UserTourKit

Last year I shipped a side project on Product Hunt and a third of signups bounced before they activated. The fix was obvious. Picking a tool was not.

Appcues Essentials is $249/mo. UserGuiding's smallest plan is $174/mo. Pendo averages around $48K a year. At $5K MRR that's 5–6% of revenue going to a tooltip vendor before AWS bills hit. Most indie hackers I know either skip onboarding entirely or wrap React Joyride in a bunch of glue code that breaks on the React 19 upgrade.

So I built UserTourKit. Headless React library for product tours, hints, checklists, announcements, surveys, and feature-adoption nudges. MIT core, $99 once for Pro, 5 sites, lifetime updates. No MAU pricing, no annual renewal.

What's actually in it

10 packages. 3 are MIT-free, 7 are paid:

Free

• @tour-kit/core — hooks-only engine, <8KB gzipped

• @tour-kit/react — components, router adapters, focus trap, WCAG 2.1 AA

• @tour-kit/hints — beacons, pulsing dots, "new" badges

Pro

• Announcements (modal, banner, toast, slideout, spotlight)

• Checklists with task dependencies

• Surveys: NPS, CSAT, CES, with fatigue prevention so you don't survey-spam users

• Media embeds (YouTube, Vimeo, Loom, Wistia, Lottie)

• Scheduling with timezone support

• Analytics plugins for PostHog, Mixpanel, GA4, Amplitude, Segment

• Feature-adoption tracking + a nudge scheduler

Headless means UserTourKit owns the state machine, positioning, focus management, and accessibility. You bring the components. So if you're already on shadcn/ui + Tailwind + Next.js (most of the 2026 indie stack), it looks like the rest of your app on day one. No iframe overlay, no foreign-looking tooltips, no script tag pointing at someone else's CDN.

Why I went headless instead of rendering our own UI

Every tour SaaS I've used paints its own DOM on top of yours. It breaks when your design tokens move, looks off in dark mode, and pins you to a vendor's release timeline. I wanted the inverse: a library that disappears into your codebase and looks like everything else on the page.

Pricing wedge

- TourKit Pro: $99 once, 5 sites, headless, MIT free tier

- Appcues Essentials: $249/mo, 1 site, renders its own UI, no free tier

- UserGuiding Starter: $174/mo, 1 site, renders its own UI, no free tier

- Pendo: ~$4K/mo customer average, per-seat, renders its own UI, no free tier

Numbers are from each vendor's published 2026 plans (Appcues Essentials, UserGuiding Starter, Pendo customer averages reported by Vendr). $99 once is what most indies put on a corporate card without thinking, and updates are lifetime.

What it doesn't do

Saving people a demo:

• No visual no-code editor. Tours are defined in code. If a PM needs to edit copy without a deploy, Userpilot are better fits.

• No backend, no server. Zero infra to run, but no live content updates without a redeploy either.

• React only. Vue, Svelte, plain JS: wrong tool.

• No hosted dashboard yet. On the roadmap.

What I'd love feedback on

The one thing I keep going back and forth on: $99 once is the obvious wedge for a solo dev, but it might be leaving money on the table for 5–20-person teams that just want a single invoice for $299 and to stop thinking about it. If you've shipped a one-time-license product into that buyer, I'd love to hear how you priced and packaged it.

Free tier is on npm. Pro packages are rolling out Supabase-style — one launch per package over the next few weeks instead of one big bang. If you want a code sample for a specific onboarding flow you're stuck on, drop the use case in a comment and I'll write it up.