I’m a solo founder building SubBuddy, a privacy-first subscription tracker.

Current pricing: - Free: up to 3 subscriptions - Premium: $4.99/month - Lifetime: $64.99 one-time

Current traction: - 50 users total - first paying customer (lifetime) - most users are still on free

I’m trying to validate pricing before I push harder on growth.

Important product context: - I intentionally do not connect to bank APIs - users add subscriptions manually (or via import/extension), which improves privacy but adds friction - value prop is “control + privacy” over “full automation”

My questions: 1. At this stage, is one lifetime purchase meaningful signal, or mostly noise? 2. Should I keep lifetime available now, or hide it until I have stronger monthly conversion data? 3. What is the most practical way to validate these price points with only ~50 users? 4. Would you prioritize: - user interviews with free users who did not convert - paywall/packaging experiments - onboarding activation improvements first

If you’ve been through this at similar scale, I’d really value concrete experiments or benchmarks that helped you decide.

our Premium plan offer similar features listed on RocketMoney's paid plan, such as AI analytics, email reminders, churn insights, and a broader spending overview

Ever since I started down this path, I’ve asked myself this question. I saw gurus like Marc Lou (@marc_louvion on X) launching 20 startups and it seemed kind of crazy to me. On the other hand, entrepreneurs like David Park (founder of Jenni AI) have focused on one idea that worked and scaled it to infinity, reaching $9M ARR.

But is it really beneficial to build so many startups, or is it better to pursue one good idea? Are people truly willing to pay a subscription for just anything? If that were the case, managing so many subscriptions would be insane—the real winners would be startups like Subbuddy or ClickUp.

After a few years of being obsessed with this world, I’m still undecided on this topic.

How exactly is your question related to the link you shared? You should change the title to: "Show HN: SubBuddy"

oh sorry! I am new to the forum and didn't know that, thank you!

Hello everyone, my name is Álex and I’m a young software developer who recently launched his first SaaS. I started coding before I was 15, and since then I’ve been fascinated by the web and entrepreneurship. I set out to learn programming so that one day I could make a living from what I love. And here I am—there’s still a long road ahead, but I’m ready to face it with the same drive I had when I started.

Since the beginning of this year I’d been looking for ideas to build a SaaS using different methods, but nothing worked. Until one day I came across it in the simplest way possible: I had a Spotify family plan with my friends that we paid monthly, and I always noticed someone forgot to pay (even the person managing the shared payment). Add to that other subscriptions and even trial periods, which made me think it would be a great idea to create an app for this problem. That’s how SubBuddy (subbuddy.io) was born.

I did some market research and saw there was considerable room for improvement, since the main solutions focused only on working as a planner, no reminders or automations to make the user experience easier. Here’s how the development phase went:

First month of development: Together with a friend, we started building the app using AI, which didn’t turn out so well, as it produced very messy code and created complex solutions to simple problems. So the first lesson was to stop seeing the AI agent as a magician and work with it as if it were a very fast junior dev.

Second month of development: Development was moving quickly and it was starting to look great; however, the more features we built, the more we thought of—something we initially saw as a good thing. Nothing could be further from the truth: building increasingly complex features made development drag on too much. So we decided to go back to basics and launch a simpler version so we could improve the app thanks to user feedback, implementing features users actually need.

On launch day I got a couple of customers, and one of them left a review praising the product and suggesting a couple of changes that would make it more complete. Honestly, it’s something I’m very proud of—especially given that this is my first adventure in the startup world. Now it’s about keeping at the app and bringing in new customers at the pace I’ve started. I’m sure there’s a great story ahead from here on out!!

that's interesting!, we would like to make it universal, as, probably, not all banks would partner.

Our objective is to make it as "universal" as possible, and banking/b2b partership is on our roadmap ;)

Never miss a payment or a trial ending. SubBuddy helps you manage all your subscriptions in one place. With SubBuddy, all your subscriptions meet in one place, where you can manage, view AI analytics, spending habits, and receive email notifications.