I killed my own SaaS idea after 2 weeks of talking to real people — here's what I learned about project profitability the hard way

I'm a Rails developer working a full time job. I freelance on the side. A few weeks ago I had what I thought was a great SaaS idea — a tool to help freelancers deal with scope creep on projects.

I was so excited I almost started building it immediately. Instead I decided to do something I'd never done before — actually talk to potential users first. I posted on Reddit, got 53 comments, sent DMs, had conversations.

And I killed the idea.

Turns out the problem was real but nobody wanted to pay for a standalone tool to fix it. The people who responded basically said "yeah scope creep sucks but I wouldn't switch to a new tool for that."

That experience broke something in my brain though. Because while researching scope creep I kept running into a deeper problem that almost everyone mentioned but nobody had a clean solution for:

Most people doing project-based work have no idea if they're making or losing money on a project until it's already over.

I experienced this myself. I quoted a project at 60 hours. It took 94. I didn't notice because the hours were spread across 2 months mixed in with other work. That's 34 hours of free work. At my rate that's over $3,000 I basically donated.

My time tracking lives in one place. My invoices live in another. Nothing connects them. And I never sit down to build the spreadsheet that would tell me "hey this project crossed 80% of your budget and you're only halfway done."

So now I'm obsessing over this question: how do people who do project-based work actually track profitability in real time, not after the fact?

I've been researching like crazy. Talked to a bookkeeper who tracks job profitability for small businesses using spreadsheets — he said "gut feeling isn't good enough" and that projects surprise him "pretty much every day." Talked to someone who runs a landscaping company — staged payments matched to phases. Talked to devs who just use Toggl and say it's enough (maybe it is for hourly billing, but not for fixed price work).

I don't have answers yet. I'm not selling anything. I'm a developer who's genuinely trying to understand this problem because I might try to build something to solve it — but only if the problem is real enough that people would actually use it. I already killed one idea by talking to people. I'd rather kill another one early than build something nobody wants.

So if you do project-based work — agencies, freelancers, consultants, trades, whatever:

How do you handle this? Is it spreadsheets? Is it a tool? Is it just gut feel and you accept the losses? Or have you actually solved it?

I'll be hanging around and responding to everyone. Not with AI-generated replies this time (yeah someone called me out on that last week, lesson learned lol).