Somebody should check whether your price is everyone's price.

Nobody was doing it, so John G started. No company, no team, no funding round, no roadmap deck. One person, one laptop, and a nagging suspicion that the number on your screen was chosen partly by looking at you.

The suspicion

Prices used to belong to the thing. Increasingly they belong to you — your phone, your postcode, how often you order, how long you've had the app, possibly how much battery you have left. Some of that is entirely fair. Franchises set their own prices. Distance costs money. Demand moves.

The trouble is you only ever see your own price. No comparison, no argument, no way to tell "prices vary" from "you specifically got charged more."

cup.pm is an attempt to build the comparison. That's the whole idea, and it's a genuinely hard one, which is precisely why it's fun.

The quest log

✅Buy a domain that reads like a time of day. Immediately regret nothing.
✅Ship something actually useful first. A daily email of things that are genuinely free.
✅Discover Reddit blocks Google's servers. Then discover one URL it doesn't. Small victory, disproportionate joy.
🔨Build the price comparison. Real prices, real people, same shop, same fifteen minutes.
🔮Hand somebody a spreadsheet that makes a regulator sit up. Optimistic. Still the point.

What you get right now

☕ The daily dose

Every day a handful of genuinely free things appear on Reddit — apps that went free for a weekend, games at 100% off, giveaways that expire before you've finished your coffee. Easy to miss, tedious to hunt. So cup.pm reads the noisy subreddits and sends one email with what was actually free. Not "50% off". Not a trial. Not free-to-play. Free.

It's useful on its own, and it's honestly the small half of the idea. The pricing work is why the domain exists. The digest is what there is to show for it so far — and it means the mailing list earns its keep while the interesting part gets built.

Vibe coded, and not embarrassed about it

This is an evenings-and-weekends project built for enjoyment. Things get torn out and rebuilt because a better idea turned up halfway through. Dead ends get written down instead of quietly buried — there are comments in this codebase that exist purely so a future attempt doesn't waste a day rediscovering that Reddit returns 403 to Google's IP ranges.

Half of it was built by arguing with an AI at eleven at night. That went about as well as you'd expect, which is to say: mostly great, occasionally it confidently deployed the wrong file.

The promises

One email a day, maximum. Nothing free that day means nothing lands in your inbox. Unsubscribe in two clicks from any message, with no win-back sequence and no "are you sure?" guilt trip. Your address is never sold, shared or handed to anybody — the full details live in the privacy policy, which is mercifully short.

Say hello

Three doors, so things land in the right place.

about [at] cuppm.com Anything about the site or the project — ideas, corrections, hello.
screenshot [at] cuppm.com A price you want to share — especially being charged more than the person next to you. This is the useful one.
privacy [at] cuppm.com Data, deletion requests, or anything legal. Goes straight to the privacy policy owner.

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