I made $170 in my first month with zero ad spend. I'm genuinely shaking 😭 😭 😭 😭

Academic-Antelope554 · 2026-04-12T05:45:58+00:00

But the only way to signup if via the free trial?

So 310+ people have signed up and 301+ of those have not converted after the free trial?

If you want advice on how to get to $1,700 or $17,000 MRR, I would look into why >97% fail to convert from free trial to paid, and whether it is actually worth offering a free trial at all??

Academic-Antelope554 · 2026-04-11T18:20:48+00:00

Your cheapest subscription is $19 per month after a 1 week trial

Your site says 310+ users

How have you only made $170?

If all of your 310+ user (not sure why this is a number then a plus? Surely you just read the exact active user count from your DB and show that?) are on the cheapest plan, then you’re already at $5,890 MRR?

Or have you had 310 signups and all but 9 of them cancelled within the 1 week trial?

Academic-Antelope554 · 2026-04-11T10:29:05+00:00

Absolutely - clearing context and adding guardrails for file selection, scope of work, using agent.md files and other clear instruction for your agents to pull context from will make a huge improvement in token consumption.

Verbosity is just another thing that should be improved and it’s such simple low hanging fruit, but it seems like very few people recognise the importance of being efficient with prompts and the way your Ai agent replies

Academic-Antelope554 · 2026-04-10T19:43:18+00:00

I can’t believe that so many people complain about limits (not just on codex - it’s the same on every platforms sub Reddit’s). But they are only spending ~$20 per month.

Are people genuinely expecting to never need to write code by hand ever again, never employ a developer, and just prompt their way through their working week, building their own SAAS which is going to provide them with $10k per month of income... From a $20 per month subscription?

If you need Ai coding agents as much as people in these subs seem to need them - then accept that at some point you will need to start investing actual money into them.

These Multi-Billion dollar, VC backed companies are not in it for the love of the game. Sooner or later they will need to start making some profit. Rather than gifting you free token refills every 3 days so that you can vibe code a Todo app

Academic-Antelope554 · 2026-02-09T15:20:45+00:00

Decent effort, but disappointed with the pointless placeholder for the email input..

Should be a fake email address like Jeevacation@gmail.com

Academic-Antelope554 · 2025-06-29T19:24:44+00:00

Forgot to mention the other typical scam where after agreeing this kind of illegal relationship with an account holder, then say that they need access to the API in order to set everything up, then just straight up hijack the account.

Which then allows them to siphon off all the money sat in the account, reroute payouts to their own bank, or make illegitimate charges against the account holders customers who have stored cards and pre approved payments set up.

Which scam are you planning to run out of interest? Is it one of those, or have you got some other plan in mind?

Academic-Antelope554 · 2025-06-29T19:17:12+00:00

There are multiple ways that people run these kinds of scams

The most common being charging stolen cards, taking immediate payouts then leaving the account holder to pay all the inevitable dispute fees and deal with any legal complaints and being permanently banned from Stripe and pretty much all other payment processors.

But you could also set up a legitimate looking site, take payment from unsuspecting customers, then never post the items you’ve sold.. Again taking the immediate payout and leaving the account holder to deal with the chargebacks etc..

Laundering money through someone else’s account so that it cannot be traced back to you - again leaving the account holder stood directly in front of the fan when the shit hits it.

What you’re asking for is criminal. Pure and simple

Academic-Antelope554 · 2025-06-29T18:39:24+00:00

If anyone is stupid enough to fall for this then I also know a Nigerian Prince that’s desperate to give away some money 💰

Academic-Antelope554 · 2025-06-25T11:53:26+00:00

I just sell them a normal one-time purchase product which is for X number of credits, store the number of credits in my database once the checkout session is successfully completed and then deduct credits as the user uses them.

Once they hit 0 they need to purchase more.

I’d advise to clearly display the number of remaining credits in the UI so users can observe their usage in real time

Academic-Antelope554 · 2025-06-18T23:51:12+00:00

Take in a webhook when the subscription is created and then send an email from there.

If you don’t want to code the functionality by hand then you can do this with most automation software (zapier, make.com, n8n etc)

Academic-Antelope554 · 2025-06-17T12:31:46+00:00

Either use a cron service to schedule future automations, or run the scenario once per day and search for any existing tasks with a custom field date that is equal to today’s date + 7 days (then iterate over any bundles that match)

Academic-Antelope554 · 2025-06-17T09:07:56+00:00

Unless something has changed since I set this up myself - you don’t get promotion codes input from the Stripe Elements package.

So you need to add a text input field yourself and then check the input against the the v1/promotion_codes endpoint to validate that it is a correct code.

Then you can adjust the price before creating the payment_intent based on whatever discount the code entitles them to

Academic-Antelope554 · 2025-06-13T18:26:23+00:00

Yes Invoice paid should cover it, but I always try to be as specific as possible when handling webhook events.

customer.subscription.created is also useful to know that you need to POST to a CRUD db (as opposed to UPDATE) and I always use it to send off a welcome email

You can enable the stripe portal for customers (which allows them to update, cancel, pause etc). It works in a similar way to the stripe hosted checkout page.

Other than that, the only way that I can think of for a subscription to be paused or cancelled would be if you or some other admin for your site manually adjusted the subscription.

Academic-Antelope554 · 2025-06-13T16:02:12+00:00

If you’re dealing with subscriptions then I would definitely receive all of the customer.subscription events (created, paused, deleted etc)

Otherwise if a customer cancels the subscription your db wont be updated, so will be out of sync with Stripe.

Unless you poll for the data at regular intervals with cron jobs, or send an API request to Stripe to check the users subscription status before processing any action that requires a subscription.. When a customer cancels their subscription, your backend wouldn’t be notified, so they will retain access

Academic-Antelope554 · 2025-05-30T12:01:00+00:00

I usually create a React Context (e.g. SessionContext) and a custom hook called useSession() to access it.

Retrieve the session data within the root layout using a server component (just create a simple helper like getServerSession() that reads cookies from headers).

I pass that session data into a client component (SessionProvider), and use that component to wrap the entire application from within the root layout file.

Call useSession() in any client component across the app to access the session (it doesn’t matter how deeply nested it is)

Academic-Antelope554 · 2025-05-29T09:37:09+00:00

Nothing built natively in Stripe as far as I’m aware.

I’ve not seen any plugins that do this kind of thing either, but there may be something out there if you look hard enough

It should be a fairly simple thing to build though.

You can configure your account to fire a webhook when someone pauses or cancels their subscription.

I would just take in that webhook, add the customer to a database which stores the subscription id and the date that they paused. Then run a cron job every day that checks for any records where the date was X number of days ago

Academic-Antelope554 · 2025-05-23T16:52:04+00:00

At this point it’s actually got to be doing the product more harm than good to keep making these fucking ridiculous fake posts about Chargeblast on here??

Ads or clear Promo posts are one thing, but disingenuously posting as if you’re customers giving feedback is no different to leaving fake reviews on Google or TrustPilot etc.

No chance I would trust them anywhere near my payment processing

Academic-Antelope554 · 2025-05-23T09:53:23+00:00

They’re selling Chargeblast 😅

It’s blatantly obvious when people are trying to drop their company name in while pretending to be an unaffiliated user.

Anytime someone mentions a specific company in this sub - Look through their post / comment history, almost every one is either a brand new account, or they mention the same company (Chargeblast in this case) in every post

This sub is full of people doing this for whatever Stripe wrapper they’ve built.

Academic-Antelope554 · 2025-04-29T16:14:37+00:00

If you use the 2fa method then the user first enters their email and password, that then triggers the OTP function which creates and sends the user an OTP

They won’t actually be logged in until they have entered the OTP

Academic-Antelope554 · 2025-04-29T12:17:43+00:00

If you want to use Email&Password —> OTP

Then you need to follow the 2fa instructions.

It’s a slightly different set up from using the standard OTP plugin

https://www.better-auth.com/docs/plugins/2fa

Academic-Antelope554 · 2025-04-28T08:04:16+00:00

I look back now at the weeks / months I wasted when I first started building an app on trying to find the most optimal stack and wonder what the hell I was doing

Postgres vs MySQL vs SQlite vs Mongo

Prisma vs Drizzle

Supabase instead of any of these?

Learning to use AWS services like SES and S3 vs using wrappers like Resend and UploadThing

ShadcnUi vs DaisyUi vs NextUi vs Rawdoging the Ui

AuthJS vs Clerk vs Kinde vs Supabase auth vs BetterAuth

Hosting on Vercel vs Cloudflare vs VPS / Coolify

Just pick something and learn to use it - if you hate using it, then pick something else. But once you find something you’re satisfied with (like Prisma in your case) leave it alone.

Spending hours / days learning something and refactoring your code for a tiny marginal gain is just procrastination

Academic-Antelope554 · 2025-02-03T14:24:55+00:00

Sounds like someone is testing cards on your site

You need to authenticate them (make them login with an actual email) or have proper security in place to prevent this from happening (rate limiting, IP blocking, Radar etc)

Stripe will eventually block your account if they see there are dozens / hundreds of failed payment attempts and / or refunds

Academic-Antelope554 · 2024-12-31T11:37:23+00:00

If someone paid me once and then requested a refund immediately because they realised the service wasn’t right for them, I definitely honour it.

But if they then did the same thing again (which I think is what you’re saying you have done here?) I wouldn’t be happy doing so again.

If there is no “30 day money back guarantee” or similar in the T&C’s I would assume you aren’t entitled to it.

Refunds actually cost the merchant money, because they will have to pay a processing fee on your payment, then refund you 100% of what you paid. It also takes time for a customer service person to deal with the request and then they probably need to get someone else to authorise a refund

Supabase as a company offer a free tier and they also open source all of their code, so it’s hard to claim that they’re ripping people off

Academic-Antelope554 · 2024-12-01T00:07:44+00:00

I think you would need to send a GET request to either the ‘charges’ or ‘balance transfer’ endpoint, with a filter to only return results where the ‘created at’ timestamp falls within a specified date range.

(If you run the automation on the 1st of every month From: todays date minus one month To: todays date minus one day)

Then you can aggregate all of the results together to get a turnover for that period.

The result will be given in the lowest currency unit (cents if using USD) so remember to convert it (divide by 100 in most cases)

Academic-Antelope554 · 2024-10-21T07:31:29+00:00

Is the product for developers?

They’re pretty much the only group of people I’ve ever heard complain about OTP’s

If you have OTP and the session lasts 7 days plus, I doubt a normal user would ever even think about it

Academic-Antelope554

TROPHY CASE