Dev Built Debt Payoff App One Hour a Night, Found 133 Users Dropped Off at Onboarding

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A software engineer built Toffee, a debt payoff app for iOS and Android, during one-hour nightly sessions after his daughter went to bed. The app used React Native with Expo, Supabase, Plaid for bank sync, and an AI coaching feature powered by Claude Haiku. After running Apple Search Ads and App Store optimization, installs increased but subscriptions remained flat. Using PostHog to build a proper analytics funnel, the developer discovered that of 133 users who began onboarding, only one completed it — revealing the core problem was not the paywall but the onboarding flow itself.

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