Part 1: The Alert I Should Have Paid Attention to

Tom was glancing over his bank records, a small frown developing on his face as the mid-afternoon sun poured through the windows of our preferred coffee shop. "Everything good?" Turning from my laptop, I asked.

He sighingly turned his screen towards me. "I just discovered I have charges for that survey platform once more. Fourth month in a run right now.

Looking at the screen, I saw $43.

"That's a rather reasonable subscription." I said. "Are you at least making reasonable use of it?"

Tom made a slight grimace. "That is exactly it. Four months have seen exactly three surveys created. That comes to practically two hundred dollars for something I hardly use."

I nodded sympathetically. It's quite a universal thing now – subscription fatigue. We all have those monthly paid services that we use every so often.

"You know," Tom said, stirring his coffee with a thoughtful expression, "it's not that I don't need surveys. I absolutely do. Just not all the time. Maybe one every couple of months for customer feedback, or when we introduce something new." "But there's no option for that," I finished his sentence. "It's either subscribe monthly or."

"Or just miss it entirely," Tom said, bobbing his head. "Absolutely."

We switched to other topics of conversation quickly enough - his son's soccer tournament, my latest gardening endeavor, the bad playlist choice at the coffee shop. Yet something about the exchange lingered in my mind, though I didn't value its significance at the time. A seed had been planted that would grow into something so much greater.

Part 2: My Own Subscription Nightmare

Half a year later, the tech firm that I was employed with held a small conference for their partners and customers. Being one of their technical consultants, I was responsible for various facets of the event, which included gathering feedback after the event.

My project manager said we need to find out what worked and what didn't in detail.

"Are you able to arrange a professional survey system for participants?"

"Alright," I said, putting the assignment on my never-ending list of things to do.

Later that night, after the conference schedule had been settled, I then turned my attention to the feedback survey. Due to the high-level event and business standards of the company, I needed something advanced and secure - something beyond a mere free tool.

I started looking into options, thinking I would find a simple solution to a one-off professional survey need.

Three hours passed, and I was still contrasting sites and becoming increasingly frustrated.

The free versions lacked key features - no conditional logic, limited question types, branded footers that couldn't be removed. Conversely, all professional options had monthly charges starting at $35, with more feature-complete platforms running $75 or more. I settled back in my chair and pondered Tom and his complaint of survey subscription. Now I got it first hand. For one single key conference survey, I was presented with the possibility of subscribing to a monthly service neither I nor the company would use again until perhaps next year's conference. So, after looking through the options, I did end up going with a month-to-month plan, but I fully planned to cancel it after we got the feedback from the conference. It was just so much money for something that was really only an ad-hoc project need.

Part 3: The Midnight Revelation

So, the night after the conference, I was going through the survey results. The data was very useful, but then my banking app beeped at me - apparently, the survey platform charged my card a fee.

Thirty-five dollars for a survey which I had taken twenty minutes to create.

I reclined in my chair and looked up at the ceiling. This just didn't add up. Not for hobbyist users like Tom and me. Not for contractors who are building run-of-the-mill client projects. Not for companies who are running seasonal promotions.

That's when it struck me.

What if survey pricing was different? What if you paid for what you actually created, not time-based access? I grabbed my notebook and began doodling. By 3 AM, fueled by late-night energy (and far too much coffee), the concept for SurveySlice was born.

Part 4: The Credit System That Changed Everything

I called Tom the next morning.

"Hi, recall that discussion we had regarding the survey subscription? I believe I've found a solution!" I exclaimed, struggling to contain my enthusiasm.

"Sure, I'm listening," he said, not sounding interested at all. I explained the idea: a credit-based survey system where the users buy credits but they never run out. Simple surveys would be 50 credits, complex ones with branching logic would be 200. Creating questions aided by AI would take a few credits per question.

The best part? Those credits are yours to own, whether you redeem them once or sign up to get new ones every month.

"So if I subscribe for three months and then cancel, I keep all of my unused credits?" Tom queried.

"Sure thing! You're really buying something, not just renting it."

The silence at the other end made me nervous for a while before Tom spoke once more.

"Why doesn't this already exist?" he wondered. I chuckled. "Probably because subscription fees are more appealing to investors than one-off purchases. But personally, I don't care about that - what's most important is what's best for the users."

Part 5: From Idea to Reality

The next few weeks were a crazy mix of wireframes, pricing models, and all-nighter coding sessions. I spoke to more friends who'd experienced the same frustration with survey tools, gathering their feedback and iterating on the idea.

We settled on three flexible choices:

• Single purchases for individuals who just required credits without a commitment

• Monthly plans for frequent users who desired the lowest price

• Yearly plans for the optimal deal.

Yet the revolutionary part remained the same: all the credits you had accumulated were yours to keep forever - even if you terminated your subscription.

We named it SurveySlice since you could quite literally cut your survey budget any way you preferred - whether a few bigger surveys or lots and lots of simple ones. It was up to you.

Part 6: The Beginning of Something Different

Now that I've been brainstorming away on SurveySlice, I catch myself recalling that coffee shop conversation with Tom, which reminded me of my own frustrating conference experience, which brought about a moment of clarity at midnight.

Sometimes the best ideas come from the simplest realisations: Software needs to function as humans function in real life. It needs to adapt to our needs, not make us adapt to its pricing model. With SurveySlice, we're not just releasing another survey tool. We're revolutionizing the whole idea of software pricing – like, you actually get to keep what you pay for, your money doesn't vaporize when you cancel your subscription, and the pricing actually aligns with how you use the product.

So it all began when one of my friends grumbled about a subscription he wasn't really utilizing.

Ready to be a part of the SurveySlice revolution? Sign up for our waitlist and receive 100 free credits when we launch – yours to keep, no strings attached