Hey DEV community 👋
I'm Ricardo. By day I run a warehouse in Boston, Lincolnshire (UK). By night, for the last few weeks, I've been building a SaaS with the help of AI tools — and as of this week, it's live in production with real Stripe payments.
This post is partly an introduction, partly a "non-developer founder ships product in 2026" snapshot.
The product
FairTime is a meeting scheduler that finds times across time zones and ranks options by attendance, comfort, and fairness — so the same person doesn't always end up taking the 11pm or the 6am call.
The reason it exists is personal. My family is scattered across Venezuela, the UK, and Spain. Every video call, someone is eating dinner late or waking up early. Almost always my mum. I wanted to build something that rotates the inconvenience instead of always defaulting to whoever complains less.
Then I realised distributed teams have the same problem dressed up in calendar invites.
The stack
- Next.js 16 (App Router, Turbopack) — frontend + API routes
- Stripe — subscriptions, with two-layer anti-trial-abuse (email + card fingerprint)
- Turso (libSQL) — edge database for fairness history and trial tracking
- Tailwind + shadcn/ui — UI
- Netlify — hosting
Bilingual EN/ES from day one — useful for hispano teams.
Where AI fits in
I am not a developer. I read code, I can edit it, I can spot when something looks wrong — but I can't write 800 lines of TypeScript from scratch. AI tools (Claude in particular) have done most of the heavy lifting on the code I couldn't write myself.
What I bring: product judgement, the actual problem, attention to detail, and the willingness to push back when the AI suggests something wrong or over-engineered.
What I learned: AI doesn't replace understanding. The bugs I spent the most time on were the ones where I trusted the AI's first answer instead of pushing it to explain why.
Where I am right now
- Started early April 2026
- Solo founder, no investors
- No paying users yet (the honest number)
- Stripe live, anti-trial-abuse layered, OAuth verification with Google in progress
- Just submitted to Capterra, working on getting indexed properly
What I'd love from you
Honest, technical feedback on the landing page. Specifically:
- Does the value prop land in the first 5 seconds, or do you bounce?
- Is the pricing page clear, or does anything feel sketchy?
- What's the dumbest thing you'd remove?
The free tier needs no signup, so testing the actual planner costs nothing.
Also genuinely curious — anyone else here building without being a "real" developer? How do you handle the fear of imposter syndrome at 11pm when something breaks in production?
Cheers from a small town in Lincolnshire 🙏