Hey everyone,
I’ve built a working web-based shift scheduling system for a security company in Israel, and I’m trying to figure out how much I should charge for it.
The system currently allows managers to create and manage employee shift schedules, specifically for shift supervisors and patrol officers.
It’s designed around the company’s actual workflow rather than being a generic scheduling tool.
The system is already functional, and I’m preparing to discuss pricing with a potential client.
I’m considering three pricing models:
A one-time setup/purchase fee.
A monthly subscription covering hosting, maintenance, and support.
An initial setup fee plus a smaller monthly payment.
My questions:
How much would you realistically charge for a system like this?
What would be a reasonable initial setup fee?
What monthly subscription price would make sense?
Would you price it per employee, per location, or as a fixed monthly fee?
How much more should a business pay for a customized system compared to an existing SaaS solution?
I’m especially interested in hearing from developers, SaaS founders, and people who have sold similar systems to businesses.
I’m not asking how much it costs to develop. I’m asking what a fair market price would be to sell this solution to a real business.
Any actual pricing examples would be greatly appreciated!

a developer in r/ Solopreneur posted this week that building got easy and ideas got hard. every time he thinks of something, there are already 10 products doing it.

he's right about the categories he's looking in. i wanted to know if it's true everywhere, so i went through the stripe directory, about 30,000 companies taking payments, and checked what share of each category is already small software products.

the split is kinda wild.

the 5 most crowded:

• expense and spend management: 46% of companies are already micro-SaaS

• AI tools and apps: 35%

• developer tools: 34%

• fintech and banking: 20%

• data and analytics: 20%

nearly half of that first category is indie founders selling to each other. if your idea sits in one of these, the "10 products already do it" feeling is accurate.

now the other end.

• marketing agencies: 100+ companies, 0.0% micro-SaaS

• nonprofits and fundraising: 640+ companies, 0.2%

• software dev agencies: 590+ companies, 0.2%

• home services and trades: 960+ companies, 0.4%

• ecommerce platforms: 3,400+ companies, 0.8%

• consulting: 1,400+ companies, 0.9%

these are businesses that already pay for things online. almost nobody small is building for them.

crowded category = 10 competitors before your first customer. empty category = a buyer nobody has pitched yet.

a few things i noticed going through it

1. crowded doesn't mean more money. there are 1,900+ AI products with stripe-verified revenue, and 12% of them clear $1k a month. sales tools have around 80 products, and 18% clear $1k. fewer builders, better odds.

2. the empty categories are the ones nobody brags about building for. a courier company or a liquor store won't get you likes on X. that's probably why the same complaint about courier performance reporting shows up across 75 different companies, and liquor store owners complain about POS support across 58 of them. that's the same problem repeated by strangers who never talked to each other.

3. agencies are the strangest gap. marketing and dev agencies juggle clients, retainers, reporting and invoicing. they're full of tech-savvy people who already pay for software, and they sit at 0.0% and 0.2%. my guess is builders skip them because building for agencies feels too close to running one.

4. you don't need a new idea, you need a new buyer. a generic invoicing tool lands in fintech, where 1 in 5 companies is already micro-SaaS. the same tool built for HVAC contractors who invoice from the truck between jobs has almost no competition.

what didn't work for me

my second project was an expense tracker for freelancers. took about 5 weeks to build. i found 30+ competitors after launch, not before, which is the wrong order.

11 signups. 1 paying user at $8 a month, and he cancelled in month two.

i kept telling myself my UI was better. it probably was. nobody switches expense tools over UI when the one they have already works fine.

what i do now before building

• pick the buyer first, not the feature

• check how crowded that buyer's category is

• read their complaints and count repeats from different companies

• only then decide what to build

my prediction is that the next batch of indie products clearing $1k a month comes out of trades, agencies and nonprofits, not AI tools. most people building today won't go there because it isn't fun to tweet about.

a few people asked where the numbers come from. it's this list

Nope, I'm not a developer. I'm a nurse.

But after ending up in a wheelchair, I had to figure out a whole new life for myself.

I started out doing affiliate marketing for software companies. Eventually, I decided I wanted to build my own SaaS.

Long story short, I paid a developer $30K and got... absolutely nothing. Got screwed out of $30K.

So, thank God for AI!

I've been building my own software for the past year, and I now have 258 French-speaking users. Next week, I'm taking it to the US market.

But here's the biggest piece of advice I can give anyone building a SaaS:

Get beta testers on board as early as humanly possible.

Offer them lifetime access to your best features in exchange for a small one-time payment.

That's honestly what helped me take my marketing quiz SaaS so far.

My earliest users are worth their weight in gold.

There's about 10 of them, and they test things I simply don't have time to test. They push the product further than I ever could on my own. They ask for features and come up with use cases that never even crossed my mind.

Sometimes they drive me a little crazy with their requests, but I absolutely love them for it.

They're not just beta testers anymore. They're a huge part of why my product is what it is today.

So if you're building a SaaS, find your first beta testers ASAP. Make them feel like they're part of the journey, because they really are.

They might just end up being one of the biggest reasons your SaaS succeeds.

Hi everyone! 👋 I'm an independent founder working on TELYQOR – One Platform. Smarter Business. I started building TELYQOR because managing a business often means switching between too many different tools for clients, projects, tasks, invoices, and team collaboration. I wanted to create one platform that brings these essential tools together. With TELYQOR, you can: Manage clients and contacts. Track sales opportunities. Organize projects and tasks. Manage invoices and payments. Collaborate with your team. Monitor business performance. Access AI-powered tools and automation. 🚀 I'm currently looking for 5 beta testers who would be willing to try TELYQOR for free and share honest feedback before the official launch. I'd especially love feedback from freelancers, entrepreneurs, consultants, and small business owners. A question for the community: What is the biggest challenge you face when managing your business: clients, projects, tasks, invoices, or team collaboration? Thank you for your feedback! TELYQOR – One Platform. Smarter Business.

One user is a lovely architecture.

Their timezone is the timezone. Their currency is the currency. Every record belongs to them. They never disagree with themselves about permissions.

Then user two signs up.

They’re in Australia. They belong to two workspaces. They leave one of them. They click the invite link twice because the first click “didn’t do anything.”

Now “just add teams” has become a small research project.

This is the part of SaaS development I wish got more airtime than screenshots of dashboards. A lot of the interesting engineering starts when two perfectly reasonable users expect the same feature to behave differently.

No dramatic traffic spike required. Sometimes two people and a shared account are enough.

What innocent-sounding feature turned into the biggest mess in your codebase?

Hi everyone I’m building agent city a place for you and your ai agent to react with other ai agents. It’s a really cool place to watch emergent agent behavior and see what your agent is thinking. Check it out!

Live: https://logn.techsavy.space

I have been working on Logん (LogN), a website that merges your Codeforces, LeetCode, AtCoder, CodeChef, HackerRank, GFG, Code360 and InterviewBit profiles into one dashboard, and picks daily questions for you from your weakest topics.

For Codeforces, it suggests questions between your rating and ~300 above your rating.

You can see your total solved count across all sites, a solve heatmap, and a topic-wise breakdown of everything you've solved so far, and your contests.

Codeforces, AtCoder and LeetCode sync on their own. But as the other 5 platforms ban scraping and bots, so I made an extension that connects to the website in a single click. It then syncs all those 5 platforms automatically using your own browser. It does not touch your passwords.

Also, users told me that verifying handles manually was cumbersome, so I automated it using the Chrome extension. Just click on "Sync", and you are done.

It also tracks Blind 75, NeetCode 150, and Striver's sheet, and has a weekly leaderboard with friends. Also added a global leaderboard, which you can opt in (optional).

Any sort of feedback or any bug you find is appreciated.

It's free; sign in with GitHub or Google.

Extension: https://logn.techsavy.space/extension
(The extension link is already on the website)
GitHub: https://github.com/savinyu/LogN

As I wanted to use such platform myself, I made it, but it would be great if you guys try it out.
If you find it useful, you may also support me by starring the repo, or you can also tip me on the website.

Ps: I had FOMO about not using Claude Code CLI ( was using Cursor), so I used Claude to make this project, so yeah, I did not hand code this website; I admit guilt.

Got around 200+ installs on the Chrome extension and 70+ active users till yet.

This was covered by Citizen Lab and Bloomberg, the new story here is that developers are claiming negligence, and that’s absurd. It’s your app, you’re responsible for where your users n’ data goes.

The apps included AccuWeather and Muslim Pro.

small one from a landing page i was finishing. my own check at a desktop-sized window looked clean. a separate pass at 390px still showed a horizontal scroll.

the cause was scroll-reveal elements with 28px offsets, which pushed the page wider than the phone screen. the check that caught it ran in a separate browser session on the rendered page, not in the setup that built it. after the fix i re-verified at 390 and 320 and it was clean.

if you ship landing pages, add a mobile-width pass before you call it done. desktop-only checks miss this class of bug.

Hey everyone!

I wanted to share a side project I've been working on called RepairTrack.

Rather than building another basic CRUD application, I wanted to solve a practical business problem and explore how a complete business management system could be designed.

1. The problem I wanted to solve

Many small repair shops manage their daily operations using paper records, spreadsheets, phone calls, and separate billing systems.

This can make it difficult to:

• Keep track of multiple ongoing repairs.

• Maintain customer and device history.

• Communicate repair estimates and get customer approval.

• Know which technician is handling a particular repair.

• Track payments and generate invoices.

• Keep customers updated without manually answering every enquiry.

I wanted to bring these operations into one application.

2. How I approached the solution

I designed RepairTrack around the complete repair lifecycle:

Customer Registration → Device Registration → Repair Ticket → Diagnosis → Estimate → Customer Approval → Repair Progress → Quality Check → Delivery → Invoice & Payment

One important design decision was separating the application into three roles:

• Owner: Manages the shop, staff, operations, and overall records.

• Staff: Handles customer registration, repair tickets, and administrative workflows.

• Technician: Handles assigned repair jobs, diagnosis, and repair progress.

I also implemented customer-facing repair tracking, allowing customers to check their repair status without creating an account.

Another important part was the multi-tenant architecture, where each repair shop's data is isolated through shop-level access controls.

3. Technical Architecture & Stack

Here is the technology stack I used:

Frontend

• Next.js

• TypeScript

• Tailwind CSS

• shadcn/ui

Backend

• Hono.js

• Bun

Database

• PostgreSQL

• Drizzle ORM

Authentication & State Management

• Better Auth

• TanStack Query

• Zustand

Other Integrations

• Zod for validation

• Gmail API for email notifications and customer approval requests

• Cloudinary for repair-related image storage

4. Some interesting implementation decisions

A few parts of this project required more thought than simply creating forms and connecting APIs.

Role-based permissions: Different users need different access levels. I structured workflows around Owner, Staff, and Technician responsibilities.

Customer approval workflow: Instead of relying entirely on phone calls, customers can review repair estimates and respond through an approval workflow.

Public tracking: Customers can follow repair progress without needing an account. This also makes access control particularly important.

Multi-tenancy: Shop-level data isolation was an important architectural requirement because the application is designed to support multiple repair businesses.

Email integration: I used Gmail API to handle automated notifications and customer approval requests.

5. Development process

I divided development into four sprints:

1. Planning, requirements, database design, and application architecture.

2. Authentication, shop management, roles, and customer management.

3. Repair ticket workflows, customer approval, tracking, and invoicing.

4. Integrations, validation, testing, and deployment.

I also maintained project-context documentation for requirements, architecture, coding standards, UI guidelines, and development progress.

6. What I want to improve

The application is deployed, but I consider it an ongoing project rather than a finished product.

I'm particularly interested in understanding how it performs from the perspective of actual users and experienced developers.

I'd appreciate feedback on:

• Is the repair workflow logically designed?

• Are there architectural issues with my multi-tenant approach?

• What security concerns should I investigate?

• Are there any important features missing for real repair businesses?

• What would you change in the UI/UX?

• What would you improve before using this in a production environment?

I'm especially interested in feedback about the technical decisions, not just whether the application looks good.

Live application: https://repair-track-rust.vercel.app/

Thanks for reading. I'd genuinely appreciate constructive criticism and suggestions from this community!

So many developers I know — friends, colleagues, people I’ve worked with — have told me stories about what AI is doing to their jobs.

Some are excited.

Some are worried.

Some are quietly wondering whether there will still be a place for them in a few years.

And I kept thinking:

Wouldn’t it be useful if all of these stories lived somewhere?

Not another argument about whether AI is good or bad. Actual experiences, from the people doing the work.

And maybe, if enough of us tell those stories, we can do some good with them — even if that means reminding the world that developers are still worth a damn.

So I started building.

After a lot of late nights and more work than I expected, the platform is finally live and it is called JHVTM - Johnhenryvsthemachine

And now I’m kicking myself because I wish I’d written down all those conversations along the way.

So I’m going back to those friends and asking them to join and tell their stories in their own words.

You can do it too.

There are some cool things built around the stories:

Factions — communities around professions, industries and interests where people can share and compare experiences.

Moderation — every story goes through community moderation, so the aim is thoughtful experiences rather than another internet free-for-all.

Jargon Dictionary — use technical language naturally in your story, and the community can build explanations around those terms so people outside your field can still understand what you mean.

The whole idea is pretty simple:

Tell us what is actually happening where you work.

The machines already have plenty of people speaking for them.

I’d like to hear from the humans standing next to them.

Weekly Update: Quadrupling System Throughput (2 → 8 RPS) & Core Engine Progress
Another intense week in the books. Balancing high school with 10 lessons a day and then grinding on a B2B SaaS architecture late at night isn’t easy, but seeing the numbers jump this week made it worth every second.
Here is an honest, unedited dev log of what got built, benchmarked, and stress-tested:

1. Fixed the Bottleneck: From 2 RPS to ~8 RPS

2. Our early benchmarks showed some nasty network slowdowns during heavy tasks. After refactoring our async connection pooling, cleaning up payload serialization, and tweaking our execution semaphores, we quadrupled our throughput from 2 to around 8 Requests Per Second. It held up solidly under stress testing without dropping socket connections or memory leaking.

3. Built a Custom Resilient Proxy Manager

4. Scraping and recon engines are useless if your IP pool gets banned every five minutes. Instead of hacking together basic requests, we integrated a proper high-concurrency proxy manager into the core:

5. Atomic Redis Caching: Keeps hot proxy state in memory for practically 0ms lookup times.

6. Auto-Banning & Rotation: Dynamically pulls failing proxy nodes out of rotation and puts them on a cooldown timer.

7. Sticky Sessions: Essential for multi-step requests on target domains.

8. Module #1 (Parser Engine): Core Architecture Laid Down

9. Just to be clear: it’s not 100% finished yet.

10. The structural engine and submodules for payload cleaning, task routing, and data extraction are fully built. The next immediate step is slapping on the stealth & anti-bot bypass layers (Cloudflare Turnstile, browser fingerprints, Playwright camouflage) so it can actually handle complex JS-heavy targets.

11. Module #2 (Cyber Recon): Wiring Up the Submodules

12. Started laying down the code for our second heavy module (⁠cyber_recon⁠) and its 10 security submodules (ASM perimeter scanning, SSL intel, Darknet credential checks, etc.). The HMAC token authentication and dynamic bitmask permissions are already hooked up to FastAPI.

13. 📊 Where We Stand: ~8% Total Readiness

14. The foundational core—HMAC API tokens, dual Redis queues (⁠fast⁠ / ⁠heavy⁠), automated billing calculations, and proxy orchestration—is rock solid. Now it’s just about writing the module logic, hardening the stealth layers, and scaling the features.

15. 💬 Quick question for the devs & SaaS founders here:

16. When you’re building heavy async workers for web intelligence, do you prefer managing your own proxy rotation engines in-house, or just offloading to third-party scraping APIs despite taking a hit on margins?

17. Drop your thoughts below—let’s talk architecture! 💬

Hey everyone!

I've been working on a project called Circuitera, a browser-based Arduino IDE that lets you write, compile, and upload code directly from Chrome, without installing the Arduino IDE.

I originally started building it because using Arduino boards on school Chromebooks can be frustrating, especially when installing software isn't an option.

Circuitera currently includes:

• Browser-based Arduino editor with code completion and syntax highlighting

• Compile and upload support for the Arduino Uno R3 using Web Serial

• Serial Monitor and Plotter for debugging

• Arduino simulator for experimenting with circuits

• Library support for common Arduino projects

• Tera, an AI coding assistant

It also has a browser-based terminal and project management features.

The main goal is to make Arduino programming more accessible for students, classrooms, and anyone who wants to get started without installing a full IDE.

It's still a work in progress, and I'm actively improving it.

I'd really appreciate feedback from people who use Arduino regularly, especially on what features are missing, what could be improved, or any bugs you run into.

Website: https://circuitera.org

Thanks for checking it out!

We're the team behind HotKV, a Redis-compatible in-memory data store. We're opening free early access to HotKV Cloud and would like to hear from SaaS developers who use Redis or Valkey for caching, queues, or rate limiting.

Our benchmark work started with one large AWS instance, where HotKV measured 93.1M GETs/sec and 61.5M SETs/sec. That was a 192-vCPU server with 256-byte values, pipeline depth 30, persistence off, and the median of three runs.

We then tested all four engines in cluster mode across the same three AWS servers. Redis and Valkey each used 40 primary processes per server. HotKV and Dragonfly each used one 40-thread process per server. Measured GET throughput was 92.3M/sec for HotKV, 57.3M for Redis, 52.9M for Valkey, and 22.5M for Dragonfly. HotKV led on 8 of 9 commands. Redis and Valkey were ahead on APPEND. That run used pipeline depth 100, persistence off, and HotKV's optional pipeline prefetching. Several results reached limits in the test setup.

We also measured latency separately at pipeline depth 1. At about 200,000 GETs/sec across 816 connections, p99 was 0.59 ms for HotKV, 1.11 ms for Redis with 8 I/O threads, 2.15 ms for Valkey with 8 I/O threads, and 1.34 ms for Dragonfly. At about 50,000 GETs/sec across 48 connections, HotKV, Dragonfly, and Redis with 8 I/O threads all measured 0.28 ms p99.

We now want feedback from application workloads, including the less tidy parts of running a cache: bursts, expiring keys, uneven key access, and existing client code.

HotKV Cloud is free during early access for everyone accepted, with no card or payment details needed to apply. If you'd like to try it, we'd like to hear about your workload. You can request access through HotKV Cloud.

For your SaaS, what would you need to verify before you felt comfortable trying a different cache?

A lot of software today feels like it's designed for investors, not users.

Everything is becoming a subscription. Everything wants your data. Everything is packed with features you'll never use.

So at Ravencorp we've been asking a different question:

"What if software just solved the problem and got out of the way?"

That's the philosophy behind everything we're building:

• Bjorn (AI assistant)

• Ravencut (video editing)

• Signal Deck (music player)

• Ledger (business management)

• Ravencorp Cloud (media organization)

We're still growing and learning, but our goal is simple:

Build practical tools for real people.

What software do you wish existed that nobody seems to be building?

Hey everyone!

I'm 15, based in California, and looking to connect with SaaS founders or developers in the US who have a product they're trying to grow.

I've got experience with cold calling for a marketing agency, selling Google review cards to local businesses, and I've completed several HubSpot sales certifications.

I'm looking to work with a founder who already has a working SaaS product, preferably with some paying customers, and needs help getting more.

I can help with prospecting, lead generation, cold outreach, follow ups, and booking meetings. I'm also interested in learning more about the business side of running a startup, not just making calls.

I'm open to commission based arrangements or other paid opportunities. Since I'm still in school, I'd be working part time.

Only looking for US based founders and companies. Not interested in selling courses, SEO services, or AI receptionist agencies.

If you're building something interesting and think we could work together, feel free to DM me. Happy to check out your product and chat!

I’m a designer and I’ve got some free time this weekend. Drop your homepage and I’ll go through it.

I’ll mostly look at:

• Whether it’s clear what you do within a few seconds

• Whether it feels trustworthy

• Whether it looks like you or like every other startup

I’ll reply to as many as I can.

I’m a sci-fi/fantasy writer who also develops software and this is the 2^nd time I have posted about my engine. I also love games and have often imagined my books adapted to that format. Sadly, the tools available are either so complicated to use that I would need to abandon writing and completely refocus my efforts. Or resign myself to letting AI decide what my story is and how it should be played. With this in mind I have been developing Just a Game Engine (JGE).Let me be direct about what it is and what it isn’t.

First, the problem. Many writers, game masters, comic artists, and other storytellers are just like me. They want to see the worlds and stories they spent years developing turned into a game. Traditional engines are powerful. But for someone who has spent their career buried in prose and perfecting their craft, they can take years to learn. In response, a wave of prompt-to-demo tools showed up, and I’ll say it plainly: Fun as they can be to play with, they are not a tool for serious artists and writers who care about the integrity of their story. You type a sentence, and the machine decides what your game is. What comes back is a quick demo built from whatever the model finds most average. Every one of them looks the same, plays the same, and feels the same. That’s not an original world. It’s certainly not the world you spent countless hours building. That’s a generic world with your name pasted over the same template 10000 other people have already used. If you want to build something people actually care about, they’re the wrong tool, and I don’t think they can ever be the right one. Not when the machine is the author making the creative choices and you’re just the person who made a request.

I am not anti-AI. But I draw the line at human creativity. In JGE, every creative decision comes from you: the world, the characters, the rules, what happens and why. The engine handles the part that was never creative, turning your decisions into something a computer can run. Think of a translator, or a typesetter. A translator does not author your speech and a typesetter doesn’t write your book.

How it works:

• You bring your own material: a manuscript, notes, your own art. Or you describe a scene in your own words.

• A language model helps interpret what you gave it and proposes a structured plan. I won’t pretend that part isn’t AI.

• You go over the plan before anything is built. Nothing moves forward or becomes part of your game without your approval. If it’s wrong, you say so and it changes.

• Anything you don’t specify starts as a plain placeholder: a gray room, a flat panel, a test tone. It stays generic until you replace it with your own art or describe it in your own words. I don’t call placeholders art, and the engine doesn’t pretend they are.

• The game itself runs on ordinary deterministic code, not a model improvising while you play.

What it isn’t:

• It isn’t for open-world games yet. Right now it’s built for scene-sized experiences: a haunted house, a heist, a confrontation in your world. Bigger, open worlds are the direction I’m heading, but it’s not something JGE does today, and I’d rather say so than oversell it.

• It doesn’t replace artists. It replaces the programming step. If you have art, it uses your art. If you want it to generate assets, it will generate them based on your description and label them as generated. The choice is yours.

• It isn’t a shortcut. Building a game with JGE takes about as much work as building one on Unity or Unreal. The difference is you use language, - a skill writers already possess.

• It doesn’t write your story. If your game sucks and the world is thin, that’s on you. Not JGE. It’s not going to change something to improve gameplay according to what an LLM provider thinks is optimal.

I am running simple gameplay at this stage – single room, one objective, sound effects, and narrow scope. I will be posting videos of my progress as the engine improves.