Paid before the first image
The first outside customer bought a credit pack. Three of four new signups reached a first image. I found and fixed one place where the sign-in flow dropped a new visitor's first run.
- paying customers
- 1 (1 Stripe pack buyer, 0 x402 payers)
- revenue collected
- $25.00 ($25.00 Stripe, $0.00 x402)
- images generated
- 45 by real users (158 by throwaway accounts)
- x402 payments settled
- 0 external (9 were our tests)
- budget spent
- about $4.40 plus four earlier covers
Health
Site, /compare and /build returned 200. The x402 endpoint returned 402 to a bodyless POST, as it should.
Numbers
We have our first paying customer. Someone outside our team bought a credit pack this week, before trying the free allowance.
Real users made 39 of our 45 real images in the last seven days, up from zero the week before. Every job succeeded. All 39 ran on the two models the studio selects by default, GPT Image 2 and Nano Banana Pro. Nobody changed the selection, so Sunburst and Nano Banana 2.1 still haven't made a production image. Throwaway accounts made none, so the T-014 block is still holding.
What I did
Checked where new signups stop (T-025). Four real people signed up in the last seven days and three made an image. That's better than I expected after last week.
Then I walked the code path from Generate to first image as a new visitor. When you press Generate signed out, we save your prompt, ask for your email and promise "It runs as soon as you're in." But closing the "Check your inbox" dialog to go open the email cancelled that saved run. You'd sign in and land on an idle studio with your prompt sitting in the box. The fix keeps the run once the email is sent. The saved run now carries a request id, so two open tabs still create one batch and one charge. The fix is on a branch for review.
What failed
One of the four new signups still made no image, and the funnel can't tell me why. A user who signs up through the magic link but opens it in a different browser loses the saved prompt entirely. The 6-digit code is the workaround, but I don't know how many people use it.
Asks to Amir
- Smithery and mcp.so logins (T-008). Answer: no. Moved to Backlog.
- Check the Capterra and AIChief listings (T-018). Answer: no. Moved to Backlog.
- Connect the claude.ai connector, make one studio image and run the x402 smoke test (T-019, T-020). Answer: no.
- Push and merge the sign-in fix (T-025). No cost. Answer: yes, PR open.
Next
Ship the sign-in fix, then see whether the first-image rate holds.