I built an ATS resume checker because the others were running subscription traps

I have a day job. I run finance for an energy company in Dubai. ACCA. EMBA at London Business School starting this year. So when I tell you "the resume tools market is a financial trap" — I'm saying it as someone who reads contracts for a living.

Here's what made me build atsverification.com.

The trap I kept seeing

My friend was job hunting. He paid for one of the popular ATS scanners. "Free scan" → $14.95 "trial" → auto-renews at $74-$79/month if you don't catch the fine print. He didn't catch it. Got billed three months. Chargeback fight. Hours of his life.

Worse: the actual scan was a vanity number. "Match score: 47%." Based on what? Nobody can tell you. Because the score isn't a real parser output. It's an opinion their algorithm invented to make you feel bad enough to upgrade.

That's not a product. That's a financial trap dressed as a career tool.

So I built the opposite.

What I shipped

atsverification.com — you upload your resume, and we show you literally what the parser extracted. Not an invented score. The actual structured output that Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS, SmartRecruiters, and the other major ATS engines pull from your PDF.

If your "Senior Engineer" job title parsed as "engineer senior, the" because of a column layout — you see that exact string. If your dates parsed as "2021 - " (current job dropped) — you see that. If your name parsed as your previous employer's brand because the PDF render put them on the same line — you see that.

Receipts. Not opinions.

Pricing:

Free scan, no signup, no card

$9 one-time for the full parser receipt + 12-month re-scans on the same resume

No subscription. No "trial." No auto-renew. If you want a second resume later, that's another $9. That's it.

I'm a finance person. I refuse to ship something I'd flag if I were the auditor.

The numbers, 3 months in

60+ SEO blogs shipped (one every 1-2 days, all parser-tested examples not LLM-generated fluff)

Indexed in Google, Bing, Yandex, Naver

Currently in Google's new-domain throttle window (months 3-6 is the hardest stretch)

Tried LinkedIn ads: $36, zero conversions. Killed it.

Tried Google ads: same story. Killed it.

Now: 100% organic. Patient. Compounding.

Revenue is small. I'm not going to lie about it for the "build in public" applause. Month 3 of a new domain in Google sandbox, organic only — small is what it looks like. The interesting question isn't "what's MRR today" — it's "what does the impression graph in GSC look like in 6 months."

What I'm learning that might help another indie hacker

1. Cheap paid traffic is a tax on impatience. $5 LTV products cannot survive $4-12 CPC paid acquisition. The math never works no matter how good your landing page is. If your unit economics demand cheap traffic, build organic from day one or change your unit economics.

2. Honesty is a moat in markets full of dark patterns. "No auto-renew" is now a feature. That tells you something about the category. Whatever market you're in — find the trap everyone else is running, and not running it becomes your positioning.

3. The new-domain sandbox is real and you can't speedrun it. Months 0-3 you index. Months 3-6 you sit. Months 6-12 the compounding starts. If you can't survive that window without revenue, you don't have a SaaS — you have a content marketing experiment that needs a salary.

4. Day job + side project is a feature, not a bug. I'm not raising. I'm not on a runway. I don't need this to work in 90 days. The patience that comes from a real paycheck is the actual edge over VC-funded competitors burning $79/mo subscriptions to chase a $50M exit.

What's next

8 more role-specific SEO posts (UAE HR, marketing, KSA finance, etc.)

Product Hunt launch

5 functional resume layouts (combination, chronological, functional, entry-level, executive)

Real Trustpilot review collection

If you're job hunting and want an honest scan, atsverification.com. Free. No card. No trial. No upsell carousel.

If you're an indie hacker, ask yourself one question this week: what's the trap your market is running, and what does the opposite look like as a product?

That's the whole strategy.

— Tanzeel
Finance Manager by day. Indie hacker by night. Dubai.