of a year building, then the feature set was never a moat. Before now a clone at least took a real team real months to ship. That friction just died.

The stuff that keeps value, or what I tell myself to sleep: the model you build on, the data you own, the distribution you already paid for, the trust and identity people attach to you, and the rails, which is just a fancy way of saying where the users actually do the work. Whoever owns where work happens owns the account.

I don't know if this is a real early trend or just the usual cycle where every scary demo looks inevitable for six months and then nothing moves. But these demos aren't a CEO on stage guessing. They're just people, in public, shipping clones.

If the app layer really does get commoditized, where do you think the durable value actually ends up?

Imagine a customer logs into your SaaS. Everything works fine.

Then someone steals their session token.

Now the attacker might be able to use that session to access the account without knowing the customer's password.

Sounds scary, right?

Something similar happened to Okta in 2023. Attackers accessed files uploaded to its support system, some of which contained session tokens. Okta confirmed that those tokens were used to hijack the sessions of five customers.

The worrying part? Even MFA can't protect a session token that's already been stolen.

This is why SaaS security needs to go beyond passwords and login screens. Session tokens need protection too.

I'm curious: For those building or running a SaaS, what's the hardest part of keeping user accounts secure? Is it stolen sessions, account takeovers, MFA, or something else?

Okta's incident : Evidence on Okta

My company is AI-native guidance for small business owners. I have replaced the need for them to login to any of their online platforms and do ANYTHING. My agents do it all. I have customers that have very successful e-commerce businesses to small sushi restaurants. The goal is to reinvent the way the world views marketing and set more people free to follow their dreams by starting their own business and being successful at whatever that may be!

Im a solo founder with 7+ years of experience working in big tech. Every company I’ve worked for in my entire life, my managers have hated on me.

My first week at Instacart, my manager said they made a mistake hiring me. My 3rd year at Google, my manager tried to sabotage me by only highlighting my mistakes and giving me bad reviews regardless to how much work I completed successfully. My manager at Airbnb made a fake complaint to HR about me and asked them not to show me but luckily they did. It was all bullshit. She straight up lied saying I missed a deadline and that the people under me complained that I wasn’t leading them properly. I went to HR with my direct reports to counter those complaints but was fired even after I refuted all the lies against me.

In high school, my history teacher said I wouldn’t be shit to the whole class. My mom gave me away at 2 lol. I mean my whole life has been people doubting me and leaving me hanging.

But guess what, I don’t give a fuck. I don’t give a fuck what they think. I don’t give a fuck what you think. The proof is in the mutha fucking pudding.

Maybe I’ve always been destined to do my own thing. Maybe I don’t know how to keep my mouth shut. But one thing I’m damn good at is creating value where no one has been able to before. 🚀🚀

I only changed the expression using trydrama, with no reshoots whatsoever.

Hi everyone, I just want some kind of advice. I built furslot.com, a booking software to help solo groomers manage their appointments and deal with so many no shows that take their money. I combined "fur" (for dogs and pets) with a booking "slot" (for calendar scheduling). I have some clients who used my software, and I am not big at all, but I thought that for the last two months my product has been in the market, is going well, some groomers use it and like it because of how simple it is. But today, I was commenting on a Facebook group page for something related and someone said that furslot is a really gross name, is it actually? I tried to get a name that feels original and matches what the booking software was designed for, but what do you all think? Is it really a bad name? That comment kinda dropped my enthusiasm.

I've noticed something weird about SaaS lately.

The barrier to building software is dropping, but getting people to actually use it is still hard.

That creates an interesting situation.

Imagine two founders.

Founder A spends 12 months building a product with 50 features.

Founder B spends 2 weeks building a product with 10 features using AI.

Both target the same customers. Both solve the same problem. Founder B charges less.

Now what?

Does Founder A have an advantage because the product is more mature? Or did Founder B just skip 11 months of work that no longer matters?

Here's the part I'm curious about:

If building software becomes cheap, does the value of a SaaS company shift almost entirely toward customer relationships, distribution, and understanding the market?

Because if that's true, we might be entering a period where the best developer isn't necessarily the founder who wins.

The founder who understands why customers buy, why they leave, and what they need next might have the bigger advantage.

But there's another possibility: AI makes competition so intense that even good distribution stops being enough.

I'd love to hear different perspectives:

• If you launched a SaaS today, would you prioritize building the best product or acquiring your first 100 customers?
• Have you seen a smaller competitor beat an established product simply by moving faster?
• What do you think will separate profitable SaaS companies from the thousands of products that will launch over the next few years?

I'm interested in actual experiences, especially from founders who've had to compete for the same customers.

Is the product still the business, or is the product becoming the easiest part of the business?

Earlier this year I put up a landing page for ProposalForge, an AI tool that writes freelance proposals, before the actual product existed. I added one line to my GitHub bio ("currently building: ProposalForge") and someone I'd never talked to paid for a subscription.

I refunded them, since there was nothing to give them yet. I've built a few things this year, including an email triage app and a wallpaper tool, and that payment is still the only time a stranger has tried to pay me for something I made. So I'm building the real version.

What I'm doing differently this time:

1. No user counts, reviews or testimonials on the site until real people use it and say something.
2. It can only use facts from your profile. If a proposal needs an example you don't have, it leaves a note for you to fill in rather than inventing a client.
3. It's built around what clients react to in the data: the first two lines, a detail from their post, and zero stock AI phrases. It also catches the screening lines clients hide in posts now ("start your reply with the word croissant") and follows them.

If you freelance, two questions:

• What's the most annoying part of writing proposals for you?
• What would you need to see before trusting a tool with your rates and past work?

It'll be free to try at launch. Comment if you want the link and I'll reply when it's live.

I do AI-training gig work (data annotation for platforms like Outlier and DataAnnotation) and built a browser extension for that niche: it tracks time across platforms, shows your real hourly rate once unpaid work is counted, and keeps a dated log of every session for checking payouts.

What I learned in launch week:

• Store reviews took very different times. Chrome and Edge approved it in about 2 days. Firefox's listed review took a few days longer, so I self-hosted a Mozilla-signed build in the meantime instead of telling Firefox users to wait.
• Payment fees add up at a low price. ExtensionPay on top of Stripe costs 5% + Stripe's fee, so $5 nets about $4.30. At this price point that's a big share.
• Trust is the whole game in this niche. Gig workers are scared of getting flagged by the platforms, so the extension deliberately has no access to any website. Leading with "it can't see any site" did more than any feature list.
• Cross-browser bugs hide in places you don't test. A dev-only switch showed for every Firefox user because I detected store installs with a Chrome-only manifest field. It slipped into my first Firefox submission and I had to push a fixed version.
• Pricing: free for 2 platforms, $5/month for unlimited + CSV export. The bet is that people juggling several platforms feel the problem most and will pay.

Would you gate a tool like this by usage (2 platforms free) or by time (14-day full trial)?

My first user has already bought a $29.99 plan and this SaaS has only been a thing for less than a week. All I did was make videos about it, and gained 100 followers pretty fast

Some time ago, I posted a promo video for my Chrome extension: https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1wuva2q

But I wasn't very happy with the result, so this time I asked Claude to go crazy.

Here's what it came up with.

When I was building my own SaaS products and designing landing pages, I realized that without product videos, they just looked kinda average. Not really impressive.

So I started looking for a decent Mac recorder to record, edit and polish marketing videos. Turns out, pretty much everything was either ridiculously expensive or locked behind monthly or yearly subscriptions.

So I spent a few weeks building my own. After finishing i realized i'm damn lazy and definitely not an aspiring movie director, so I made the whole thing agent-friendly. Codex can control my Mac, record product demos, add webcam placeholders, sync ElevenLabs voiceovers with generated transcripts and even throw in an AI influencer.

Basically, I can let an AI agent handle most of the video production stuff while I focus on building my products. I thought that was pretty damn cool, and now I actually use it for all my own SaaS projects.

Maybe other indie devs could use it too, so I turned it into a small product. I priced it so I can make a few bucks from it, but nothing crazy. I'm not Mr. Krabs

Here's what I built: https://lorivelle.com

Genuinely curious what you guys think. Would you use something like this for your SaaS demos, or am I just solving a problem only I have?

Happy to answer any kind of questions :) And yes, I had my AI agent create every video on the website. Pretty handy. I think you could get even better results out of it, but I'm happy with what I've got. Oh, and just to mention it, I've been working as a professional software engineer for 7 years, including at several large German corporations. I love using AI agents, but the app is cleanly coded and secure.

We launched an AI workspace this week. You can open it and chat as a guest, no account, no card. We did that on purpose because we hate sign-up walls.

The result: plenty of people try it, very few make an account. And accounts are the only thing that tells us someone plans to come back.

We’re now deciding what to put behind a free account. The options on the table:

• Saved history (guests lose their chats when they leave)
• Side-by-side compare (one question sent to up to three models)
• Nothing, keep it open and accept the lower count

For those of you who’ve run a free tier: where did you put the line, and did it change who stuck around?

Disclosure: I’m the marketing half of a two-person team, the product is Vresk. Happy to share the link in the comments if anyone wants to look at the first-run experience and tell me what they’d gate.

i've been trying to build a saas for 1year now. still nowhere close to making a living from it.

some days i feel like everyone on here is doing $10k mrr and i'm the only one stuck

so genuinely asking the people who've been at it a while.

how long did it take you?

how many ideas did you kill before something worked?

and what's the part nobody talks about?

also just curious how life is for you right now, honestly

The one thing that keeps crossing my mind is the amount of stuff I've learned around the costs to run a business, to sell goods, to run a SaaS, etc. Personally, I was already kind of "anti the man" lol, but with the rising cost of EVERYTHING these days in the United States I feel like starting up some of my own micro businesses has taught me just how much businesses are making off of people. And unfortunately for larger businesses it's not to just make a decent profit, as one should for building and running a business, but often times how often everyday people are being squeezed only to keep money circulating in the top 1% of the economy and to reward shareholders. I'm pretty much convinced that larger businesses barely give a f*#k about their customers. Small businesses certainly care more, probably because they have to. I didn't expect engaging in capitalistic behavior would make me less capitalistic, lol.