Diary of an Indie Hacker — Entry 17: The credit widget, and the phone nobody had tested on
Day seventeen: credits become visible with upfront costs and automatic refunds — and every page finally meets a phone screen.
Originally written November 22, 2025
Credits stopped being invisible today. There's a widget now — a simple "X of Y" with the date it resets — and before you upload anything, the app tells you the cost up front: a card showing the video's length and exactly how many credits it'll take. If you don't have enough, it says so in plain language instead of a generic "upload failed," and offers to upgrade right there. Under a minute of video rounds up to 1 credit minimum; if something fails partway through processing, the credits go back automatically instead of just vanishing.
The less glamorous half of the same day's work was probably the more important one: every page finally got checked on a phone screen, properly, for the first time. A hamburger menu that actually opens a sidebar instead of the sidebar just not being there. Grids that collapse to one column instead of squeezing three into a window a third the width. The calendar page — a grid by nature, seven columns of it — got a horizontal scroll instead of trying to shrink a week into something unreadable.
Neither of these is a feature anyone would screenshot. But credits meant nothing while they were a number nobody could see, and none of what we'd built meant much on a phone, which is where most people were probably going to open it first. Today both stopped being theoretical.
Next entry: real analytics — the first time we could see what users actually do, instead of what we assumed.
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