What are you building, and what does your stack look like?
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I am a Computer Science student doing research into how solopreneurs and small startups create new apps and what their stack looks like. Particularly, I'm interested in how you handle things like authentication, billing, and permissions/authorization in your apps.
Let me know what you're working on below and how you're going about it -- I'd love to connect for some quick calls to learn about your product and talk about your process in building it!
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Copus
Thanks Ryan! Love that you are taking the anti-algorithm route too. It is honestly the hardest design challenge — resisting the urge to just optimize for engagement. We have been experimenting with letting people subscribe to curators they trust instead of feeds, which has worked really well. Would definitely be down to chat — we are actually launching Copus on PH tonight so this week is a bit wild, but let me check out your calendar link after the dust settles!
@ryan_hendrickson Great questions! The primary interface is actually both — we have an iOS app, but the real magic happens through WhatsApp and Telegram. Users manage their entire day (reminders, todos, calendar, meeting notes) just by chatting in WhatsApp without ever opening another app. The voice note feature you liked is a big part of that — you can dictate a task while driving and Aria just handles it.
For billing, we're using RevenueCat + App Store subscriptions on iOS. Kept it simple for now since we're iOS-first — it handles entitlements cleanly and has great analytics built in. Happy to connect if you want to dig deeper!@ryan_hendrickson Thanks so much! The primary interface is actually the messaging platforms — WhatsApp and Telegram are the core experience. The iOS app is more of a companion dashboard. The big insight was that people already have WhatsApp open all day, so we meet them where they are instead of asking them to open another app.
For billing, we're on Stripe — works great with RevenueCat on the iOS side for in-app purchases. Happy to share more if useful!
Building Social Intel (https://socialintel.dev) — Instagram influencer search API for AI agents. The twist: payment via x402 micropayments (USDC on Base). Agents find the API, call it, and pay automatically. No subscription, no API key for the caller. Stack: FastAPI + fastapi-x402 + MCP server. Anyone else building in the x402/agent payments space?
@sebastianwall Very interesting! So the primary (only?) interface with your app is via an AI Agent?
Building Genie - an AI analyst inside Databox. Users ask questions in plain English ("Why are leads down this week?") and get instant answers, charts, and dashboards from their connected data sources.
Stack for the AI layer: LangGraph for agent orchestration (evaluated several frameworks - LangGraph gave us the control we needed for stateful, multi-step tool-calling without abstracting too much away), LangSmith for tracing, Claude + OpenAI depending on task complexity, AWS Bedrock for RAG. We also just shipped Databox MCP so users can query their live data from Claude, ChatGPT, or any MCP-compatible tool.
On auth/billing - we're an established SaaS so we have our own systems, but the most interesting challenge on the AI side has been usage metering. Every Genie response chains multiple tool calls, and the cost per conversation varies wildly depending on what the user asks. We landed on a credit system where simpler tasks cost less and complex ones cost more - transparent to the user, visible right next to each response.
The hardest part wasn't the AI. It was making sure every answer traces back to real data. Confident-sounding wrong answers are worse than no answer when someone's making a business decision.
@zigapotoc Interesting insight about usage metering -- trying to map billing to your costs, while keeping it simple and transparent to the end user.
@Ryan Hendrickson
I just built my first saas product (Streamster.shop) as a solopreneur, and here's what I'm using:
Auth: Supabase Auth
Billing: Stripe
Permissions: Started with simple boolean flags. Now moving to RBAC. My advice: plan early.
My secret sauce:
I'm actually a manager at a B&B and not a developer. My "co-founder" is AI. It wrote 90% of the code. Although it was expensive, I used OpenClaw + Codex + Opus.
The hardest part wasn't the tech — it was staying focused on what actually matters to users vs. what I thought mattered and looked cool lol
Happy to hop on a call!
@mrosan117 Nice that you've been able to build this! Where did the inspiration for Streamster come from, is this a product you would want to use yourself?
I relate too much with what you said about staying focused on what users want... it's very easy to continue spinning out new ideas for features that nobody wants but you think would be cool.
If you've got some time this week, would love to chat! Pick a time that works for you here!
ZapDigits
Hey @ryan_hendrickson ,
I am building @ZapDigits . Helping marketing agencies with client reporting and dashboards. I've been working on it for more than 1 year now. A few months back I quit my full time job. Launched on Product hunt twice. 1st time product of the day and second time 3rd. We have 25+ native integrations and counting.
Stack is simple: Next.js, Prosgress, AWS fargate, AWS S3 and a few lambda functions.
@malithmcrdev Congrats on the success of your launches! Very cool that you were able to quit your job and work on this, are you full time on ZapDigits now?
Would love to talk in depth if you have a moment in the next week or two. You can find a time that works for you here.
Murror
Building Murror, an AI app for young people dealing with loneliness and isolation. The core idea is that a lot of people don't have anyone they can really talk to without judgment, and Murror tries to be that space.
Stack is React Native for mobile, Node/Express on the backend, PostgreSQL, and we're using a mix of Claude and some fine-tuned models for the emotional support layer. For auth we went with Supabase which made things a lot simpler early on.
The hardest part honestly isn't the stack, it's figuring out how to make something that feels genuinely warm and not like a chatbot. That's been most of the work.
@astrovinh You're spot on with your issue -- cool that you're trying to find a solution. What has the process of adding guardrails/protections to Murror looked like, such that it stays helpful and doesn't make the issue worse by young people becoming dependent on it?
On the tech side, you mention both Postgres and Supabase; are you using Postgres on Supabase, or are you running your own database in parallel?
LiveDemo
Hey Ryan,
I am building livedemo.ai
Stack is JS with MongoDB
- React + Redux - Frontend
- Express Backend
- MongoDB database
- MongoDB as queue
- C# and Swift for Desktop Apps
- Mux for video streaming and cutting
- ElevenLabs for voiceover
- ChatGPT 5 for AI features
@gapostolov Nice! How long have you been working on LiveDemo?
I like that you created native desktop apps, I'm curious what the decision was behind that and if it created headaches when you were trying to build? The other thing I'm curious about is Mux -- how was the process of implementing that into LiveDemo, any headaches or challenges there?
Working on a privacy-first web tools app — keeping it simple with no auth for most features, and using basic Stripe billing + minimal backend only where truly needed.
building speakeasy — an ios app that turns any article url into audio. paste a url, get ai tts in ~30 seconds, saves to icloud
stack: expo + react native for the mobile side, fastapi backend, inworld tts (with openai as fallback), postgres. for auth its just device id stored in keychain — no accounts needed which keeps onboarding super minimal
biggest challenge has been text extraction — different sites block scrapers differently. revenucat for subscriptions has been great tbh, saves a ton of time vs rolling your own