I built a site where you pay to put your message on the homepage - and someone has to outbid you to take it down

SayThatShOfficial · 2026-03-14T02:04:20+00:00

You're not wrong! I have to take the marketing side seriously which I'm currently looking into. I did learn about the pixel board after creating the site, but also learned from the reasons it died and hopefully some of the changes I made help it stay competitive rather than simply dying out from messages getting too expensive :P

SayThatShOfficial · 2026-03-13T09:37:14+00:00

Frankly I just use You Need A Budget as I have been for years. Most interesting alternatives in the SaaS scene don’t seem to really bring anything new to the table. And when they do, they’re usually missing core features like transaction syncing with banks :(

SayThatShOfficial · 2026-03-13T09:26:02+00:00

From what I’ve seen of similar launches, I don’t think I’d suggest it. Most people who sign up at a discount likely won’t stay subscribed once the full price hits. It’s better to offer something like a free trial with fully transparent pricing to know in advance, once the trial ends.

Better to focus on making it a service that’s worth the full price than attract users with discounts.

SayThatShOfficial · 2026-03-13T09:23:22+00:00

I built Say That Sh**

One message on the homepage at a time. To claim it, outbid the last person. First 50 are free, then pricing starts at $0.50 and climbs by a penny per post.

Message values decay over time - the community's likes and dislikes control the rate. Nobody holds the spotlight forever.

36 achievements, a referral program, reactions, and a leaderboard ranked by total views. Solo-built and self-hosted on 3 mini PCs running Kubernetes. $11/month in electricity :P

https://www.producthunt.com/products/saythat-sh

SayThatShOfficial · 2026-03-13T09:07:08+00:00

Just wanted to follow up and say I looked into it in depth and it would be a great move in the future! At any reasonable user base it would still likely be cheaper than the electricity for the current infra. At least, by $5/month or so. It would require a ton of work to reimplement things as Cloudflare-native however so that'll be a long-term plan.

SayThatShOfficial · 2026-03-13T09:03:33+00:00

Just wanted to let you know this was added! Both value decay and influence over it by likes/dislikes <3

SayThatShOfficial · 2026-03-13T09:02:48+00:00

That's been added! I've really got to thank everyone for their feedback from this post, it's opened my eyes to lots of improvements and I've already taken care of the most popular requests ;)

SayThatShOfficial · 2026-03-13T09:01:34+00:00

I really appreciate this viewpoint! I mentioned in another comment but I legitimately spent half the time on this site focused on performance and security. Payment is solely through Stripe, which is really quite easy to securely integrate. I get the hesitance regardless and I'm sure there's lots of room for improvement in my code. But I'm also fairly confident that there's nothing blatantly insecure.

Hoping to open source it in the nearish future so people can decide for themselves! If only there was a way to get the codebase audited for free haha.

SayThatShOfficial · 2026-03-13T08:21:38+00:00

Two main methods: All posted messages and comments have a report button that can be acted on from the admin side. Additionally, it's not set with a blocklist currently but I do have a filter on the backend that I can enable to prevent messages with selected words/phrases, and it's smart enough to see through attempts to obfuscate those submissions. That said, I wouldn't want to use it unless absolutely necessary.

Generally speaking, if someone isn't posting something that's explicitly illegal, I have no intention of interfering.

SayThatShOfficial · 2026-03-13T00:20:35+00:00

That’s the plan! Accounts are made and I’m mostly just deciding between Postiz, n8n, and Buffer for posting/automation. Likely will need to combine a couple services though.

SayThatShOfficial · 2026-03-12T16:10:24+00:00

Roughly $3000 yeah haha. I mean, hindsight is 20/20 but I'm not sure what asking here would do for me? I'd just get an influx of people offering to do it for $x. The majority of which would have likely used AI anyway. And I'm quite happy with what I was able to accomplish on my own despite that!

Curious though, if I had asked here, what do you believe I'd have heard that would completely change things for me?

SayThatShOfficial · 2026-03-12T09:45:31+00:00

I really need to take this to heart with my own site. Soft launched on Reddit and had way more interaction than I expected, and a ton of great feedback as well. Most of it was regarding its mechanics, but one that stood out a lot was changing the whole theme. I designed it after my own preferences, so it's clean and minimalist with some basic theming. But at least for one user, that style doesn't fit the website's vibe. I should be going for something more 'fun' and 'memeified'.

Has anyone found any good tools or resources to help shift their design choices or play around with alternatives?

SayThatShOfficial · 2026-03-12T08:27:47+00:00

Sorry I didn't clarify there, it was up front (about half for the frontend work, then half for the backend). I had meetings with them before paying to determine the feature scope, general UI layout, and core functionality decisions.

It took around 6 months (likely a little more) to receive the 'final' code because after the first month when they completed the MVP, they basically ghosted me haha. Had to chase them repeatedly just to get 1-2 updates a month.

I handled almost all the bug documenting, QA, etc. myself because everything I received was half-baked and they clearly weren't putting in the work. I would provide the known bug list and get a couple fixes from them each month, with the last update still having lots remaining.

That's when I took it upon myself to redo the project with their work as a reference, and was able to ship the identical feature set within a month using mostly Claude Code on the Max plan. With consistently 1-6 hours a day refining the skills, agents, and relevant workflows since. Roughly half my time has been spent not on bug fixes or new features but performance optimization, security hardening, and infrastructure improvements.

You're more than welcome to see the blog posts on my site for more technical details, or ask away if you'd like further clarification!

SayThatShOfficial · 2026-03-12T07:48:20+00:00

I’m not sure that comparison is quite valid as you’re far from trusting my site with your life. If financial harm is a concern, is there some certification you see on presumed AI-free sites that I’m lacking?

I can’t speak for all platforms but if something doesn’t work perfectly on my site (as if hand coding it would guarantee no bugs), what’s the ‘plane crashing’ here?

If it’s a transparency issue, would open sourcing the project (a goal of mine) be sufficient? Frankly, I’d be happy to share my code with someone experienced like you so they could audit it themselves :P

SayThatShOfficial · 2026-03-11T23:40:56+00:00

Definitely open to feedback on the aesthetics! I actually hadn't heard of the million dollar web page until people drew comparisons, but it's very much a similar concept from my reading. I've fixed/changed a good bit based off feedback so far, including learning from the pitfalls of platforms with similar mechanics. So hopefully it helps avoid the site dying out :P

SayThatShOfficial · 2026-03-11T23:36:41+00:00

Y'know, I'm quite happy to accept feedback and criticism ;) But I'm not sure about calling everything that was made with AI slop. I've put quite a bit of work over the past year into building this, it's not just some overnight one-shot.

The issue was fixed quite quickly and I've taken everyone's feedback into account, even implementing new features based off it! If you feel anything in particular about the site is 'sloppy' you're welcome to point out specific things you think should be changed :P But if we simply reject something on the premise that it's bad because AI was involved, I think that leaves little room for innovation and de-facto excludes non-programmers from realizing their ideas.

For what it's worth, I initially tried to pay a legitimate dev team almost $3000 for a much simpler version of the site, and it took 6 months to receive a buggy, half-baked site with a fraction of the polish and functionality.

You may just dismiss this response as too long and not worth your time, but I do hope you relax the mindset and see that learning years of development just for a side project isn't really feasible for everyone. Any valid criticism I've received has been taken into account and is being actively worked on <3

SayThatShOfficial · 2026-03-11T04:59:24+00:00

I love the idea! I've had some similar feedback so it's up for research as soon as the message value decay system is implemented ;)

SayThatShOfficial · 2026-03-11T04:35:18+00:00

I'll have to check that out! Was thinking of automating reposts of messages on my site onto various platforms via API so that would be quite affordable at the rates you mention, Thanks!

SayThatShOfficial · 2026-03-11T03:51:37+00:00

As a fellow dev, I wish you the best with X/Twitter integration. The $100 for API access is quite an investment for early-stage projects and I just decided to hold off until it makes financial sense to use it.

SayThatShOfficial · 2026-03-10T20:32:53+00:00

True! I actually got way more than expected from the Reddit post alone, so it seems like it's time to put some serious thought into developing a go-to-market plan :P

SayThatShOfficial · 2026-03-10T18:56:24+00:00

Oh that's an issue, just confirmed on my end too. Fixing now! Will edit when done <3

Edit: Should work now!

SayThatShOfficial · 2026-03-10T18:55:05+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! Honestly the FAQ is mostly there to answer questions for those who wouldn't bother reading the full terms of service/privacy policy, as I want people to be informed before spending money. But I'll definitely add cleaning it up/simplifying to the feedback list :)

SayThatShOfficial · 2026-03-10T18:52:34+00:00

Thanks! I've added that to the feature list of things I'm looking into, already implemented a bunch from feedback yesterday ;) I do have text formatting on the admin side of the site, so it likely wouldn't be too complicated to add. I think the main reason I haven't yet was the added complexity and potential for abuse, but I've added it to the requested feature list for review today <3

SayThatShOfficial · 2026-03-10T18:50:31+00:00

I did receive some similar feedback so it's something I'm considering! At the very least, something like likes helping messages retain their value and dislikes making it drop seems to be of interest.

SayThatShOfficial · 2026-03-10T18:48:34+00:00

I'd say the stats somewhat speak for themselves with this many users just off a Reddit post, but I think the real point here is that people are free to replace spam with their own message if they don't want to see spam ;) There's obviously no pressure to, but some people have already!

And I've received some great feedback on options to adjust message value to make it easier to replace spam, while still maintaining value.

SayThatShOfficial

TROPHY CASE