After our first launch on Product Hunt, our team spent a little over a month upgrading the product. There were major changes to the UI and several new features added, so the process took time from discussions and redesigning the interface to testing, fixing bugs, and updating AI prompts.
We re also a very small team, so everyone had to push themselves to give 200%. Time and resources are limited, and at the same time, we also had to work on securing funding for the next six months to keep the team running and continue developing the app.
I've built my product around traditional SaaS pricing (monthly tiers), but I m starting to wonder if that model is getting outdated, especially with more AI-powered and compute-heavy tools entering the market. That shift requires real architectural changes, instrumentation, metering, billing logic, and UI changes, not just pricing tweaks. It s something I m starting to seriously think about for my own product.
In particular, AI usage has real COGs (every prompt costs money), and I m seeing more platforms experimenting with usage-based models, or hybrids like SaaS base + usage + overage.
For those of you building AI or compute-intensive tools:
New AI models pop up every week. Some developer tools like @Cursor, @Zed, and @Kilo Code let you choose between different models, while more opinionated products like @Amp and @Tonkotsu default to 1 model.
Curious what the community recommends for coding tasks? Any preferences?
I ve been spending a lot of time on Discord and Reddit helping people who are trying to add AI chat to their no/low-code apps.
What keeps coming up is that the setup is way more fragile than it looks.
It s usually not the model itself it s everything around it: conversation state, memory, retries, edge cases. Vibe-coding works for demos, but once people try to ship something real, things start breaking.
Since I haven't been able to meet my work goals very well in the last few quarters, I now plan to approach them more systematically and not push myself too hard on work goals, as that ultimately led to problems that made my plan less sustainable.
AI dev tools are moving stupid fast. Every few weeks, there s a new must-use. Some stick. Most don t.
Some vibe coders are developing full products with @ChatGPT by OpenAI+ @Replit. Others swear by @Cursor + @Claude by Anthropic . A few are mixing @Lovable , @v0 by Vercel , and @bolt.new . New and shipping way faster than expected.
I ve been refining my own vibe stack lately. Building with @Google Antigravity at the core. It keeps the flow clean when things get messy.
We just wrapped the Orbit Awards for AI Dictation and now we re moving to the next category: AI Automation.
This one is for the tools that actually do work for you clearing chores, running workflows in the background, or quietly taking over a chunk of your week without turning into another dashboard you have to babysit.
