Case Study
Most "we learned a lot" posts skip the actual mistakes. This is the specific, unflattering breakdown of what broke GrowsChat v1, and the decisions that shaped the rebuild.
11 months
Time v1 stayed live
$250
Peak monthly server cost
$0
Revenue at shutdown
What actually broke it
01
No rate limiting, anywhere
Free users could hammer the most expensive part of the infrastructure, voice and video calls, with zero limits. That directly drove the cost blowup.
02
No monetization plan
There was no free tier, no paid tier, no plan to offset infrastructure cost at all. Every user was pure cost, with no revenue on the other side.
03
Fully open source, by default
The entire codebase was public with no strategic reason for it to be. It gave away the product with nothing protecting the business behind it.
04
No SEO fundamentals
No robots.txt, no sitemap, nothing structured for discovery. Growth depended entirely on people already knowing the app existed.
What v2 does differently
01
Hard rate limits
Free voice and video calls are capped at 10 minutes, enforced server side, no exceptions.
02
Revenue from day one
A free tier with light ads, plus a paid tier for people who want more, built in before launch, not bolted on after.
03
Closed source
The codebase is private. What's public now is the story of building it, not the code itself.
04
SEO built in from the start
Sitemap, robots.txt, and structured content from day one, not an afterthought once growth stalled.
This is the version I actually stand behind
