Show IH: $50 MRR, 19 signups, 8 weeks in. I built a tax planning tool 4 freelancers after years in bookkeeping, finally had AI tools for it

I'll be honest — $50 MRR feels embarrassing to share publicly. But it's real and this community deserves the real version.

I'm Crystal Harrison. Professional bookkeeper for almost 25 years now. Owner of BookKeepXperts LLC in Austin, Texas. I still work full time, so SnapTax was built in the evenings and on weekends. I am not a developer, so I built this on Lovable, an AI-powered dev tool that finally made it possible for someone who knows taxes inside and out but can't write code to actually ship something real. I waited years to start building. It wasn't until AI tools got good enough that I finally had the confidence to try.

Two problems drove me to build this. First, the April surprise, I would get new small business clients that would come to me blindsided by tax bills that were completely avoidable. It wasn't complicated stuff, they just didn't know about self-employment tax or quarterly taxes, they didn't realize they had to pay 15.3% tax on top of federal taxes until it was too late. I saw so many people get penalties for missing Quarterly deadlines and having to dip into savings to pay big tax bills.

Second, was the QuickBooks overkill. I watched freelancer after freelancer try it, get overwhelmed, give up, and go back to guessing. It's accounting software with so many bells and whistles the little guys just didn't need, which made it very hard to navigate and keep up with. The complexity wasn't just inconvenient, it was driving people away from tracking their finances at all.
I wanted to solve both problems, real-time tax awareness AND radical simplicity. That's SnapTax.

The honest numbers 6 weeks in
19 signups
3 converted to paid
$50 MRR
90-day free trial so most people are still in trial
Google Ads running: in the learning phase
Filed a trademark , two weeks after launch a copycat appeared with the same name targeting the same audience. That was a fun morning.

What surprised me as I built this for traditional freelancers, was the audience that is converting the fastest and that was tech professionals with a W2 job and a side hustle who have no idea their employer withholding covers zero of their 1099 tax liability. That realization hits them hard and they move fast.

I am really struggling with visibility. I'm competing with QuickBooks and TurboTax for search real estate and AI citations. Both have years of content authority I'm building from scratch. I'm doing everything right , content clusters, LLM optimization, calculator pages, directory listings, press placements, but it all takes time and I'm impatient. Also doing this while working full time is genuinely hard, some weeks I have more energy for it than others.

What's next for SnapTax? May 15, I'm launching $49 personal setup sessions, each is 30 minutes with me personally to calculate their tax estimate and configure their account. Starting it myself then handing to contracted bookkeepers if it takes off. I feel like giving people personal attention, even though its a self serve easy to use SaaS platform with tons of training video's, gives them the extra confidence to be successful and keep up with it.

I am posting today partly for accountability and partly because I genuinely believe the product solves a real problem and I want people to know it exists. And partly because Indie Hackers taught me that the early stage is worth documenting even when the numbers are small.

If you're a freelancer, contractor, or have any side income, SnapTax is free for 90 days and I'd genuinely love your feedback. And if you've built something in a space dominated by established players, I'd love to hear how you approached the visibility problem.