MVP Launched for Accountbalance.io in 3 weeks
So freaking excited to announce that my full SaaS MVP is now live and fully functional!
https://www.accountbalance.io/
Accountbalance.io is a web app that connects to your bank account using a secure, 3rd party API and delivers SMS bank account balance updates every day to your phone. I threw up a landing page 3-4 weeks ago to see if people were actually interested, and I received over 100 signups. That justified to me that it would be worth taking the time to build out the initial first version.
It is super basic right now in the sense that it just focuses on one thing - sending account balance updates to the users' phone one time a day.
Future features can include an array of financial tools to help make money management easier for the user, but I figure I would start with this and see how it goes.
I'm going to do a full launch tomorrow and send out invitations to everyone that expressed interest, fingers are crossed that people will actually sign up for the paid subscription. The one thing that i have literally no idea about is how much to charge - @csallen always talks about charging more than you think, so I settled on $9.99 per month. I don't know if that is too low, or too high, but it seemed a good middle ground. I suppose I can do some testing to see what works (that is, if people even sign up lol).
Thanks so much to the amazing community here, it really helped to keep me motivated.
Feel free to check it out and if you have any tips, comments or find any bugs let me know! Also happy to talk about any/every aspects of the system, so feel free to ask.
nice work! So you threw up a landing page but still needed to get people onto it to sign up, how did you get that traffic?
Yep - for testing and validation, I took out a Google ad and directed people to the homepage to see if people would go through to the signup page. From there I collected their email.
How much did that cost you?
$100 total for the ad. I stopped it when I hit 100 signups.
Neat idea! How much are you spending on the Plaid API? I have always wanted to build a product in that space but the costs associated have always scared me off.
Thank you :) . I did a lot of research initially on the Plaid API to determine what kind of costs I would be running into. It turns out that I can keep things pretty cheap by using their Transactions API endpoint + webhook to refresh account balances as they change.
The full breakdown is as follows --
Plaid cost per item / month = $.30
Initial Auth call (to connect bank account to stripe for monthly subscription = $1.50
And that's it. I'm not using the balance API because the Transactions webhook will let me know if a balance has changed, and I can hit the Transactions API endpoint without any additional cost.
Beyond that is server hosting ($5 through Digital ocean at the moment), Twilio cost per SMS message ($.0075), and ACH payment processing (.8% = $.07992, which is way cheaper than CC transaction processing fees).
Awesome, thanks for the transparency and detailed response!
No problem :)
Nice one!
Where did you get your first 100 subscribers from? Where did you spread your first landing page?
It was all from putting an ad out with Google Adwords :)
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Hey thanks so much! The use case is dead simple - remove the friction of having to log into your bank app to check your balance. In terms of the price point, like I said I'm not sure exactly how much or how little to charge, so depending on how things go the price may come down.