Show HN: I spent 4 months building Duolingo but for your life

Congratulations! Beautiful design, very simple and appealing. The onboarding flow filled me with optimism, which I appreciated.

That said, I bounced off at the pricing. The $30 lifetime price isn’t something I find inherently too expensive, but I need to see if the app works for me before committing to it. It was weird that if I went forward with the free trial it would automatically put me on the exorbitant $3/week price. That option was repellent and got me worried about forgetting to either cancel or make the purchase. Compounding the issue was uncertainty about whether I even _could_ make the lifetime purchase after accepting the free trial.

Then I lost momentum and started thinking about how I was about to drop $30 on an app that’s just some HN poster’s 4-month project, and I have no clue how crippled it will be if (when) you decide to shut down the API.

If you’re confident the app itself is habit-forming, I’d recommend just letting people use it for a couple weeks and then hitting them with the paywall. And when you’re asking for that kind of money and using the word “lifetime”, I’d describe how you’re going to guarantee that to the user, even if they’re the only person who ended up buying your app.

Edit: Now I’m stuck on the payment options screen with no way to delete my account. Not happy about that.

Specifically for Kanji I am building shodoku.app

It is very different from duolingo though. No gamification, only two types of cards (reading and writing) every card has basically all the information about that kanji available from the dictionary. Content is sourced directly and unaltered from a couple of open sourced dictionary, so no AI or content writing either.

noted, thank you for the feedback. I will improve on this. Didn't test this case during my development phase. Much appreciated

Thank you for a thorough review. It's very helpful honestly. You raise some valid concerns I will make the following changes.

- I will add an option for the user to delete their account upon hitting the paywall if they don't want to continue. - I didn't want the app to be free to begin with as it doesn't attract serious users and also because I'm an indie maker and free users is not something that I can ultimately afford at this current stage. - You're right, I should have a way for the user to trial the app and then pay once instead of the trial being on the weekly subscription only.

As for guaranteeing lifetime access, a lot of web based products offer lifetime access and I guess it's just a matter of trusting the maker if they will support it. For my particular app I know that I've been involved in the productivity space for quite some years and only now making an app that suits my needs. I imagine myself using this for all the years to come and if I stop using it, it's self hosted on a server I own and I will keep it live forever. If the user doesn't trust that then that's completely fair and fine. No issues with that.

Lots of useful feedback, thanks again for the write up! Still building and learning and trying to be as genuine as possible.

I would like notion to support this kind of glove making perfectly but right now it’s too slow and high friction to make sense for the domain for most people. Currently it only works for people with huge friction tolerance, and it’s missing quality calendar tooling & trustworthy configurable push.