Hey everyone,

For the last few months, I’ve been building **MedScanner** ([medscanner.in](https://medscanner.in)) as a solo dev. It’s essentially a "Skyscanner for Indian healthcare." It compares live prices across 1mg, PharmEasy, Truemeds, and Medkart so patients can bypass hidden checkout fees and easily find 80% cheaper generic alternatives.

I decided to build this in public and share my raw data for the last 30 days. The gap between my server logs and my frontend analytics is wild, and I wanted to share my learnings on Programmatic SEO and tech stack scaling.

**1. The "Bot Invasion" (2.4 Million Requests vs. 228 Users)**  
If I look at my Cloudflare dashboard, I handled **2.4 Million requests**, **881k visits**, and served **56 GB of data** in the last 30 days.  
But if I look at Google Analytics? I had exactly **228 Active Users**.

Why the massive gap? Because to compete with giant monopolies, I generated thousands of programmatic SEO pages for obscure, long-tail medicines. The massive backend load isn't humans—it's Google and Bing crawlers aggressively indexing my database. (My highest traffic city on GA4 is literally Ashburn, Virginia—the AWS data center capital).

**2. The Bing Anomaly**  
Looking at my GA4 acquisition sources, I found something hilarious. In India, Google is king. But for my site, **Bing Organic (88 sessions)** is actually beating **Google Organic (58 sessions)**.  
My theory? People are searching for their parents' monthly medicines on their corporate office laptops, where Microsoft Edge and Bing are the default browsers.

**3. The Tech & Data Challenge**  
Serving 2.4M requests for a free tool requires heavy optimization. When a user searches, we fetch the prices from all the pharmacies and normalize the messy, unstructured data on the fly (e.g., matching "Dolo-650" to "Dolo 650 Strip of 15"), and return the cheapest final price in under 3 seconds. Handling this mapping across multiple competitors without breaking the UI is the hardest part of the build.

**4. The Core Challenge Right Now: Retention**  
While the SEO engine is clearly working (getting thousands of impressions for obscure medicines), retention is my biggest bottleneck. People search, find the cheapest app, close my site, and go buy it.

**My questions for the builders/devs here:**

1. For those who do programmatic SEO, how long did it take for your massive crawl spikes to translate into sustained human traffic?
2. To improve retention, I'm thinking of building a WhatsApp bot (e.g., "Text me the medicine, I'll reply with the cheapest link"). Do you think Indian users would prefer WhatsApp over a web UI for this?

Would love any harsh feedback on the tech, the UI ([medscanner.in](https://medscanner.in)), or the growth strategy. Thanks!

I built an aggregator for Indian medicines. My backend hit 2.4 million requests last month, but I only had 228 actual users. Here’s the raw reality of SEO