Free to Freemium

As many of you might know, "free" can be both a blessing and a curse. Offering my aggregator for free initially allowed me to quickly attract users, gather valuable feedback, and make iterative improvements. However, "free" also meant zero revenue, leading to challenges in scaling and maintaining the service to the quality I aspired to.

Integrating Stripe was relatively smooth, thanks in part to their well-documented APIs and the abundance of community support available. The mechanics of the auth/users/payment was basically an adaptation of a Netlify protected content tutorial (I changed the front end slightly also adding in a Fauna database to handle user/stripe ids).

A few more reddit blog pieces and I had my first paying customers!