Alternatives
Products that do what I built a tool to show how much ARR you lose to FX fees does
Hey HN, I started my career as a finance manager, transitioned into product management, and now I’m building my own products. Back in my finance days, while managing a £6M budget, I uncovered a £15k leak hiding in plain sight: FX fees. Today, I see solo founders making the exact same mistake. I realised most founders are quietly losing 2-5% of their revenue to what I call the Lazy Tax: - Stripe's ~2% auto-conversion fee on inbound revenue, - plus their local bank's ~3% spread when paying for global SaaS tools (AWS, Claude, Ads). So I built FixMyFX to show founders their exact leak and how to…
- 1
- 2IB
Hey HN: I'm Kaveh, the founder of Usage (https://www.usage.ai/) We help companies drive down AWS costs. Why? Because the way it's done now is a pain. Stakeholders, especially engineers, are required to spend unnecessary time manually finding underutilized or overly expensive EC2s. We believe the optimization process should be done automatically through a series of sophisticated algorithms. At the moment, there are over 70,000 AWS EC2 prices - doing that manually just won't scale at most organizations. My background is in software engineering. Previous to founding Usage, I…
2020
- 3
- 4IW
I was a software engineer at a late stage startup and was caught in a layoff this January. When I looked into exercising my options or getting liquidity, I realized the secondary market is a total black box. Liquidity funds spend a fortune on Google Ads just to find people like us. Those high marketing costs eventually come out of our pockets in the form of higher fees and worse terms. I built StrikeRates to change that. The site is meant to be a central resource for anyone navigating this. I included a Liquidity 101 section that explains the different financial vehicles because that…
Mar 2026 · strikerates.com
- 5MS
For years, I have struggled to understand my cash flow and save for the future. In addition to that, my wife has many credit cards and accounts that complicate matters. I am building a tool that connects all our accounts, helps us create a budget, and tracks and adjusts expenses on the fly. I am also sprinkling some AI magic on it for financial suggestions. I am looking for feedback on the implementation. More importantly, I am looking for more beta testers to improve the product.
2023 · financemadelovely.com
- 6IB
Hey HN, I've just begun my solopreneur journey. I've been a "serial starter" - often starting projects and never seeing them through, and I have finally finished my first project! Maybe this sentiment resonants with some of you, let me know in the comments below I built this tool as a simple no-risk method for turning more visitors into customers by A/B testing your sale promotions and automatically displaying the promotion with the highest conversion rate. Did you know that increasing your conversion rate by just half a percent can have a dramatic impact on your sales without needing…
2024 · smartsalebanner.com
- 7WB
Hey HN: Kaveh here, founder of https://www.usage.ai/ We help companies drive down AWS, GCP, and Azure spend. Why? Because the way it's done now is a pain. DevOps and Software Engineers end up spending time managing costs rather than focusing on business problems. I have been building Usage AI for almost 4 years now (4 year anniversary in 1 month from now!) with an incredible group of founding people. We started as a product just to help lower AWS EC2 costs, and now we do all major AWS services (such as RDS, OpenSearch, ElastiCache, and Redshift with more on the way) and other…
2024
- 8IB
Hey HN! I am a developer working on a startup doing lots of payment integration stuff with payment providers like Stripe. I built a tool to talk to Stripe data, just so that I can answer questions from our team. I turned that into analytics tool (sort of) to answer questions about MRR, churn, revenue etc. (https://www.dataraccoon.io/). There is a two minute demo video on the page if you want to see how it works, or you can use free trial without needing a credit card. I was wondering if you would use such a tool directly in Slack or prefer receiving messages about your metrics…
2024 · dataraccoon.io
- 9AF
Hi, I'm Robert Karl, a software engineer, cryptocurrency trader, and creator of CBR ( https://CostBasis.Report/ ). I wanted to report gains from trading to tax authorities, but found existing crypto-tax solutions were not great. There are some very fully featured tax solutions out there. I believe there is even a YC company that can solve this problem. However, I found that for my use case, which includes less than 100 trades, the existing sites would charge me between $150 and $800 for a handful of PDFs. I wasn't sure that made sense given the server-side costs to generate…
2019
- 10MA
Hi there, So a buddy a couple of days ago came up with the idea for a new SaaS product regarding gpt and image generation. We did a quick MVP that barely works, it breaks almost 50% of the time but we still wanted to validate the idea before going all in. We have almost 1k followers on Twitter together. Did a quick post describing the idea with a stripe link in the comments with a 5$ value, no landing page, and no shipped product. In exchange, the buyers become beta users. Around 30 mins later we got our first sale next 30 mins another 5$ and so on. Do we consider the idea validated? The…
2023
- 11AB
Hey HN: Kaveh here, the founder of https://www.usage.ai/ We launched a new free tool to help engineers understand their AWS spend. Why? Because the way it's done now is a pain. DevOps and Software Engineers end up end up becoming cloud accountants or end up forking over a big % of their AWS bill for a tool to understand costs rather than focusing on business problems. Previous to founding Usage, I worked on high-performance computing research at JP Morgan Chase and as a software engineer at a number of smaller startups. Here's how this new tool works: It's fully self-serve and…
2022
- 12IM
Hello everyone. I'm a relatively new developer and I started my first project to go full production recently. It is a directory of payment processors and payment service providers. It's free to use and gives detailed info on their pricing, business model, supported business types, available countries, prohibited businesses and high risk business support. So far only 40 have been added with more to come. And I allow processors to contact me so that they're details can be added to the database. I'll eventually automate this and add verification the months to come. I hope you'll find it useful.…
2025 · sourcefees.com
- 13IM
I build a lot of small products myself and I realized how many indie founders want an exit that doesn’t involve platforms charging large commissions or requiring big revenue numbers. Sometimes a project makes $50/month, sometimes $500, sometimes $0 but has a great codebase, and that’s enough value for someone else. So I built buy-startups.com, a very simple, privacy-friendly marketplace for buying and selling small online startups. It’s not fancy. There’s no commission, no listing fee, no hidden funnel. Just a straightforward way for indie devs and bootstrappers to list a project and…
Dec 2025 · buy-startups.com
- 14WW
Over three months ago, I posted my book on HN and got tremendous +ve reponse. I am happy to inform that I have published the book to leanpub as per the comments I got on HN itself! It is pay as you go model, and the minimum is $0 because I wanted to contribute back to the FOSS Community
2016
- 15
$43B in SaaS deals analyzed. Find your revenue leak — free.
Apr 2026 · agilegrowthlabs.com
- 16IM
I spent last 6 months trying to build Simple Ops [1] to democratize website performance monitoring so anyone can use it. A year back, while I was trying to measure performance for Visa List as it became a huge content website with more than 100K pages. Also as data is changing very frequently, it's very hard to keep doing this manually. I searched on google and found that all the solutions are just uptime monitoring and nothing and none of them truly measure performance. So I decided to build one for myself. But it turns out website performance monitoring is not so simple after all and with…
2020
- 17AS
I built this simple Chrome extension to always see how much I can pay myself based on my Stripe income. So now when I open my Stripe dashboard, I always see how much I can pay myself. How it works is pretty simple. You create a read-only Stripe API key (this key stays on your laptop), the widget gets the last 3 months of your revenue to calculate an average, and then you can specify your monthly expenses and adjust a tax and buffer %. Then you get a nice card that shows you how much you can pay yourself this month. It's fully open source under an MIT license. Please let me know if you have…
Jun 2026 · github.com
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- 19BQ
Hey HN, I’m from QR Code Developer, a simple SaaS tool for marketers and creators to generate & manage dynamic QR codes. It came out of frustration watching small teams overpay for bloated QR tools that lacked affiliate features or analytics transparency. We’re keeping it clean: privacy-first, no-nonsense pricing, and analytics. I’m currently onboarding a small group of affiliate partners (30% lifetime recurring commission) and would love feedback or thoughts from the HN crowd. Here’s the site: https://qrcodeveloper.com/affiliate AMA or DM—happy to share more behind the scenes.
2025 · qrcodeveloper.com
- 20WB
I was with BOFA and Chase Private Client for years before I realized that they were making tons of interest off my money and just keeping it for themselves. The funny thing is that since I had a lot of money with them they raised my rate as a thank you to wait for it 0.02% instead of 0.01% lol. Got upset because of this and made this site. It scrapes all the banks every 30 minutes so it is the most real time source of APY data on the internet. Rates are now over 3% at the high end so it makes sense to park your money in these places rather than the big three banks.
2022 · apy.fyi
- 21CS
Hi HN! Token cost has started to become a high topic of concern to all of us. I tried a few (awesome) tools such as rtk, caveman, and the recent (hillarious but effective) ponytail. What they usually do, is in-line token reduction, e.g. try to compress requests / responses as much as possible. But then it hit me (and I’m sure others had similar ideas) - just like we have routers that pick the right model, why not have something that will also narrow down the amount of available tools, skills and mcps based on repo/context? People usually accumulate skills, agents, MCP servers,…
Jun 2026 · github.com
- 22IM
I got the chance to create a whimsical game about their latest Adaptive Pricing feature, despite Stripe being a very serious financial company. I'm in an interesting place being able to be paid to make games for a non-gaming tech company.
2024 · priceadapter.com
- 23TT
I use multiple AI tools for work and also my side projects, and the annoying part was to track my costs and token usage across tools. Everytime I had to visit each tool and its respective usage setting to check it and I was losing patience and also was getting hit by surprise limits Now I know that there are already free/open-source trackers for Cursor or Claude usage, and they are useful if that is all you need. My problem is broader as I wanted one small place to see tokens, spend, subscriptions and limits across the AI tools I actually use. I was really tired of switching tabs and…
Jul 2026 · lifehacksgermany.com
- 24IB
2019 · getretire.com
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