Built Applio, a free resume builder that tells you your actual ATS score
Hey everyone, been building Applio for a while now. What got me started: most job seekers have no clue their resume is getting filtered out by an ATS before a human even looks at it (98% of Fortune 500s use one). Applio scores yours 0-100 against real ATS logic and tells you what to fix, then can tailor your bullets to a specific job in under a minute. Trying hard to keep it honest, it only rewrites based on what you actually did, doesn't invent stuff. Free plan, no credit card. Would genuinely love feedback, especially from anyone who's been burned by the ATS black box before.
Quick update: we're running a promo right now, the first 100 people who sign up for Applio get Premium free for 2 months. If you're job hunting and want an honest read on why your resume might be getting filtered out before a human sees it, this is a good time to try it. appliohq.com
The interesting part is the decision to optimize against actual ATS behavior rather than just generate a prettier resume.
How are you thinking about the gap between improving ATS compatibility and preserving what makes a candidate compelling to a human?
Good question. For us, passing the ATS is really just the minimum bar, not the end goal. The formatting and keyword stuff has to be clean enough that the parser doesn't choke on it, but the actual rewriting still focuses on making each bullet specific and results driven, since that's what gets someone to keep reading once a human actually opens the resume. We're not trying to game anything, just making sure a good bullet point actually makes it through.
That distinction makes sense — ATS compatibility as the baseline rather than the whole product. I’d be interested to hear what you learn from users as they compare the two sides. If you’re open to continuing the conversation, what’s the best email to reach you at?
The clearest thing so far is that free users mostly want the score and a quick sanity check before they hit submit, while paid users are the ones going back in every day to retarget the same resume at a new posting. So the free side is proving trust, and the paid side is saving time on repetition, pretty much what you'd expect. I'll probably do a proper write up on this once we have more data. For now I'm keeping the back and forth here on the thread so anyone following along can see the reasoning too.
That’s an interesting split — the free score building trust while the paid workflow captures the recurring use case. I’d be curious whether that repetition is ultimately what drives most of the willingness to pay.
Yeah, that's the honest answer so far, it's repetition more than the initial score. Most people can stomach doing one resume tailor by hand, but not five or six for the same week of applications, so the willingness to pay shows up once someone is actually deep in a job search rather than just curious about their number. We'll know more once we see how many free users convert after a second or third job posting.
That’s a useful signal. I’d be interested in comparing notes as you collect more of that data.
What’s the best email to reach you on?
I mostly try to keep this stuff public so other people building similar things can benefit from it too, so I'd rather just keep comparing notes here on the thread if that works for you. Happy to keep sharing numbers as we get more data.
The "only rewrites what you actually did" line is the right trust call. One watch-out on free: job seekers use free tools like devs use free tiers — heavy usage, thin conversion. The ones who pay are people already getting interviews but drowning in tailoring 50+ applications. Watch that segment.
That's a fair point and honestly something we think about a lot. Our bet is that the free tier is what gets people to trust the scoring in the first place, and the people who end up paying are usually the ones you mentioned, folks already landing interviews but spending hours retooling their resume for every single application. So we're trying to make the paid side about saving time on that repetitive tailoring, not just gating the free scans.