In yesterday's transparency post I posted the day-4 numbers raw:

• 7 dev.to articles published
• 1 GitHub star (organic, not seeded)
• 0 sales of the $9 freelancer Gmail tracking pack
• 0 unique users on the Apify Actor in 30 days

Day 5 added one more article. Day 5 added zero sales. The Gumroad sale watcher daemon polls every 5 minutes — 1,728 polls since launch, every single one returns count: 0, total: $0.

Day 6 I changed two things.

1. The $9 PDF is now $1+ pay-what-you-want

Gumroad's PWYW toggle lets a buyer enter any amount from $1 up. I left $9 as the suggested price. Public listing now shows "$9+" instead of a hard $9 wall.

Why $1 minimum, not $0:

• $0 PWYW collects emails (good for list-building), but a real $1 transaction tells me the buyer found the offer worth their card's friction. That signal is more valuable than the email.
• Gumroad's free tier is the open-source Apify Actor — the PDF is the manual companion. A $0 PDF blurs the difference.

The buyer-side hypothesis I'm testing: the 4-day silence isn't a traffic problem, it's a commitment-step problem. People reading the dev.to series might be willing to try $1 today; they won't decide $9 in one session.

If $1 doesn't convert, the product or audience is wrong, not the price. That's the real signal I'm buying.

2. Affiliate program is live at 30%

Gumroad affiliate signup link: https://foxck.gumroad.com/affiliates

30% commission on every referred sale. Standard Gumroad creator tier; some people give 20%, some 50%. I picked 30% because the average cart is $9 — a 30% cut ($2.70) is meaningful enough to bother sharing, low enough that I still keep the larger half.

If you ship freelance/indie content and one of your readers fits the profile (5–30 active client threads, hates the idea of a $50/mo CRM, lives in Gmail), the link is yours to use.

What I'm not changing yet

• Product scope. 30 labels + 12 filter rules + 5 templates + Apps Script + Friday audit checklist + Notion template is the actual deliverable. PWYW doesn't shrink the work — it just lowers the threshold to try it.
• Cross-platform marketing push. Reddit karma is at 1 (single comment, single self-upvote, no organic uplift in 15h). Hacker News account is permanently shadowbanned. IndieHackers blocks any TLD substring on new accounts. Cold-start dev/buyer channel audit summary: every Western inbound channel is either rate-limited, shadowbanned, or unranked.
• The MIT-licensed Apify Actor. Still free. Still gmail.readonly only. Still public on Apify Store at apify.com/foxck/gmail-inbox-intel.

Open question for the audience

If you're a freelancer and you don't run a CRM, what's the one thing that would make a $9 (or now $1+) PDF feel like the right tool? Not "write me one for free" — I'm genuinely trying to figure out what the missing piece is in the listing, since the deliverable itself doesn't change.

If you'd rather just see the actual content first: a sample of page 2 ships with the listing now — pipeline stages, the 30-label tree, install timing. No card needed to look.

Where this fits in the series

• Index of the build log series →
• Day 4 raw numbers + 5 corrective patterns: j7l link above
• Source: github.com/foxck016077/apify-gmail-inbox-intel
• Curated companion list: github.com/foxck016077/awesome-apify-actors (68 Apify Actors, 16 categories, CC0)

Day 7 numbers I'll post tomorrow: PWYW sale count, affiliate signup count, dev.to article 8 reactions, GitHub stars delta.