About
→ Your assistant for payment processors’ policies
Concept
Born from a personal setback in 2024, TOS Expert emerged after months of work on a doctor chatbot were lost due to payment processor policy violations. This RAG-augmented assistant is trained on various payment processor policies to help indie developers and founders avoid similar pitfalls while maintaining their fast-paced development cycles.
Origin Story
After spending months developing a doctor chatbot in 2024, the project was rejected by payment processors—including Stripe—due to licensing and regulatory concerns. This experience highlighted a common challenge faced by developers: understanding complex terms of service before investing significant development time.
Technical Architecture
Following the Replit approach and hosting on Fly.io, the project achieved significant development-time savings compared to previous ventures. Privacy was a key consideration, leading to a deliberately lean architecture with no chat data storage—enabling truly anonymous conversations with the assistant. The only stored data is back-office information for the private ad network, managed through Stripe webhooks with complete separation between frontend and back-office operations.
Monetization Strategy
The core application and chat functionality are offered free of charge. Revenue is generated through businesses purchasing banner spots on the landing page at $20/month, providing maximum exposure at an accessible price point.
Infrastructure & Development
Primary expenses include servers and Replit costs. While creating a quality application required significant effort even with Replit’s automation, the investment in these tools translated to substantial time savings. The development process was further refined using Cursor, and future improvements are anticipated through Cursor’s background agents for bug detection.
Key Learnings
- Nuxt over React: The project demonstrated the superiority of Nuxt’s stable, intuitive ecosystem, resulting in reduced debugging time and better technical debt management.
- Framework choice matters: As AI tooling improves, choosing a framework that streamlines maintenance and debugging becomes increasingly important.
- Future focus: Target larger consumer markets or foster collaborations with both technical and non-technical partners to enhance application development and distribution support.