u/Great_Key_766

ok so this is kind of an accidental saas story. I own a cosmetics brand in Russia, and we work with a lot of influencers on Instagram and TikTok. I had a team of 5-7 people whose entire job was monitoring trending content in our niche. They were scrolling TikTok and Instagram all day, saving reels, logging engagement metrics in spreadsheets. it cost me roughly $3k/month just in salaries for that

About 8 months ago, I saw someone build an app with a cursor on Twitter and thought let me try. zero coding background btw. I built a tool that scrapes trending reels in any niche, runs them through AI to score trend potential, and shows which creators to watch. It replaced most of that manual monitoring work

I used it for my own brand first. Then a friend who runs a fashion brand asked if she could use it. Then her friend. Then, other brand owners in completely different niches. Before I knew it, I had 45 paying clients, all from my personal network

Right now, I'm tracking cost per customer through credyt to understand my unit economics before I set real pricing. Each trend search costs me about $0.04-0.08 in api calls, depending on niche size.

The problem is, I want to expand beyond Russia, but international payment processing just doesn't work from here. All my current clients are people I know personally or got introduced to through other brand owners

so my question to this sub, if i'm going international with consumption based pricing, does it make sense to charge per search only with no subscription? or do people expect a monthly plan? Plus, if that here some alternatives to Stripe or not?

ok so this is kind of an accidental saas story. I own a cosmetics brand in Russia, and we work with a lot of influencers on Instagram and TikTok. I had a team of 5-7 people whose entire job was monitoring trending content in our niche. They were scrolling TikTok and Instagram all day, saving reels, logging engagement metrics in spreadsheets. it cost me roughly $3k/month just in salaries for that

About 8 months ago, I saw someone build an app with a cursor on Twitter and thought let me try. zero coding background btw. I built a tool that scrapes trending reels in any niche, runs them through AI to score trend potential, and shows which creators to watch. It replaced most of that manual monitoring work

I used it for my own brand first. Then a friend who runs a fashion brand asked if she could use it. Then her friend. Then, other brand owners in completely different niches. Before I knew it, I had 45 paying clients, all from my personal network

Right now, I'm tracking cost per customer through credyt to understand my unit economics before I set real pricing. Each trend search costs me about $0.04-0.08 in api calls, depending on niche size.

The problem is, I want to expand beyond Russia, but international payment processing just doesn't work from here. All my current clients are people I know personally or got introduced to through other brand owners

so my question to this sub, if i'm going international with consumption based pricing, does it make sense to charge per search only with no subscription? or do people expect a monthly plan? Plus, if that here some alternatives to Stripe or not?