... build mobile apps. Soon hitting 50 new signups daily. All these signups came with massive LLM costs. Starting with just ~$4K, we burned through 30% of our budget in the first week with only $260 MRR. Our well-funded competitors offered 5 free code gen requests daily (30/month), while we provided just 1 request/user lifetime. Talked to users, they wanted to explore platform for free but even with our minimal free tier, costs were eating up our savings. Traffic kept ... ... blogs. We approached VCs but got no replies. We pivoted to a paid-only model after burning 60% of our funds. Still getting ~50 daily signups from our @daily.dev blog, but users expected the same free plans as competitors