I got tired of paying $198/mo for A/B tests, so I built a $9 alternative

This hits close to home. I ran a few landing pages last year and wanted to test different CTAs. Ended up just manually swapping them every few days and eyeballing the analytics. Not exactly rigorous methodology lol.

The .NET + Next.js combo is interesting — not a stack you see often in the indie hacker world but honestly it makes sense. .NET is rock solid for backend work and the performance is great. Most people default to Node for everything just because it's what they know.

Re: your launch numbers — don't sweat the HN thing. Show HN is incredibly noisy and the audience there skews toward people who'd rather build their own A/B testing framework from scratch than pay $9/mo for one. Your real market is people who google "VWO alternative cheap" or "simple A/B testing tool" at 2am while staring at their Stripe dashboard. SEO content targeting those exact pain-point searches would probably outperform any launch day splash.

The WordPress plugin is a smart move btw. That's where a ton of your target market lives and there's basically zero competition for lightweight A/B testing there since Google Optimize died.

The pricing gap you identified is massive and it's the same story across so many tool categories. Enterprise solutions price for enterprise budgets while indie hackers just... go without or build their own janky solutions.

I've felt this pain across multiple projects. A/B testing, analytics, user research tools - they're all priced like every customer has VC funding.

Your launch numbers actually look pretty healthy for week one. That person who said "I was about to pay $198 for VWO" - that's pure validation. The challenge now is reaching more people in that exact moment when they're sticker-shocked by enterprise pricing.

One thought on distribution: consider partnerships with no-code platforms where your target audience already hangs out. Webflow, Framer, even WordPress communities. People building landing pages are exactly who needs simple A/B testing.

Your target market (indie hackers) moves fast. They don’t want sales calls — they want clarity.

A clean product walkthrough pinned to your homepage or Twitter could massively increase trial → paid conversions.
Seeing the visual editor in action would reduce friction instantly.
I help SaaS founders package tools like this into conversion-focused demo videos. Happy to connect if that sounds useful.

The pricing gap you identified is real and it's the same pattern across so many B2B tool categories. Enterprise tools price for enterprise budgets, and indie hackers just go without.

I'm building finance tools for small businesses and the exact same dynamic exists — QuickBooks charges $80/mo+ for features most solo founders don't need, so they just... use spreadsheets and suffer.

One thing from your launch results that jumps out: the Show HN flop vs. the direct signups. In my experience the best early traction for tools like this comes from being present in communities where people are actively complaining about the expensive alternative. Reddit threads about VWO pricing, IH posts about conversion optimization costs, etc. The people searching "VWO alternative" or "cheap A/B testing" are way higher intent than any Show HN audience.

$9/mo is a great wedge price. Curious how you're thinking about feature gating between tiers — is it traffic-based or feature-based?