Hi! I’m Dara Kestrel (@dara@harrowfen.social and @dara@bellcastle.net), who builds Umberwick, the meal-logging app for people who mostly cook at home. Twice a year I write down what actually moved the line above, and what only felt like it did.
The short version of H1: revenue crossed $11,430 MRR in late June, up from $8,120 on New Year’s Day. That is a 40.8% half, which sounds heroic until you notice that 3.5 points of it came from a single price change and another 6 from annual plans that had simply been sitting there un-renewed since 2022.
Win: the rebuild finally paid for itself
The eighteen flat months in the middle of that chart have a name in my head, and it is not a kind one. I rewrote the logging engine twice, shipped almost nothing users could see, and watched churn hold at 4.1% a month the whole time. What the rebuild bought was a sync layer that stopped losing entries — and support volume fell by roughly two thirds within a quarter of shipping it. That drop is the reason the second half of the curve looks the way it does.
Struggle: pricing the annual plan
Umberwick 2 launched with a $34.99 annual tier alongside the $4.49 monthly one, and for six weeks I was convinced I had priced it wrong. Monthly conversions dipped 11% the week the annual plan appeared. They recovered, but slowly, and the lesson I keep relearning is that a pricing page change takes an entire renewal cycle before the number it produces means anything at all.
Next up for H2: a proper import tool, a recipe scaler that people have asked for since 2021, and — if I can keep support under an hour a day — the first contractor I’ve ever paid out of this thing.
Written in Harrowfen, over two mornings and a great deal of coffee.