ATS Verification

I am a finance manager in Dubai, ACCA, starting an EMBA at London Business School this month. Not a developer.

The rejection: last year, and more than once before that. Senior finance roles, the kind I already do for a living, applied for with a two-column resume a designer friend had made for me. The rejections came back within minutes of applying, sometimes the same hour. No human reads a finance manager's resume in three minutes. When it happened for the fourth or fifth time I pasted the PDF into a plain text editor and saw what the software was seeing: my sidebar sat in the middle of my work history and my name was nowhere near the top.

What I built: a scanner that runs the same kind of plain-text extraction Workday-class systems run and shows you the result next to your original, names every failure (tables flattened, name not found, icon bullets turned into boxes, two-column scramble), then rebuilds the resume into a single column with your exact wording and shows page one free. The clean Word and PDF are $5, once. No subscription, no signup, file deleted in 60 seconds.

How: Next.js on Vercel, Stripe, Upstash for anonymous counters, the Anthropic API for extraction and optional bullet rewrites. I did not write the code by hand. I built it with Claude Code over evenings and weekends, about three weeks from idea to first sale in May 2026, and I still ship most days the same way. Running cost is about $50 a month, most of it Vercel Pro; each free preview costs me roughly one cent in model calls.

Numbers, all real, and the scan figures are published live on the site:

5,436 resumes scanned since 2 August. 42.3% had a table the parser flattened, 26.7% had a name it could not find.

About 70 paid orders from 44 people since May, average order just over $6. Small, but it is a finance manager's side project, not a funded startup.

Free scan to paid: about 1.5%. Since I started showing the rebuilt resume on screen before payment (this week), roughly half of visitors now look at their rebuilt resume; the conversion from there is what I am working on.

Distribution, honestly:

One Reddit post with a table of failure rates got 779K views and gave me the only traffic spike in four months. The same sub removed my next post.

Google organic and direct are 60% of sales. Bing sent one buyer this week.

Product Hunt and SaaSHub badges: nice backlinks, zero attributed sales.

ChatGPT started sending buyers this week, two in one day, both landing on a post comparing AI resume builders. I am now writing for assistants as much as for Google.

Hardest problem: I cannot log into Workday to see what it does. So I built the checks from failure patterns I could reproduce (copy-paste order, glued tokens, missing headings, dates in tables), tested them against public resume templates, and published the method so anyone can call me on it. I say "Workday-class extraction", not "we replicate Workday", because that is what is true.

What I want from you: tell me if $5 is too cheap to be trusted. Several people have asked "what is the catch" and I do not have a good answer beyond "there isn't one".

I have a day job. I run finance for an energy company in Dubai. ACCA. EMBA at London Business School starting this year. So when I tell you "the resume tools market is a financial trap" — I'm saying it as someone who reads contracts for a living.

Here's what made me build atsverification.com.

The trap I kept seeing

My friend was job hunting. He paid for one of the popular ATS scanners. "Free scan" → $14.95 "trial" → auto-renews at $74-$79/month if you don't catch the fine print. He didn't catch it. Got billed three months. Chargeback fight. Hours of his life.

Worse: the actual scan was a vanity number. "Match score: 47%." Based on what? Nobody can tell you. Because the score isn't a real parser output. It's an opinion their algorithm invented to make you feel bad enough to upgrade.

That's not a product. That's a financial trap dressed as a career tool.

So I built the opposite.

What I shipped

atsverification.com — you upload your resume, and we show you literally what the parser extracted. Not an invented score. The actual structured output that Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS, SmartRecruiters, and the other major ATS engines pull from your PDF.

If your "Senior Engineer" job title parsed as "engineer senior, the" because of a column layout — you see that exact string. If your dates parsed as "2021 - " (current job dropped) — you see that. If your name parsed as your previous employer's brand because the PDF render put them on the same line — you see that.

Receipts. Not opinions.

Pricing:

Free scan, no signup, no card

$9 one-time for the full parser receipt + 12-month re-scans on the same resume

No subscription. No "trial." No auto-renew. If you want a second resume later, that's another $9. That's it.

I'm a finance person. I refuse to ship something I'd flag if I were the auditor.

The numbers, 3 months in

60+ SEO blogs shipped (one every 1-2 days, all parser-tested examples not LLM-generated fluff)

Indexed in Google, Bing, Yandex, Naver

Currently in Google's new-domain throttle window (months 3-6 is the hardest stretch)

Tried LinkedIn ads: $36, zero conversions. Killed it.

Tried Google ads: same story. Killed it.

Now: 100% organic. Patient. Compounding.

Revenue is small. I'm not going to lie about it for the "build in public" applause. Month 3 of a new domain in Google sandbox, organic only — small is what it looks like. The interesting question isn't "what's MRR today" — it's "what does the impression graph in GSC look like in 6 months."

What I'm learning that might help another indie hacker

1. Cheap paid traffic is a tax on impatience. $5 LTV products cannot survive $4-12 CPC paid acquisition. The math never works no matter how good your landing page is. If your unit economics demand cheap traffic, build organic from day one or change your unit economics.

2. Honesty is a moat in markets full of dark patterns. "No auto-renew" is now a feature. That tells you something about the category. Whatever market you're in — find the trap everyone else is running, and not running it becomes your positioning.

3. The new-domain sandbox is real and you can't speedrun it. Months 0-3 you index. Months 3-6 you sit. Months 6-12 the compounding starts. If you can't survive that window without revenue, you don't have a SaaS — you have a content marketing experiment that needs a salary.

4. Day job + side project is a feature, not a bug. I'm not raising. I'm not on a runway. I don't need this to work in 90 days. The patience that comes from a real paycheck is the actual edge over VC-funded competitors burning $79/mo subscriptions to chase a $50M exit.

What's next

8 more role-specific SEO posts (UAE HR, marketing, KSA finance, etc.)

Product Hunt launch

5 functional resume layouts (combination, chronological, functional, entry-level, executive)

Real Trustpilot review collection

If you're job hunting and want an honest scan, atsverification.com. Free. No card. No trial. No upsell carousel.

If you're an indie hacker, ask yourself one question this week: what's the trap your market is running, and what does the opposite look like as a product?

That's the whole strategy.

— Tanzeel
Finance Manager by day. Indie hacker by night. Dubai.