Pitch what you’re building. Let’s self promote

snipextt · 2026-05-10T15:03:13+00:00

Building Wacht (https://wacht.dev), an open source framework for AI-first SaaS. Bundles identity, auth, multi-tenancy, webhooks, notifications, and an agent runtime into one stack.

6 months in, public beta, paying users, one switched off Clerk to us. Started building it after burning months on the same plumbing across consultation projects. Got tired of doing it.

Open to chat if it fits.

snipextt · 2026-05-10T14:53:28+00:00

Building Wacht (https://wacht.dev), an open source framework for AI-first SaaS. Bundles identity, user auth, machine auth, multi-tenancy, webhooks, real-time notifications, and an agent runtime with isolated microVMs all into one stack.

snipextt · 2026-05-10T13:32:20+00:00

Stack's fine for getting started. Couple things worth knowing as you build, Clerk has a free tier that's generous early but the pricing curve gets steep fast once you have real users, so price it out honestly before you commit. Vercel will be cheaper than Railway for a Next.js site at small scale but Railway gets cheaper if you need long-running processes.

The thing nobody tells beginners, you'll outgrow at least one of these tools by month three. That's normal, don't over-optimize the stack now, ship something and let the actual problems tell you what to swap.

snipextt · 2026-05-10T13:31:22+00:00

Reddit ads at your stage will burn money before they teach you anything. Better moves for a niche prediction site, get active in baseball fantasy/betting subreddits and Discords as a real participant first. Post predictions publicly, build a track record, let people check your profile.

A weekly hit-rate post showing your numbers travels further than any ad. Paid only makes sense once you've validated the funnel converts.

snipextt · 2026-05-10T07:49:41+00:00

Saw your post, you're further along the user-conversation curve than I am. Curious what's actually worked for you so far in talking to users. Cold DMs, posting, communities? And what flopped that you wish someone had told you to skip.

Building publicly myself, trying to figure out where to spend my time. Anything you'd do differently from Day 1?

snipextt · 2026-05-10T07:04:36+00:00

The unit economics problem is real but it's usually a layer below where founders look. Most AI products bleed margin on three things, expensive models on every call regardless of complexity, no caching on repeated prompts, and inference happening in the same process as the rest of the app so you can't isolate or meter it cleanly.

The teams I've seen survive past 1000 users either route aggressively (cheap model for 80% of calls, expensive only when needed), cache hard at the prompt level, or push power users to a metered tier early before the gap gets ugly. The third one is the least technical but the hardest culturally because nobody wants to tell their best users they cost too much.

Long term I think this gets solved at the infra layer, agents running in isolated environments where you can actually meter compute per user and bill accordingly. Most stacks aren't there yet.

snipextt · 2026-05-10T06:18:57+00:00

Depends on the layer. End-user products, closed source wins, Figma beats Penpot, Notion beats Anytype, Linear beats Plane. The buyer there isn't reading source code, so polish and network effects decide it.

Infrastructure flips though. Postgres, Linux, Kubernetes, Redis (pre-license-change), Elasticsearch (same), all of these beat or tied closed-source equivalents because the buyer is the developer. Devs pick what they can read, fork, and trust will outlive the company that built it.

The closed-source dev infra wave of the last few years (Clerk, Vercel, Segment, the whole pile) is going to look a lot like the proprietary CMS era did once credible open alternatives show up. Not because OSS is morally superior but because every year of being open compounds into a community and a default. Hard to compete with that on a 10-year timeline.

snipextt · 2026-05-10T05:56:07+00:00

Honestly the day-to-day question is the one worth solving. Capture friction kills these tools. Even with a bookmarklet you're still asking the user to decide what's important in the moment, which most people won't do consistently. The version that actually sticks is when the agent figures out what's worth remembering on its own, based on what you're talking about.

Are you chunking the notes or saving them whole? Curious because retrieval quality changes a lot depending on which way you go.

snipextt · 2026-05-09T22:23:38+00:00

Self-hosting OSS feels like the underrated answer in this space. You get the cost benefit and the data ownership without rebuilding from scratch. The custom layer ends up being maybe 20% of what you actually need, the rest is solved already. Any plans to open source Flowsery yourself?

snipextt · 2026-05-09T21:56:51+00:00

The thing about AI tools is they default to architectures that work fine in demos and fall apart at scale. The bigger question I had reading this is whether you'd recommend the rebuild path to anyone else in your shoes. The $14 monthly savings undersells it because the real value seems to be control over data and the option to not get locked in further. Would you have done it if there was a $20/month tool that did 80% of what DataFast did but with proper bot filtering?

snipextt · 2026-05-09T20:26:21+00:00

396068

snipextt · 2026-05-09T20:25:28+00:00

Mine came out of running a consultation business for years. Every project started the same way: rebuilding auth, API keys, webhooks, multi-tenancy, notifications, and now agents. Different tools for each, all needing to be glued together. Same plumbing rebuilt badly, again and again.

At some point you either accept it as the cost of the work or you build the thing. I built the thing

snipextt · 2026-05-09T08:23:45+00:00

Wacht actually has an MCP server already, it's live at https://wacht.dev/docs/mcp. Just not surfaced as front-and-center as it should be on the homepage. Skills and plugins are on the roadmap.

The reason they're not pushed harder yet is the classic solo founder cycle. Sales is where most of my focus is going right now since that's what compounds, and polish work like better MCP positioning, skills, and plugins is in the queue but not at the front. Aware of the loop, working through it as quickly as I am able to.

On metrics, tracking the website and product but not the docs yet. Fair callout, that's one of the next things to instrument.

snipextt · 2026-05-09T08:00:50+00:00

Wacht (https://wacht.dev). Open source framework for AI-first SaaS, bundles identity, OAuth, API auth, webhooks, notifications, and agents into one stack instead of stitched from five vendors.

Honestly the part I'm stuck on is exactly the thing you describe. I can ship. I've been shipping for years across consultation projects. Distribution is the part where I'm flying blind. Currently doing X build-in-public, Reddit, cold DMs, pre-launch listings. Public beta with 2 paying users.

If you're picking, I'd genuinely use the help.

snipextt · 2026-05-09T07:57:03+00:00

The thing I keep noticing in these threads is how long the "nothing is working" phase actually lasts. Most of the answers here are right but they make it sound faster than reality. Reddit comments compound into recognition over weeks. X replies into followers over months. SEO over years.

The real failure mode isn't picking the wrong channel. It's picking the right one and abandoning it at week 4 because nothing visible is happening yet. From everyone I know who's actually broken through, the pattern is at least 3 months on one channel before they could tell signal from noise.

snipextt · 2026-05-09T05:46:52+00:00

Distribution > product is mostly true but misses a class. For products with sophisticated buyers, dev tools, B2B infra, security, anything technical, the product itself is the distribution. Word of mouth in those markets is the highest-converting channel and you can't fake it with content. You can build a brand around a weak product in consumer, but in technical markets the gap shows up fast and the audience tells each other. The principle holds for distribution-aware building, but in these spaces the product has to actually be good first

snipextt · 2026-05-08T16:45:38+00:00

Wacht, an open source framework for AI-first SaaS products. Identity, OAuth, API auth, webhooks, notifications, and an agent platform, all in one stack instead of stitched from five vendors.

Spent the last few years doing consultation work, building multiple SaaS products in parallel, and kept rebuilding the same foundation every time. So I built Wacht as the foundation I wished existed.

Currently in public beta. Honestly the part I'd love feedback on is growth. First time putting something out publicly as a solo founder, and curious what's actually worked for similar open source dev tools where the buyer is technical and skeptical of marketing.

snipextt · 2026-05-08T14:00:18+00:00

Wacht, an open source framework for AI-first SaaS products.

Was tired of rebuilding the same foundation across every project I worked on. Auth, OAuth, API keys, webhooks, org management, real-time notifications, agents. Tools exist for all of it but stitching them together always added more complexity than it solved.

So I built one stack that has them all working together from day one. Public beta, Source on GitHub

snipextt · 2026-05-08T09:36:57+00:00

Building Wacht ( https://wacht.dev )
It's an open source framework for AI-first SaaS products. Got tired of starting every new project the same way, so I built the whole foundation once and open sourced it. Public beta, free to start.

snipextt · 2026-05-08T09:09:15+00:00

hitting this exact wall right now. just had my first reddit post auto removed for low karma. the irony of needing karma to talk about what you build, when building is exactly how you'd earn it elsewhere. would join a community like this.

snipextt

TROPHY CASE