Show HN: Cashbar app – your SaaS revenue in your menu bar | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Cashbar app – your SaaS revenue in your menu bar

cashbar.app

74 pointskulesh46 comments

My first thought was "oh, this will contribute to already high anxiety levels", mostly because I remember how I reacted to MRR changes:

- MRR went up a bit: "Great, we're on track"

- MRR went down a bit: "THE END IS NEAR!!!!"

At some point, I understood that it was Loss Aversion Bias [1] at play. Once I reframed MRR movements as something fluctuating and neutral, it lost all anxiety-inducing powers.

So this might actually be fairly neat if the business owner has a reasonable approach to this metric.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion

Solo founder with a SaaS, can confirm. These reactions are REAL. This is why I first thought this app was cool, and later thought that I'm fighting myself every day not to look at my MRR too often.

Exactly! Know your enemy. Thanks for the thoughtful feedback.

Any particular reason why this isn't notarised? I realise it's another hoop to jump through (and an annual fee for Apple's developer program), but given that I'm going to connect this thing to my Stripe account it would be nice if it didn't feel like it was avoiding (minimal! easy!) security checks.

For that matter, it's also slightly misleading that you don't call it out as Catalina-only. I'd love to use it (to wit, I've just paid you for it!) but I'm sure there are still lots of folks putting off the upgrade to Catalina.

(Indie game devs especially, since Steam's upload tools are 32-bit).

Or anyone using Windows software through Wine/Crossover - since Crossover only announced support for Catalina yesterday.

Came here to say the same thing. The installation b/s gives me the impression this developer doesn’t take releasing MacOS software serious enough to trust them with running code on my machine, let alone having access to highly secure things like payment gateway auth tokens.

Hey now, the notarisation priority bit has only been set for a little while, if you wanna release early/often, you can't wait around for Apple to approve your submission...

I honestly can't tell if this is sarcasm or not, but I notarise builds on commit as part of CI and it took...all of about five minutes to set up. Three of those minutes were me hunting around my desk for my 2FA phone. The whole thing is _trivial_ to automate, and I normally see notarisation times around 2-3 minutes.

Is it more tedious than just flinging something up on the web? Sure. Is it so much of an obstacle that we should give up on shipping vaguely secure software for Macs? Obviously not.

(I do have time for the argument that the $non-zero/year fee excludes a huge swath of indie/hobbyist/student developers, but that's not what we're talking about here.)

Thanks for saying this. I emphatically agree with all points but wanted to add, even if you don’t have a CI/CD pipeline already, doing notorization is trivial locally.

Fixed the notarization, thanks for bringing that up!

Your reply makes me feel a bunch better about your product. Keep up the good work!

Good for you. You always have the Internet on when you do your builds.

Would be very useful if the website had even a single screenshot that clearly showed the app experience. Yes I know there’s a video (and a rather crude clip of a screenshot at the very bottom of the page), but nothing that clearly just shows what the app looks like easily. As the author, I’d assume it shouldn’t be too hard to mock it out with dummy data rather than blurring out details. If there’s any motion, a gif would be ok, but clearly showing a screenshot with what the menu bar experience looks like would go a long way imho.

Will add, thanks for the suggestion.

Alternatively for other data you can use https://github.com/matryer/bitbar and code your own api consumer in a shell script.

is there windows sys tray equivalent? (or taskbar)

I’ve used this for that purpose, along with a whole other series of stuff. Incredibly useful.

I would love to see this also for App Store & Play Store Revenues. That would push me to pay for something like this because it's much harder to get that revenue data in real-time .

Thanks for the suggestion. The current version of Cashbar is just an initial proof-of-concept utility.

Need to get it into App Store, sign properly and think of other integrations for sure.

Me too, although currently the lowest resolution of reports from Apple via the API is daily sales, no way to get last 24 hours at the moment (which I would be most interested in).

Don't AppAnnie do that?

AppAnnie doesn’t have a special agreement with Apple. all they do is guesstimate revenue figures based on downloads/rankings.

Got it, thanks.

Recorded a quick overview: https://www.loom.com/share/412c35ddc5f944f7937629080c76d7e1

The video is awesome! I didn't know that is possible to make a preview video in Loom. So much fun!)))

Glad you liked it :)

Thanks

I imagine with an app like this that gives visibility into which SaaS services are making good revenue, it would be very tempting for the app developer to exploit that information and select businesses to start replicating. Or hand the info off to an associate if you want to keep up appearances. Very clever if that’s what’s going on here.

Thanks for stopping by:

> exploit that information

All your Stripe data is stored locally: it is not going anywhere. And I have no intention on tracking any of that.

There are plenty of tools like ProfitWell that provide in-depth Stripe data analysis for free. I simply wanted to see my own SaaS numbers. All. The. Time.

Thanks!

That is good to know that it stays local! Great app idea too. Thanks for replying.

I use CashNotify.app it seems similar

Hey @agustif, (one of) CashNotify maker here. Thanks for the mention!

This indeed looks similar to what we do since 2016 (https://cashnotify.com/). However, $2 for that app is unbeatable. I hope it'll be sustainable.

CashNotify is more pricey, but you can add multiple Stripe and PayPal accounts. It's also a bit more "visual", supports both macOS and Windows, and it's notarized ;)

Anyway, best of luck to Stas!

Hey no problem, I think it may help some of the other HN fellow users which weren't so trusty about CashBalance.

If I remember correctly you're on the official App Stores, and also are a stripe verified partner which is a great point to be confident about the proper use of API_KEYs

And sometimes being pricey in software inspires more trust to the buyer, this is also true in any product or service you might need tough

Thanks! CashNotify is a _great_ product, tons of features packed into one cross-platform solution. All I wanted to do is to have the _simplest possible_ implementation: no charts, no stats, no extras. Cashbar is a mobile phone (that can be used for making calls only), CashNotify is a smartphone. All good.

Launching on Product Hunt today: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/cashbar

Hey that looks interesting, do you have graphs in your product? I just installed it, looks minimalistic but I like to know if there is some kind of extended functionality that I am missing. Thanks

No extra stuff: just showing your Stripe balance in your menu bar on macOS.

This was supposed to be a quiet soft-launch of v1.0 that I've just published at Gumroad. Charts and other beautifications to come, thank you for the suggestion!

Is installing an app like this a good idea with regards to your anxiety levels?

Depends on the anxiety readings :) I just like to see numbers going up. It's generally upward and onward in my SaaS (https://karmabot.chat).

Love it

My pleasure.

Electron?

No thank you. Native: 2.6Mb package, 22Mb RAM https://www.dropbox.com/s/pjcz8lzuixf9a05/Screenshot%202019-...

react native + catalyst[1] would be best for you — to prepare for the future and be multi-platform, which is what we'll be releasing in my team[2] in the next few weeks.

[1] https://github.com/react-native-community/discussions-and-pr...

[2] https://standups.io

I'll check 'react native + catalyst' out thanks.

For now, I'm just planning to do another tiny native app for Win. Thanks!

No worries! You can basically have a native macOS app using JS — without using Swift, with the potential of having native mobile apps and web apps (react-native-web, which is what Twitter is using these days), all using the same JS codebase — over 90% code share. Happy to chat anytime. :)

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