building a micro SaaS for every households. Roast my idea before I waste months on it.
I have been researching pain points for households and one thing keeps coming up — expiration dates. Not food. The expensive stuff nobody tracks: Passport expires, ruins a trip Warranty expires, $300 repair that would've been free FSA balance gone December…
I have been researching pain points for households and one thing keeps coming up — expiration dates. Not food. The expensive stuff nobody tracks: Passport expires, ruins a trip Warranty expires, $300 repair that would've been free FSA balance gone December 31st Car registration late fee Insurance renewed at a worse rate because you didn't catch it in time I looked at what exists. There are apps for warranties only, apps for food only, apps for documents only. Nothing that says "here's everything in your household that will expire, sorted by what's coming up soonest." So I'm building Life Shelf Life one dashboard, all of it, email reminders at 30 days / 7 days / 1 day before anything expires. $5/month for a household of up to 5. I'm not American so I genuinely can't tell if this is a real pain or if I'm solving something people just deal with. That's why I'm here. Is this something you'd pay for? What am I missing?
Collected discussion
You can't even read subreddit rules, why should we have confidence you can build anything?
It’ll be a hard sell to get people to pay monthly for something they may only really need once a year at most.
I have helped at least 3 different people build apps like this. Some version of a receipt keeper, life locker, notifications something like that. I think no one wants this and certainly no one will pay for it. I think there are just too many free, "low mental cost", ways to handle this stuff.
I would not pay for something like this. IME, most things that expire already send some kind of notification, and for those that don't, anyone who already uses any kind of calendar app can set up notifications. That's likely to be both easier than dealing with a new thing and free (or at least no additional cost, if they're already paying for the app they have).
Based in Aus - we get notification and emails when car registration or insurance are running out, and re/ warranty - you only need to fix if it’s broken, so if it doesn’t break within the warranty period you don’t need to fix anything. Lastly with Passport, as a requirement we need to have a minimum of 6 months validity prior to your return trip. So generally people check before booking a trip.
My built-in google tasks app can do all this. What's more I can chat with Gemini to add tasks. I can get it to grill me about what things are outstanding that needs to add like passport expiration dates. And I'll follow up if I have mark things as done. Not sure how youd compete with that's.
It is a pain but not one I see people paying for in its current form. The people who don't set reminders and flunk only would pay in hindsight, but they tend not to be ones who improve on their issues. If you see it as a problem, you would address it, put it on your calendar, or sign up for free reminders. The alternative is free, if they even care enough to solve it. There may be a customer segment among the more wealthy though. People who pay assistants for extra help, including the elderly. Maybe retirement homes that have to track their retirees expirations. You'd have to talk to them though, to see if that's something they would want to pay to fix.