What I Shipped This Week — Barcode Scanning, Investor Dashboard, Growth Engine & More

I shipped 10 features in 5 days as a solo founder. Here's everything.
I run Underpriced AI — an AI-powered pricing app for resellers. You snap a photo of any item, and it tells you what it's worth across 6 marketplaces using real sold data. Then you can list it on eBay with one click.

This week was one of my most productive ever. Here's everything that went live:

1. Barcode Scanning (UPC/EAN/ISBN)
   The biggest feature this week. Users can now scan barcodes on packaged items instead of taking a photo. The app looks up the product via UPC database, then runs market research for pricing — completely skipping the Claude Vision API call.

Why it matters: Each photo scan costs me ~$0.05 in Claude API fees. Barcode scans cost ~$0.004 (just Perplexity + eBay lookup). That's a 92% cost reduction per scan for barcoded items. For retail arbitrage users scanning clearance aisles, this is a game-changer.

Tech: html5-qrcode for decoding, UPCitemdb API (free tier, 100/day), same Perplexity + eBay market research pipeline as photo scans.

2. Investor-Ready Forecasts Dashboard
   Built a full forecasts page in the admin panel with:

Revenue projections — 3/6/12 month forecasts with conservative, moderate, and optimistic scenarios
Company valuations — Revenue multiple, Forward ARR, and SDE (Seller's Discretionary Earnings) methods
Operating cost tracking — Real costs for Claude, Perplexity, Vercel, AWS, RapidURLIndexer, GitHub
Unit economics — ARPU, LTV, conversion rate, MRR by tier
Rule of 40 calculation
This isn't for show — I use it to make real decisions about pricing and feature investment.

3. Growth Engine (12 New Email Sequences)
   Automated 12 new email sequences:

Churn win-back (3 emails): Day 1, day 7, day 30 after cancellation
Educational drip (4 emails): Batch scanning tips → sourcing strategies → listing hacks → analytics
Feature adoption (3 emails): Nudges for batch scanning, estate finder, price alerts
Milestone celebrations (2 emails): 10 scans reached, portfolio value milestones
Total automated emails: 35+. All triggered by user behavior, all run on Vercel cron jobs.

4. MRR Tracking Fix
   My MRR Movement card was showing $0.00 for everything. Root cause: the subscribedAt and canceledAt database fields were added after launch and never backfilled for existing subscribers. Fix: query the Stripe Subscriptions API directly instead of relying on DB fields.

Lesson learned: If your data source wasn't there from day one, don't build metrics on it. Go to the source of truth (Stripe, in this case).

5. Website Overhaul
   Social proof stats bar on the landing page (6 Platforms, 5 Countries, 10 Items per Batch, 24/7 Price Monitoring)
   Batch scanning and price alerts promoted across all public feature pages
   Colored tier badges on the pricing page (purple for Pro Plus, amber for Business)
   Referral program linked from the landing page
6. Admin Email Dashboard Overhaul
   Expanded the admin emails page from a handful of types to all 35+, each with colored category badges. The cron stats table now shows all 23 scheduled jobs with real-time counts of eligible users for each sequence.

Numbers
Tech stack: Next.js 16, Prisma, PostgreSQL (Neon), Vercel, Claude + Perplexity AI, Capacitor for iOS/Android
Monthly AI costs: ~$120 Claude + ~$5 Perplexity = ~$125/mo
Infra costs: ~$20 Vercel + ~$5 AWS + ~$0 Neon free tier
Total operating cost: ~$150/mo
Platforms: Web, iOS (App Store), Android (Google Play), PWA
What's next
Focusing on acquisition. The product is solid — now it's about getting it in front of more resellers. Content marketing, Reddit communities, and potentially TikTok/YouTube shorts showing the scan-to-sell workflow.
https://underpricedai.com