Show HN: Unlimited Web-App Testing Service starts $99/month. First test is free
Published in 2018, this chronicle by @Ana_TestRise details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $99/month.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 35 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 23 comments
Looks like an interesting service, but...
1. Testing isn’t always as easy as following a list of steps, and when it _is_ those get to be technical. Explaining those as text instructions could get harder than what most expect if they are to be useful.
2. This is a lesson learned from experience - unlimited plans rarely scale. Instead, they make those who would fit into an entry level (aka just a few tests) feel like they’re paying a premium and those who will fit a large plan not pay nearly as much as what they consume.
Not only that, but when the founders realize this they’ll have to change it and users will be upset, so they’ll grandfather them and we’re back to the beginning.
Side note: I love “breaking” new features personally and know it’s not a straight forward process. If all this aims to do is replace selenium I don’t see the need for it — selenium tests are very predictable where text-to-human isn’t. If it aims to go beyond, that can’t happen without real knowledge of the application.
I was just thinking about this the other day. I think you are on to something here. We do have test suites but at the end of the day having real people test things out is the only way to catch certain bugs and UX stuff. I mean a robot will understand everything you tell it. You don’t know how a human is going to think in which combination they are going to click.
A friend of mine hacked together something like this with mechanical turk. This seems like a much more polished version.
I hope you succeed! When I launch our product will definitely try your service out.
"Tests run on Launch plan take 2-12 hours to execute." - i normally run my test suite several times when developing and i'm sure i'm not the only developer that does this. having to wait 2-12 hours per run is completely incomprehensible and unacceptable. with that in mind, how and where do you see a service like this fitting into the development life-cycle?
my thinking is that this a late stage April Fools day prank.
Why would someone choose your service over a service such as Applause? https://www.applause.com
How do you differ from [1] Rainforest QA?
[1] https://www.rainforestqa.com/