u/Curious_Club8404

Hey all, I built my first SaaS this year, and one of my biggest concerns was the churn and disputes, I ran e-commerce in 2022-2023, and it was miserable, I did around ~$500k in revenue during that period and decided to drop that idea, since I was extremely burned out, by constant issues with payment processors, disputes, returns, refunds, and overall customer support.

When I was launching my SaaS, I was scared about this repeating, that people will be buying the subscription, bombarding me with the messages, that they did not intend on buying, they want a refund, disputes, and that people are going to be churning like crazy.

Turned out it's not the case, at all, people who forget to cancel - don't even bother contacting me, just cancel the sub the day of the charge (I send reminder of charge 2 days before the charge), there are multiple customers who schedule a couple of posts a week, and still pay for the services (for the context my product is AdaptlyPost).

It might be early to say, but my effective churn rate right now is only 11%.

I guess the takeaway is, don't be scared to launch, don't overthink.

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

Why I've chosen datafast in the first place? I have a background in Product Engineering, my company uses enterprise grade tools: Sentry, Datadog, PostHog etc, so when I launched my SaaS I went for those solutions automatically.

PostHog was a no-brainer, 100% free for millions of events, the rest I had to research, since the costs for a tiny saas were incompatible with reality.

However I found PostHog frustratingly complicated, It's a no-brainer for a Product Team, that loves analyzing every user behavior, but I wanted to have something simple that can be shown on one dashboard, since I found myself asking Claude to run MCP on my database, instead of building and checking the dashboards in PostHog.

I've seen tons of screenshots on X, from other founders, all of them use datafast, so I went with it, I also added plausible, however plausible didn't have a user breakdown, so I dropped it after the free trial.

A couple of months later I started noticing huge increase of events on my website, without much conversions, so I would need to move to a $39/m plan, would be one of the most expensive part of my setup, so I've decided to build a simple version for myself.

While working on it I found an uncomfortable truth. my traffic increased because 70% of it were bots from datacenter IPs, I ran traffic from my website through arcjet - and the real number of users dropped from >350 to ~150.

That's how I learned that DataFast has 0 bot filtering in place, and 60% of your bill are literal bots... After I finished Flowsery, I compared the results, here is the immediate day of the rollout:

Result: Reported values dropped by 50%, with additional behavior bot filtering by over 60%.

What surprises me the most - was how easy it was to implement: eliminate broken user-agents and devices (10000px wide screens), known bots, obvious data-center IPs, and that's it, some advanced behavior includes fast bounces, lack of scrolls, and some other metrics, those might be false-positives, but always nice to have.