I turned payments off on my product, because I found out the part I was charging for is a commodity

Six months ago the plan was a paid subscription from day one, on the theory that people only use what they pay for. I've now turned payments off entirely, and the reason isn't the one I expected.

Context: it's a job search tool for Indian college students and freshers. It reads openings off company career pages and the ATS boards underneath them rather than republishing other job boards, stamps each one with when it was last confirmed open at the source, and filters on the things that actually decide whether an Indian student is allowed to apply at all. Batch year, degree, branch, minimum CGPA, whether backlogs are permitted.

What changed my mind was finding out the crawl I'd built the business around isn't defensible. hiring.cafe aggregates from dozens of ATS platforms, covers India, and is free. Simplify does autofill free at a million installs. The half I thought was the moat is a commodity with better-funded competition giving it away, and the half I'd been treating as a supporting feature is the only part nobody else has built.

The problem is that I can't validate that half by looking at it. Career page job descriptions mostly don't state a CGPA cutoff or a batch year, so some of it has to be inferred, and a wrong inference means a student spends an evening applying to a role they were never eligible for. That's a bug that only shows up in someone else's hands.

So the whole thing is free while I find those. Revenue was never going to teach me anything at this stage, and fifty people using it badly will.