Tallyby Outpost

Theme

Start for free

Developer tools

For SaaS boilerplates: which build-in-public posts, videos and affiliates sell copies.

A boilerplate is sold once to developers who want to ship faster, through build-in-public posts, YouTube walkthroughs and affiliates, with the maker's own feed often doing much of the work. Tally ties each sale to the visit behind it, so a thread that went viral and a quiet affiliate are compared on copies sold.

Start for free

14 days free, no card needed.

01How they sell

  • One-offA licence bought once with lifetime updates and repository access; a higher tier adds more features or a team licence.
  • SubscriptionSome kits sell yearly access to updates, renewing on the purchase date.

02Payments it reads

  • Lemon SqueezyCheckout links with the visitor's id in custom data; orders and refunds are read.
  • StripePayment Links on the landing page are tagged automatically in cookie mode; Checkout payments and refunds are read.
  • PolarDeveloper-focused kits sell through Polar; orders, refunds and lost disputes are read.

What Tally can't read

  • Access to the private repository after purchase isn't read; Tally sees the payment, not the git clone.
  • Copies sold on a template marketplace that pays you out aren't read.
  • Affiliate commissions you pay outside your provider aren't read, though the affiliate's buyers are.

03Where buyers come from

  • XBuild-in-public threads showing a launch made with the kit send developers ready to buy that day.
  • YouTube walkthroughsVideos building a product with the kit send viewers who have already seen every file.
  • AffiliatesMakers who use the kit recommend it with affiliate links; a UTM per affiliate counts their sales.
  • Indie hacker communitiesForums and Discord servers for indie hackers pass the link around.
  • Stack searchesSearches for a starter kit for a given stack bring developers comparing a few.

04What Tally answers

  1. Which X thread or video sold copies?

    Referrers and campaigns each carry the revenue of the buyers credited to them; give each thread and video description a UTM and every one gets its own row.

    Sources with revenue

  2. Do buyers read the docs before paying?

    What they read shows engaged time and scroll depth per page for buyers and everyone else; if buyers read the docs and the feature list to the end, those pages are part of the pitch.

    What they read

  3. How long do developers think before buying?

    Path to purchase gives the median time and the share who buy on the first visit; a launch thread tends to bring same-day buyers, a comparison search buyers who return.

    Path to purchase

  4. Which affiliate brought this sale?

    The sale's receipt names the credited visit, its campaign and the method that linked the payment, so an affiliate's claim can be checked against the evidence.

    Receipts

  5. What happens on the site during a launch?

    The live view shows who is on the site at that moment, with source and location, so a launch thread's traffic can be watched as it lands.

    Live

05Numbers worth watching

Revenue by source
Revenue behind each thread, video and affiliate, the only ranking that matters for a one-off sale.
First-visit buyers
How many buy on their first visit, high when a thread shows the kit shipping something real.
Refunds and chargebacks
Refunds and chargebacks by source, for kits that offer money back after a look at the code.
Scroll depth
How far visitors get down a long landing page of features, buyers against the rest.

06An example

Example

Reading time

38s

median per pageview

Scroll depth

59%

average depth, of 27,219 views measured

Read to the end

27%

of measured views reached 90% or more

What they read

29,268 pageviews · last 30 days

Open a page to see how far down people read it, and how buyers read it before paying.

  2. /pricing5,527 views78% scrolled on average58s reading time, median

    58s

    reading time, median per view

    78%

    scrolled, on average

    5,527 views · 5,195 with a measured depth

    How far down they read

    Share of measured views that scrolled at least this far

    1. 25% — reached a quarter of the page:95%
    2. 50% — reached half of the page:84%
    3. 75% — reached three quarters of the page:69%
    4. 90%+ — reached the end of the page:48%

    Buyers before paying vs didn't buy

    • Buyers, before paying149 views · 107 buyers96% scrolled on average,1m 41s reading time, median
    • Didn't buy5,343 views · 3,816 visitors61% scrolled on average,44s reading time, median

    35 views by buyers after paying are left out of both.

    Buyers are visitors whose first sale came after viewing this page; only their views before that payment count.

Reading time runs only while the tab is visible and the visitor is active; it's the median per view. A view with no engagement report counts as 0s of reading. Its scroll depth is unknown, so it's left out of every scroll figure rather than counted as 0%. 27,219 of 29,268 pageviews have a measured depth.

Fig. 1What they read on the example site, buyers against everyone else. For a boilerplate, see whether buyers scroll through the feature list and docs further than browsers do.

07Setting up

  1. Next.jsIf the landing page is built with the kit itself in Next.js, put the tag in the root layout once.
  2. Lemon SqueezyWhen building the checkout link, add tally_visitor_id to the custom data, so each sale links with high confidence.
  3. Give every affiliate a UTM-tagged link, and add UTMs to the links in your own posts and video descriptions.

08Questions

  • We use Stripe Payment Links on the landing page. Do they link?

    Yes. In cookie mode the snippet tags Stripe Payment Links on the page automatically, so each purchase carries the visitor's id.

  • We sell an upgrade from the starter tier to the pro tier. Is that a new sale?

    It's a new payment with its own receipt, credited to the last visit that didn't come direct before it, and it sits on the same customer's row as the first purchase.

  • Are refunds counted against the thread that sold the copy?

    Yes. A refund takes the link of the payment it reverses, so the thread or affiliate that brought the sale carries it.

More in developer toolsEvery business