Give your ideas a marinating period before you do any work on them, say a week. But during this time vet the idea with potential customers.
After the marinating period and based on the responses you received you’ll have a better idea if it’s an idea worth tackling or not.
Monthly because it’s rare I feel confident enough to pay a year’s worth of a service at first, unless it was dirt cheap, and it gives me as the customer extra insurance that I can stop my subscription without extra headaches compared to annual (can I get a pro-rated refund? Do I have to follow up with you in a year to really make sure I don’t get charged again?)
I use Receipt Bank for collecting receipts + entering the data (RB gets new receipt data right about 80% of the time and then I can use rules to make future ones correct).
Everything then goes into Xero for reconciliation with my bank/credit accounts and is what my accountant checks at the end of the year to prep taxes. Been using this system for about 3 years and has been good to me so far.
Thanks everyone for the comments! To address most of what people are asking: I did not do any market or user research on this 😂 I just wanted a web-based Soulver replacement for myself that had a better UI for swapping between documents.
Adding a payment gate was done on-a-whim since that was when I was adding features that could theoretically cost me money – Supabase integration – and I wanted to see if anyone would pay $9.99 for it (so far the answer is no).
This would be more useful if I can have documents shareable in some way, as @marc mentioned. So I might explore that.
Tech wise, this was mostly vibe-coded with Cusor and Claude Code in a few days. Much of the hand-holding was related to the editor parser engine and Stripe integration.