Validated a budgeting app with 364 households before writing a line of production code. Here's what we learned.

I'm Gordon, co-founder of Allontas — a budgeting app that compares grocery prices across nearby stores before you shop, then connects those savings to your full monthly budget.

My background is finance — 10 years in FP&A, M&A integration, and middle-market banking. My co-founder, Parker, brings experience in financial services and grocery retail. We're building this because the budgeting tools we wanted didn't exist.

Before we built anything beyond a working proof of concept, we conducted a market research study on Prolific, running a 400-responder study. After cleaning the data (removing inattentive respondents who indicated willingness to pay but had zero feature interest), we kept 364 valid responses.

The headline numbers:

• 72.8% rated the concept 4 or 5 out of 5 on interest

• 56.0% named real-time grocery price comparison as the single most important feature — more than 4x the next-highest feature

• 53.3% would pay above a free tier; average WTP among payers was $7.45

• 84.2% of high-pain users (3+ frustrations with current tools) rated the concept high interest

• Couples managing shared spending (with or without kids) both rated ~78%, broadening our target audience beyond family-only positioning

What surprised us:

The feature dominance. We expected grocery comparison to be popular — we didn't expect it to outpoll the next feature by more than 4 to 1. Most budgeting categories we considered (auto-categorization, AI insights, calendar planning) all clustered between 4-12%. Grocery comparison stood alone at 56%.

The implication for product strategy: lead grocery, layer budgeting underneath. Don't position it as a budgeting app that happens to have grocery features. Position it as a grocery-first product that connects to your money.

Where we are now:

Working proof of concept with the comparison engine running. Currently refining canonical data normalization across retailers (the work that determines whether a "Kroger Whole Milk 1 gal" matches a "Walmart Great Value Milk 1 gal" cleanly enough to compare apples to apples). Funding the launch through Kickstarter — going live in the coming weeks.

My actual question for the community:

If you've launched a freemium consumer subscription app, what was the single biggest thing you got wrong about your free-to-paid conversion math? I'm trying to set realistic expectations for our subscription economics post-launch and would rather absorb hard-won lessons than learn them the slow way.

Looking forward to being part of the IH community.