r/indiehackersindia

I've been building a form backend tool and I'm stuck on pricing.

Not because I can't do the math, but because every form tool I've used eventually becomes something I stop using once the price crosses a certain threshold - even when I'm still getting value.

So I'm trying to figure out where that line actually is for other people.

The tool is simple on purpose: you get an endpoint, it handles submissions and emails, no backend needed. One of those "I just want to add a contact form without spinning up a server" tools.

If you've used Formspree, Netlify Forms, Typeform, or anything similar - at what price did you stop thinking about it and just pay? And where did you start to hesitate?

(Happy to share the link if anyone's curious, but that's not really the point of this post - genuinely want to understand how people think about this.)

I research what real users are saying about a business across:

- Review sites (60+ platforms not just Google)

- Reddit and forums

- Social media complaints

- Their own community pages

You get a report showing the real problems, what competitors do better, and specific things to fix.

First report is 100% free. No upsell, no obligation — I just want feedback.

Visit :- innovaterow.com

Submit your website . Get Report Delivered in 48 hours.

https://preview.redd.it/gc9yemb2f9wg1.png?width=1866&format=png&auto=webp&s=ee91a790a7eef3651b43278033866495fcfb6973

Got some feedback from Reddit. Tried a few things. It worked.

Before this, I was getting calls but not serious clients. People were just exploring, not ready to start.

I changed how I filter leads and how I run the call. Now I’m getting better people booking audit calls.

But now a new problem.

Most of them don’t want to pay even a small upfront amount. I ask for it because I need to set up tools and I’ve had people disappear after I already did the work.

So, it’s just to keep things fair.

What do you guys do here?
How do you get serious clients to commit upfront?

Would really value honest answers.

And if you’re here to comment random stuff, better skip this. If you’ve faced this, share something useful.

one month ago i launched my product.

the idea is simple: indian SaaS founders connect their razorpay account through official oauth (one click, read only, no api keys), and their MRR gets publicly verified on a leaderboard. no more screenshots. no more "trust me bro." just real revenue, verified at the source.

i'm an official razorpay technology partner. it took me 2 months and 4 rejections to get approved. the tech works. the oauth flow works. the leaderboard works.

nobody uses it.

zero signups in 30 days.

i've been posting on twitter and reddit, getting decent engagement (a few posts hit 200+ views, had real conversations with founders), but nobody has actually connected their razorpay and verified their MRR.

i've been going back and forth between three explanations:

the product solves a problem nobody actually has. founders say screenshots are annoying but they don't care enough to switch to something better. the pain is real but it's a 3/10 not a 9/10.

the positioning is wrong. maybe "MRR leaderboard" sounds like a vanity metric board when it should sound like "credibility infrastructure for fundraising and acquisitions."

the distribution is broken. the founders who would actually benefit from this (doing ₹1L to ₹5L MRR, actively fundraising or selling) don't hang out on twitter or reddit. they're in private whatsapp groups and slack communities i can't access.

or maybe it's a combination of all three. or something i haven't thought of.

i'm not looking for encouragement. i'm looking for the kind of feedback that hurts a little but saves me 6 months of building in the wrong direction.

specific questions i'd love answers to:

what's your first reaction when you land on the site? do you understand what it does within 5 seconds?

would you personally connect your razorpay to this? if not, what's stopping you? is it trust, relevance, or just "i don't see why i'd bother"?

if you were me, would you keep pushing this or build something else?

genuinely open to being told this is a bad idea. i'd rather know now than in 6 months.

I’ve been trying to build an AI-powered SaaS product as a solo founder, and while getting the first version up wasn’t too bad thanks to APIs, things are starting to get messy. Costs are creeping up, responses aren’t always consistent, and I’m realizing I don’t fully understand how to optimize performance or scale usage.

I also feel like I’m patching things together instead of designing a proper system. For those who’ve gone down this road, how did you move from scrappy ai app development to something more stable and efficient without burning out or overspending?

I recently made https://ghost-desk.app - a Windows overlay that floats on top of your work. Ask it something, get an answer, never leave what you're doing. It also provides u realtime info during live calls and meetings and logs your meetings if u want. Never run out of context.

It helps with preparation for mock interviews and meetings

v1 got 300+ organic users before the infra gave up. Rebuilt everything for v2.0, launched last week. Got my first paying customer yesterday - small milestone but felt real.

What's inside:

Al chat that sits over any app

Deep Think mode for coding problems

Voice input + OCR

https://ghost-desk.app - free tier, no card needed.

I wanted to know what my reddit profile says about me, and while doing this i generalized the idea and well i built a tool called True Redditor.

drop a username, hit execute and watch the chaos unfold.

This is still early and I am trying to figure out where this lands.

trueredditor.com

Any and all feedbacks appreciated.

Six months ago someone called my mom.

Told her I had an arrest warrant. Smuggling case. Police arriving within the hour. ₹50,000 to settle it quietly. Right now.

She believed it completely. Was walking to her phone to transfer.

Right before she did she went to talk to my maternal uncle.

He said: "police kabhi WhatsApp pe digital arrest nahi karti. Ye fraud hai."

Two minutes. Done. ₹50,000 saved.

We got lucky. That conversation could have gone the other way.

The thing that actually bothered me:

My mom isn't careless. She handles all our finances. Sharp, careful, uses UPI daily.

But urgency + fear for her son + authoritative voice = her brain completely shut down.

She didn't need more awareness. She'd heard "don't trust unknown callers" a hundred times.

She needed to have experienced that pressure before in a safe environment.

That's a completely different problem. And nobody was solving it for India specifically.

So I built HackIQ.

Not a course. Not another awareness video.

A scenario-based platform where you go through real social engineering attacks before an actual scammer finds you.

• Digital arrest calls
• Fake KYC verification flows
• UPI fraud traps
• Courier scams

You make decisions in real time. Feel the pressure. Then get a breakdown of exactly where you were psychologically vulnerable and why your brain responded that way.

Core idea: awareness doesn't protect you. Muscle memory does.

Honest state right now:

Early. Genuinely early. Core scenarios are live but I'm figuring out the hard stuff.

This is where I actually need help from this community:

1. GTM B2C first or straight to B2B? Banks and corporates have obvious budget for security awareness training. But I feel like I need real individual validation before any enterprise conversation. Has anyone here made this call successfully?

2. Retention after the first scenario The "aha moment" happens once. How do you bring someone back? What made retention work for you in edtech or gamified products?

3. Pricing in Indian market People pay for entertainment easily. Safety? Much harder sell. How did you handle perceived value problems early on?

4. Measuring actual behavior change Completion rates are a vanity metric here. Real success is whether someone avoids a scam six months later. Anyone solved outcome measurement for a product like this?

What I need right now:

Beta users who will go through it and tell me where it breaks.

Not "looks great" feedback. The kind that makes me tear things down and rebuild them.

If you want access comment or DM me directly. No form. No waitlist. I'll share it personally.

And if something like this has happened in your family — digital arrest, fake CBI call, KYC fraud I'd genuinely like to hear it. Real Indian stories are what the scenarios are built from.

One thing building this taught me:

The cultural specificity of Indian scams is a real moat.

Digital arrest scripts in Hindi. Fake electricity department calls. KYC flows tailored to Indian banking. Courier scams using actual Indian logistics brands.

No Western cybersecurity product touches this. That gap is massive and it's only getting wider.

Whether HackIQ is the right execution that's what I'm figuring out right now.

If you've built in edtech, fintech, HR tech, or security what killed your early traction that you didn't see coming? Would genuinely value the conversation.

Building this because my family almost became a statistic.

Been thinking a lot about how ads work for early-stage startups.

Most platforms today are built around bidding:

pay per click

pay per impression

compete with whoever has the bigger budget

Which works… but also makes it really hard for smaller teams to even get noticed.

So we tried structuring it differently.

Instead of charging per click or impression, we made it a fixed model and placed ads directly inside the feed as native posts — same format, same tone, just marked as “sponsored”.

No banners, no aggressive CTAs.

What we’ve been seeing so far is interesting:

people don’t immediately skip them

some actually engage with them like normal content

and clicks feel more intentional than accidental

It feels less like “running ads” and more like putting your product into a conversation.

Still early, but the shift in user behavior is noticeable enough to keep pushing this direction.

Opening this up to a few startups right now to see how it performs across different products.

Curious what others think — does the current ad model actually work for early-stage teams, or does it just favor whoever can spend more?

BTW, ours is a niche social media app, where users create their own, original, impactful punchlines, monologues, dialogues, quotes, one-liners and taglines.

Hi IH! I’m a solo founder building an AI-powered app to help users automate personal workflows. I can handle the backend and UI, but integrating the AI part has been slow and confusing. I’m curious: what practices/tools have you used to accelerate AI app development without a big team? How do you validate the idea early before investing too much in model training or fine-tuning?

Edit: Gig closed

I run a small marketing agency in Assam. I need a WhatsApp chatbot to qualify leads (that come from Meta ads) for my client(s). There are many tools available but I don't want to pay them extra and I want it to be inhouse.

Problem: I'm non technical, none of the clients are ready to pay beforehand. They want a 1 month free trial. I don't know if it's actually going to work or not. So, the budget for development is limited.

I tried to build it in activepieces, pipedream, but I couldn't.

Wanna help me {for ~₹5k (I know it's very low for your time, but I can bet only this much)} I can afford a VPS if required.

Drop a DM, if you want to build it.

So I always have issues on coming up with ideas to post on X, LinkedIn and in any social media platform.

I knew I am not the only one so asked the same on content_ideas subreddit, that post hit #1 for the day.

Then I knew its a problem and PMF should bethre, so I built a landing page to seek how many would be interested. Problem is distribution.

Its called nodraft.app

So, I would like to know your opinion on this idea and see if I should carry on with it or not, whats your take