Connect with the Product Hunt community

I spend a lot of time around medical students (I am one), and lately I have watched classmates quietly build tiny apps for our year group a quiz from this week's lectures, flashcards, a tracker for clinical rotations. Small things, used by maybe 30 people.

A few things surprised me:

We finally had to kill our anonymous, no-account-required tool because bot traffic was quietly draining our API budget. Now, anyone who wants the core feature has to make a free account first. The issue is that the people losing the friction-free experience are anonymous visitors we have zero contact info for so our landing page announcement feels like shouting into the void.

If you've ever gated a previously open utility, how did you explain the change without sounding defensive?

At the very least, it was something I didn't need when I was doing a project alone. Most of my projects are just me. Only the client's team used such a tool, since there were 5 or more people working simultaneously and, starting from a free board tool, they had to track the hours of outside contractors too.

Later on, I found out that I do need it too. Now I have more than 30 projects going with AI agents and honestly can't keep track of where each one is, so all of it goes on a kanban board, the same way the client's team does it. My daughter's homework and class schedule are on a board as well.

How many people were on your team when you started using one?

There is a massive danger in letting your most active users dictate every new feature on your backlog. We built advanced automation tools for them last quarter, but our retention actually dropped because regular users felt the app became too bloated and hard to use. Finding that balance between power user depth and casual user simplicity is brutal. How do you decide when to say no to heavy feature requests?

Unpopular opinion: AI coding tools are great at writing code and bad at leaving the rest alone.

Mine rewrote my config, renamed a folder, and changed how the app starts. The login page worked. The app didn t.

There is a fine line between getting honest feedback early on and over-sharing to the point where someone else runs off with your pitch.

Stealing a feature list is easy, but copying the actual vision and execution is a completely different story. Still, it hurts when a partner or contact breaks trust. I've realized that putting proper paper trails in place and documenting development dates matters way more than non disclosure agreements.

How do you decide who gets to see the inner workings of your roadmap during early stage talks?

Issue: The agent hits an error and hides it so it can deliver the output the prompt asked for.

Example: An agent swallowed a failing database write and returned a 200 success payload. The UI told users their setup was complete while the database sat empty.

There seem to be two schools of thought when raising SaaS prices: either lock in existing users at their old rate forever to build loyalty or give them a short notice and upgrade everyone across the board. We recently pushed through a long-overdue rate increase with zero marketing fluff just a plain explanation of why support load forced the change. I was terrified of losing our early adopters but the pushback was almost zero.

If you've pulled off a price hike, did you lock in old users long-term or force everyone onto the new plans?

We spent three months building complex highly requested automation features for our most vocal power users. Meanwhile, our core base of quiet casual users struggled with basic navigation and quietly cancelled their subscriptions.

How do you balance building advanced tools for your elite users without alienating the broader audience who just wants simplicity?

Early on, we treated every user request like an urgent priority, only to realize later that custom features didn't even stop those users from churning. Building what people ask for instead of solving their actual root problem destroyed our focus and wasted months of dev time. If you run a small product team, what framework do you use to filter out isolated demands and keep your core vision intact?

Over the past few days, I ve been following a heated discussion about how Marc Lou is selling parts of his body in some kind of simulation to promote products (ad placements in the form of virtual tattoos) and making a lot of money from it.

I swear, the whole thing has gone mainstream.

We recently put a simple email wall in front of our main tool to track returning users and stop abuse. On paper it makes total sense for product metrics, but communicating a downgrade to casual visitors is surprisingly brutal. Every draft announcement we wrote either sounded like PR spin or an apology for securing our own infrastructure.

For founders who transitioned from anonymous access to a mandatory free sign-up how did you frame the update to your audience?

We recently checked our helpdesk logs and found that a single free user opened over 30 tickets in under a month asking for custom walkthroughs and direct setup help. After our engineers spent hours fixing their workflows, they straight up refused to upgrade to a $20/mo plan because they got everything for free. It made us realize we were running an unpaid agency. If you run a SaaS, do you cut off manual support for free users entirely, or just route them to slow email queues and docs?

I always thought that the common answer to agent permissions is to let the agent act on anything you can undo and request only for crucial part. Sending a customer a messages usually would count as the thing you can't take back I guess.

I'm not sure that line holds for product decisions. In a past project, an agent just changed something that was easy to revert. But if we hadn't noticed, it could have set off a chain of follow-up actions that caused us big trouble under their own understanding. Another instance, when the AI agent marks a customer request as "planned." instead of Notice. It would be great if we found the issue early on, but if not, we might have missed this request

Meanwhile asking for approval with every changes would make things more secure, but when there are too many requests, I notice that people start approving without reading.

For people using agents around product decisions:

We shipped our product a few weeks ago, and while my co-founders have their maker tags visible next to their profile names my account still looks completely standard.

I've double-checked my team settings and maker status, but nothing updates on the public profile.

Is there a hidden setting or a specific admin approval step I missed to get the badge to appear?

There is a dangerous illusion in watching your registration counter go up every morning when nobody is actually sticking around to use the product long-term. We realized our leaky bucket was wasting weeks of engineering effort on acquisition channels that brought in zero active users. Once we tied our team's goals to activation milestones instead of raw signups, everything changed. If you went through this same wakeup call, what specific metric finally forced your startup to focus on activation over volume?

Since I started running Claude Code and Codex in parallel worktrees, my disk fills up much faster. Every worktree gets its own node_modules and build output, session logs pile up in ~/.claude and ~/.codex, and Xcode DerivedData does the rest.

I've seen people find 100GB+ of this stuff. How do you deal with it? Do you clean worktrees manually, script it, or just buy a bigger SSD?

When a customer who pays your bills asks for a custom feature, saying no feels almost impossible. But we learned the hard way that building every single request turned our app into a bloated mess of half-baked tools. Most requests are just users trying to patch over a workflow problem they don't know how to explain yet. How do you tell high-value clients that their requested feature isn't on the roadmap without completely ruining the relationship?

I build my app alone after my day job, with no ad budget. So far the only thing that really worked for me is writing short, personal posts on Threads. One story about my family got over 300k views and brought more signups than everything else combined. Posts that explain features barely get noticed.

But I can't tell if that was luck or something I can repeat.

I've been delaying a price hike for months out of fear of mass churn. We finally decided to bump our rates by 30% and gave current users a two month grace period before the change kicks in. We sent a simple direct email explaining that our server costs went up and surprisingly not a single person canceled.

But now I'm wondering if giving people a two month window just leaves the door open for them to shop around for alternatives.

When you bumped your pricing how long of a buffer did you give existing clients?

Hi.

On many accounts in forum i can see badge with relation to their product. I would to configure my account in same way. Product was launched moth ago, i am assigned as maker, but still i only see my account name.
How can i change it?

You ask an AI agent to research a competitor. You permit it to:

• Read public websites.

• Analyse information.

• Prepare a report.

It cannot contact anyone, send emails, or make external commitments. It delegates part of the research to another agent, which delegates again to a third agent. The third agent has access to email.

If you look at our automated cancellation surveys, 80% of users leave because of "pricing" or "missing features." But when we actually got on calls with churned users the real story came out: the app was too complex to set up or they simply lost momentum during week two.

How do you dig past polite exit-survey excuses to find the brutal operational truth behind your churn?

Giving users a 40% discount for paying annually felt amazing when we needed upfront cash to fund a month of development. But looking at our servers and support load months later, those deeply discounted annual accounts locked us into low-margin support commitments while our costs kept rising.

at what stage of growth did you stop offering steep annual discounts and start charging what the product was actually worth?