I needed to send a newsletter to maybe 100 people. Nothing fancy — just updates, maybe once a week.
You know what Mailchimp costs for that? Twenty bucks a month.
And look, I’m not knocking Mailchimp. Twenty dollars for what it does is totally fair. Automation, templates, A/B testing, analytics — it’s a whole marketing department in a browser tab. If you need all that, great.
But what if you don’t?
What if you just want to write a short email and send it to a hundred people? No automation. No funnels. No audience segmentation. Just… send.
Suddenly twenty dollars feels different. You’re not paying for value. You’re paying for a hundred features you’ll never open, just to access the three that you actually need.
It’s like going to a fancy steakhouse when all you want is a grilled cheese. The food is great. The price is fair for what they do. But you’re paying for a full kitchen, a wine list, and a sommelier — and you just wanted toast and cheese.
I ended up building my own. Took an hour. A Firebase table, AWS SES, a tiny API. Costs me nothing to run.
But here’s what stuck with me: I built it because I could. I happen to know how. What about everyone else? The person who has the same problem but doesn’t spend weekends in a terminal? Their choices are still free-with-ads or full-platform-price.
Does that feel right to you?
There’s this whole category of problems that are too small for a $20 subscription but too specific for a free tool. And nobody’s serving it. You either live with the friction or you pay for a platform you barely use.
I think that’s about to change.
Think about it like this: before Instagram, if you wanted to share a photo online, you needed a camera, a computer, Photoshop, and a web host. Now you pull out your phone. The tools got cheaper and simpler, and suddenly millions of people were sharing photos who never would have before.
Same thing is happening with software. AI brought the build cost way down. A developer can ship a focused tool in a weekend. A tool that does one thing — just newsletters, just email sorting, just cash flow tracking — and does it well, for a few bucks a month.
A $3 newsletter tool with a hundred subscribers makes real money. Not “start a venture fund” money. But real “keep the lights on and keep improving it” money.
So here’s the question I keep coming back to: how many small problems are sitting out there, too small for a platform to care about, but big enough that thousands of people would pay a few dollars to fix them?
I don’t have the answer. But I have a hunch we’re about to find out.