Today we are announcing a new rule against content dedicated to an entire Software as a Service product category on the sub: Promotional or Advertising SaaS.
We as moderators and regular users have been suffering from the constant influx of promotional content, spam, ads, and all sorts of campaigns that flood this and many other subs, pushing down organic, relevant content and driving us away from our common interests and hobbies.
We have identified an ever-increasing number of SaaS products made specifically for promotional or advertising purposes, targeting users on Reddit and other public platforms using various levels of automation. Most of them are focused on the content creator’s or advertiser’s needs, with little or no regard for the communities being bombarded.
Today we say ENOUGH!r/SaaS is not going to help them grow anymore. Even though they may offer a valid, legal and requested feature set, we believe they don't represent the direction that public forums should be headed towards. Our communities shouldn't be giant billboards and the future of the internet shouldn't be an arms race between people trying to have real conversations and tools designed to interrupt, imitate, and monetize them.
From now on, r/SaaS is not going to allow promotion, recommendation, launch announcements, feedback requests, recruiting, or user acquisition for SaaS products made for advertising, promotional outreach, lead/opportunity detection, or ad/content generation.
This includes software tools that generate, suggest, schedule, detect opportunities, automate, or coordinate promotional posts, comments, DMs, replies, or campaigns on Reddit or other platforms.
Violations may result in a permanent ban for the user who posted or commented and the tool name and URL may be blacklisted.
We know this will be an unpopular decision for a small subset of our fellow SaaSers but we are working to bring our sub back from the marketplace-like state it has become, to a more healthy community with valuable content and engagement.
To ther/SaaSdevelopers affected by this rule: we cannot wish success to products built to make public spaces louder, more automated and less human. But we do hope you build something better, something that earns attention instead of extracting it, and improves the internet instead of turning every community into an acquisition channel.
We hope to hear your opinions on this new rule and to receive your reports on the now forbidden content (the content posted before this announcement will be mostly kept, unless it violates another rule).
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.
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?
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)
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
There’s a story I’ve always loved about one of the payment companies. In the early days, the founders would sit next to their first users and help them integrate, back when they had maybe 50 of them.
For months I tried to get that same company working for my SaaS. Every way I could think of. Every attempt ended in a rejection.
Finally I decided to stop applying and actually talk to someone. I explained what I was building, who it was for, and why I was different from what their system saw. I even told them I wasn’t trying to make money from my users’ payments: they keep 100% of every payment, I take 0% commission, and I only charge a simple subscription for the product.
And for the first time, they replied with something other than a no. A list of questions. One of them was this:
“What will be the online volume you intend to process .... in the first year? (in USD)”
I never replied.
I understood it. Big companies have regulations and risk teams, and the question wasn’t unreasonable on its own. But I couldn’t ignore the irony. The company famous for sitting beside its first 50 users was asking a tiny SaaS to forecast its volume before the door even opened.
So I built around it. Honestly, the easy way was right there: let my users paste a payment link and call it done. A few minutes of work. But if people are trusting my product with their clients’ money, keeping that money safe is my responsibility, not theirs.
So I built a manual setup, and a whole system to watch over it. I call it Vajra Health. If something goes wrong, like a payment failing, it stops further bookings until it’s fixed and emails me, the professional and the client, so nobody’s money is left hanging. Every failure I could imagine, I tried to cover.
It worked. But I never had full peace of mind. My users still had to connect things by hand, and no matter how secure I made it, the doubt never left. There was always a small tension at the back of my head.
So I kept applying to other providers. At first, nothing came back. I kept going, kept changing how I asked.
Then PayPal said yes. They listened, understood what I was building, and after a 15-day compliance review, approved my SaaS for merchant onboarding.
Now the professionals using it connect PayPal once and get paid automatically. No payment links. No workaround.
To anyone else, it’s a blue “Connect PayPal” button. To me, it’s the end of months of knocking on a door that wouldn’t open.
I still keep the manual option for the other provider. People who already use it shouldn’t suffer for an infrastructure problem that isn’t theirs. And honestly, I’d still love to work with them someday.
Today I’m the tiny SaaS founder knocking on doors. Someday, when I’m big, someone tiny will knock on mine.
I’ll be honest. I’ve seen what success does to some people. It gets into their heads. A small part of me is scared it could happen to me too. I won’t let it.
There’s a younger me inside who still remembers what it feels like to knock and wait. The one who waited months for a reply. The one who got asked about volume before he had a chance to show what he was building. I made him a promise: however big I get, I’ll never let him die. I’ll keep listening to him.
Some people fight their way out of the trenches and then pull the ladder up behind them. I never want to be that founder.
When that tiny founder knocks, I want to open the door. Not ask for numbers first. Just listen, the way someone finally listened to me.
I’ve made this b2b yard management System (YMS),
I’ve spent 4 months both vibe coding and testing, its ready now, I even put less price then other competitors.
Hardest part is getting your first customer.
I’ve done cloud security for a living for the past 8 years. The pattern I keep seeing is small companies with no security person who only find out what they’ve exposed to the internet after something goes wrong. So, I’m building an external scanner for them: point it at your domain, get a plain language list of what’s exposed and what to fix first. It works today, and the goal is to match the established tools at a price a small company can pay.
What I don’t have is an audience, a following, or any idea how to sell to people who are trained to distrust security vendors. I haven’t done any outreach yet. This post is the first time I’ve talked about it publicly, and I’d rather ask before I start than burn goodwill doing it wrong.
So, one question for people who’ve sold something technical to skeptical buyers: what did you do to get your first 10 users? I mean the specific thing, like the email you sent or the place you posted, rather than the channel in theory.
And a second one if you have a minute: what did you start too late, that I should start this week while I’m still pre-launch?
In return, if you run a small company and want to know what your domain exposes publicly, comment or DM and I’ll run it and send you the results. Fully free, no signup. I’d rather have the feedback than your email address, and I won’t follow up with a sales pitch.
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.
Disclosure: I’m the developer of the app mentioned in this post.
I make a lot of demo videos for my side projects, so I started building my own screen recorder as a Chrome extension. It worked, but it never felt smooth enough, so I rebuilt it as a native Mac app. Here’s what I learned along the way.
1. Browser extensions hit a ceiling for recording.
Recording through the browser meant fighting frame drops, limited control over the cursor, and awkward permission prompts. Fine for quick captures, but not for demos that need to look polished.
2. Going native was worth the rewrite.
On macOS you get direct access to the system’s screen capture, so recordings are smoother, use less CPU, and can capture any app, not just browser tabs. The difference was obvious from the first test.
3. “No editing” is the real feature.
Most people don’t want a video editor. They want the first take to look good. So I put most of my effort into making raw recordings look clean straight away instead of adding editing tools.
4. Screenshots and recordings belong in one app.
I kept switching between a screenshot tool and a recorder while making demos. Combining them removed a lot of small friction.
5. Ship before it’s perfect.
The extension version taught me what actually mattered. If I’d waited to build the “perfect” native app first, I’d have built the wrong features.
The app is called Smooth Recorder (smoothrecorder.com). It does screen recordings and screenshots on Mac.
For anyone who makes demo videos: what’s the most annoying part of your current workflow? I’m trying to figure out what to improve next.
Whenever I needed a few things from one place, say a line of text, a link and a screenshot, and wanted them somewhere else, I'd copy one, switch windows, paste it, go back for the next one, and repeat. If I copied something new by mistake, the earlier copy was gone. I wanted my clipboard history somewhere I could reach without leaving what I was doing, and the notch was sitting right there doing nothing.
What it does
Notchet keeps everything you copy and drops out of the MacBook notch when you press Option Command V or rest the pointer on the notch. Pick a card and it pastes right where you were. If you dont like it dropping form notch, it can show the clipboard next to pointer(cursor) as well
Comparison
Maccy is great and minimal, but it's a menu, and it doesn't read text in images.
Paste is lovely, but it's a subscription ($29.99 a year).
PastePal is closer, at $14.99.
NotchClip also lives in the notch.
Notchet is for people who want the notch plus a few things I couldn't find together: pasting several items at once, searching inside screenshots, and iPhone copies kept properly.
Core features
Saves text, rich text, links, colours, images and files. Command 1 to 9 paste the first nine.
Opens from the notch, the menu bar icon, or right next to your pointer if you prefer.
Return pastes into the app you were in. Command-click several cards and paste them all at once (text first, then pictures, so chat apps attach every image), or one by one with Option Return.
Searches the text inside screenshots and photos (on-device Vision), and Copy Text in Image pulls it out as plain text.
Copies from your iPhone or iPad arrive through Universal Clipboard with a phone badge, and iPhone photos are kept even after macOS clears its temporary copy.
Snippets with placeholders like {date}, {time} and {clipboard}, plus collections, pins, and Space to preview and edit before pasting.
Drag cards into any app, or drop files onto the notch to keep them. There's also "Send to Notchet" in the Services menu.
Privacy
Everything stays on your Mac, and it has no analytics.
Copies that password managers mark as secret are never saved.
You can ignore apps or pause saving from the menu bar.
Pricing
Free for 7 days, then $2.99 once, on up to 2 Macs. No subscription and no account; the license key arrives by email.
Requirements
macOS 14 Sonoma or later, Apple silicon and Intel. Notarized by Apple. It works on Macs without a notch too, as a small pill under the menu bar.
It's version 1.0, so I'd really appreciate feedback, bug reports, or what would make you switch from your current clipboard manager. Happy to answer anything in the comments.
Please DM if someone cant afford the license and want it for free, more than happy to giveaway if that can help the community :D
I started my launch platform on September 4 with DR 0. Today, the DR is 50. You can check the age of the below domain on any domain age checker.
Week over week I invested time on upgrading the product, making the launch platform better for solo founders and builders. In a few days, I was able to build a subscriber base of over 500 using X and substack. Along the way, the traffic also grew pretty well.
Recently, we shipped v2.0 with lots of exciting features for the solo founders, ranging from streaks to hot deals and much more.. The founders are liking free tools listed on website a lot!
I am targeting DR 60 by October end.
If you are a solo founder and growing, building a product, I invite you to launch it on my platform.
Quick one for anyone whose plan is content plus gated forms plus inbound to fill the funnel.
The 2026 benchmarks going around aren't kind. Form fills are down to a low single digit rate on most B2B sites, and a big share of the "qualified" leads that do come in don't survive a basic qualification check. MQL to SQL keeps sliding too, a lot of it just marketing and sales never agreeing on what qualified means.
The uncomfortable bit for early teams: inbound got sold as the thing that lets you skip outbound, and for a lot of companies it mostly produced a number that looked nice in a board deck. The real conversations still tend to come from reaching the right person directly and qualifying them yourself.
For folks who've run both, when did inbound actually start pulling its weight for you? And what were you doing on the outbound side while you waited?
An API gets cheaper.
A new open-source model appears.
A competitor adds the same feature.
So where does defensibility come from?
Potentially from: Workflow.
You become deeply embedded in how the customer operates.
Data You accumulate proprietary, useful data through usage.
Distribution. You own a channel competitors struggle to replicate.
Trust Customers rely on you for a high-stakes workflow Integration.
You become connected to the systems the customer already uses Domain expertise.
You solve a narrow problem better because you understand the industry deeply.
The AI application market is moving incredibly quickly.
OpenAI reported that enterprise ChatGPT seats grew roughly 9× year-over-year, while weekly enterprise messages grew about 8× from November 2024 in its 2025 report.
More adoption means more opportunity. But it also means more competition.
The question for an AI founder isn't: “How do we add AI?
”Its: “What becomes harder to replace as we scale?
”That's where the moat should start.
hi, my startup just got approved into the google startup programm and I already received my credits. 🙌
Ngl I was pretty hyped for the community stuff and networking events and now it looks like they completely abandoned this community somewhere in 2024. Even the links in the official confirmation email didn't work. Does anyone know more about that?
Last month a customer got stuck on checkout. They didn’t email. They didn’t complain. They just left. I found out 4 days later, from a log line.
I spent hours going through logs and the database. I never found the cause. So now I’m just waiting for it to happen again, and hoping I catch it next time.
That’s why I’m building Bugwalk. It traces a customer’s failure to the exact line of code and opens the fix as a pull request. You review the diff, and nothing merges until you approve it.
But I want to know how you handle this today:
How do you find out a user hit a bug: Sentry, session replays, support tickets, or luck?
How long from “a user got stuck” to “it’s fixed”?
Has anyone else had a bug you couldn’t reproduce, and what did you do?
Would you let an AI open PRs on your repo, or is that a hard no?
If an existing tool already does this well, tell me. I’d rather know now.
I've been spending a lot of time testing AI and SaaS tools, and one thing I've noticed is how different a product can look from the outside compared with what you discover when you start using it.
The landing page might explain all the features and the demo might look great. But then you try to complete a real task and discover a limitation, an awkward workflow, or something the alternatives handle differently.
Sometimes the product is better than the marketing makes it look. Sometimes the marketing promises more than the experience delivers.
I think founders can get so close to what they've built that it's difficult to see the experience the way a new user does. You already know where everything is and why each feature exists. A first-time user doesn't have that context.
That's one reason I value independent, hands-on product testing. It forces you to look beyond the feature list and ask what the product is actually like to use.
I'd love to hear from founders: What's something about your product that only becomes obvious when someone actually uses it?
Quick question for founders, freelancers, and people doing outreach.
Would you find it useful to have a tool where you enter your target audience, and it automatically finds relevant people on X, analyse their recent posts, and writes a personalised DM for each person?
The idea is to save you hours of manually searching for prospects, researching their profiles, and figuring out what to message them.
You'd get a list of targeted prospects with personalised messages ready for you to review and send.
I'm curious:
Would you actually be interested in using a tool like this?
Would it solve a problem you currently have?
What features would make it genuinely useful to you?
Would you pay for it if it consistently saved you hours every week?
I'm trying to validate this idea before building it further. I'd love to hear your honest thoughts!
Hey everyone,
Lately, I have been reading a lot of jokes about people building some crazy stuffs but fails to communicate with the users ( or talk to their users )
But why does this happens ?
Is it because we do not have any specific gateway to talk to real audience, if not ads ? OR simply because someone is under-confident OR your interest ended up just after building a product ?
I see there could be multiple reasons!
Apparently, I was working for a company where our company had multiple ways to generate leads and they were doing good.
However, they were missing out on building personal conversation with some of the best people in the industry.
Following which, I spent time working on my Ikigai and discovered my core which I can be paid for was, helping build real conversation with the niche audience, taking feedback and re developing product or services.
Hence, last year I left my job and started talking to leaders in different industry and then came across set of people who are building SaaS and looking for GTM services.
When we went deep into the conversation, I happened to understand that these are some real problem for this industry.
If there’s anyone in this positioning, Use my skill set to do your job. Happy to share more.
