The user isn't the buyer

RepoGuide came from a problem of my own: with AI I moved very fast on Quicky, and a few weeks later I couldn't understand my own code. I had to redo a big part of it. So I built a tool that analyzes a repository and tells you what to read, what to skip and in what order before you touch a line.

By July I had v1.0 working: the Atlas, the Expeditions, the memory of what each person understood. The developers who tried it liked it. So I asked the question I'd been avoiding: who pays for this?

Why developers don't pay

• —The pain is episodic. A developer joins a new repo a couple of times a year. Nobody pays a subscription for a quarterly pain.
• —Cursor and Claude are already paid for and open. And their agents read more code than my single analysis call. There's no way to beat them on "better explanations".
• —GitHub owns the code. It could ship an "onboarding mode" in a quarter.

Who does

Agencies and consultancies: every new client is an unknown codebase, the pain is weekly and they bill by the hour. Turning two days of code archaeology into two hours is direct money. And engineering managers at companies that hire often: they don't buy code explanations, they buy seeing how far a new hire is from their first PR.

What makes RepoGuide different —the memory of what each person understood in each repo— is worth almost nothing to a solo developer and is the whole product for a manager.

What I did with that

I reordered priorities: next wasn't more chat or deeper analysis, it was an onboarding report for the manager and wiring up Stripe, because the pricing page sold plans nobody could buy. That was v1.0's most embarrassing mistake: zero revenue by design.

What I take from it

• —Ask who pays before finishing the product, not after.
• —Users liking it isn't the same as anyone paying for it.
• —The edge wasn't in the prompts, which anyone can copy in a weekend, but in what the product accumulates with use.