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Pain points by category

Every pain point in the latest ranking, grouped by market area. Each one is backed by real public discussions and opens its full evidence report.

Devtools & infrastructure

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supabase alternatives
High pain

Geographic / network accessibility — service unreachable in certain regions

Users in Yemen report that all *.supabase.co domains are completely unreachable without a VPN, breaking authentication, database access, storage, realtime, and edge functions for end users in that region. This is a recent issue (July 2026).

None of the *.supabase.co domains are reachable without using a VPN. Applications that depend on Supabase stop working completely because they cannot connect to the service. This affects applications built on Supabase, making authentication, database access, storage, realtime, and edge functions unavailable for users in Yemen.

github.com
View evidence report
best ci cd tools
High pain

No dedicated tooling to secure and monitor CI/CD pipelines

DevOps teams recognize that CI/CD pipelines hold highly privileged access to sensitive infrastructure, yet there is a lack of purpose-built tools to monitor, audit, and enforce compliance on those pipelines. Teams are left relying on generic 'best practices' documents rather than automated security tooling. This pain was raised in 2020 and remains relevant given the continued expansion of CI/CD attack surfaces.

I want my devops to be focused elsewhere but on the other hand the CI/CD pipeline has permissions to access and do many things in very sensitive places. I know there are 'best practices' documents for how to secure, but are there tools to monitor, offer compliance checks etc?

news.ycombinator.com
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datadog alternatives
High pain

No support for scheduled maintenance windows / non-24×7 app monitoring

Datadog's availability monitoring does not support apps that run on business-hour schedules. Maintenance windows cannot be scheduled, and monitoring mutes cannot be automated, making it unsuitable for enterprises with hundreds of non-continuous services.

The vast majority (500+) of the company app don't run 24*7, they have different business hours (like 9-5) but outside of these business hours, apps are shutdown. And Datadog don't support that. It has maintenance window but they can not be scheduled, the same is valid for monitoring mute.

news.ycombinator.com
View evidence report
auth0 alternatives
High pain

Auth0 reliability / outages undermine production apps

As of 2021, users reported repeated Auth0 outages (four in two months) knocking out their apps, with official uptime figures not matching real-world experience. This drove users to seek alternatives or multi-region resilience strategies.

After the fourth Auth0 outage in the last two months has knocked out my app, I'm somewhat at a loss of what to do. Through some downtime accounting magic, they are reporting 99.87% availability, but my stress levels from responding to customer emails on Friday and this morning say otherwise.

news.ycombinator.com
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Security & compliance

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best authentication tools
High pain

SMS-based 2FA as a security backdoor weakening stronger MFA

Users and security researchers note that allowing SMS as a fallback to hardware tokens (e.g., RSA) effectively nullifies the stronger factor, creating a false sense of security. This was highlighted in a 2017 discussion.

Wells Fargo also allows 'Advanced Access' 2FA authentication via SMS text message. So, if you pay for a RSA token, you get choice at login time of using the RSA token or SMS text auth to authenticate yourself.

news.ycombinator.com
View evidence report
Linkedin
High pain

Security Risks on the Platform

Users report that LinkedIn is being exploited as a vector for malicious activity, such as job offer backdoors, raising concerns about the platform's trustworthiness for professional interactions.

A backdoor in a LinkedIn job offer

news.ycombinator.com
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sso login
High pain

Expired Client Secrets Silently Breaking SSO in Production

Rotating or expired client secrets in Microsoft/Azure SSO integrations cause production outages with no proactive alerting, forcing developers to manually track expiry dates.

my company are increasingly rolling this out int

stackoverflow.com
View evidence report
sso setup problems
High pain

Blank page / silent failure after enabling SSO with LDAP and Apache

Users who configure LDAP + SSO (e.g. via mod_auth_gssapi or similar Apache modules) often receive no error message — just a blank page — making it extremely hard to diagnose what went wrong. This was reported in 2023 and remains a frustrating debugging experience.

I expected that my users can login to the server using SSO. But I get blank page instead of it.

stackoverflow.com
View evidence report

Onboarding & activation

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onboarding pain
High pain

Bad onboarding killing activation despite product working

Founders observe that even when the core product delivers value, poor onboarding causes users to churn before reaching the 'aha moment', making activation a critical unsolved problem.

I had a few customers so I know that it is working and providing value. But what's happening next is really stressful.

news.ycombinator.com
View evidence report
user onboarding
High pain

Payment + registration sequencing causes ghost/invalid user accounts

Coordinating user account creation with payment validation (e.g. Stripe) is error-prone — users can be created before payment is confirmed, leading to invalid registrations.

I want to register the user only if Stripe payment is valid... 3. Validation --> User is created 4. Pay us

stackoverflow.com
View evidence report
user onboarding friction
High pain

Software procurement ignores lock-in and exit friction, leading to costly surprises post-onboarding

Organizations evaluating project management tools focus on onboarding ease and feature lists during procurement, but systematically overlook exit costs and data portability. This creates long-term lock-in pain that only surfaces after onboarding is complete.

Software procurement decisions in project management often focus heavily on surface-level feature lists and initial onboarding ease, while entirely ignoring software lock-in and exit friction.

dev.to
View evidence report

Retention & churn

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habit tracker app
High pain

Monetisation is extremely difficult despite strong user love and engagement

Habit tracker builders report deeply engaged, emotionally attached users who nonetheless do not convert to paying customers, making sustainable revenue a critical unsolved problem.

My users say they'd cry if my app disappeared. None of them pay

news.ycombinator.com
View evidence report
customer churn reasons
High pain

Involuntary churn from failed payments goes untracked and unrecovered

Many SaaS founders are losing MRR to failed payment recoveries (involuntary churn) without even tracking it as a separate metric, let alone having automated dunning flows to recover it. This is distinct from voluntary cancellation churn and represents a silent revenue leak.

Involuntary churn—when customers are lost due to failed payment recoveries rather than active cancellation—is silently eating into the monthly recurring revenue (MRR) of SaaS businesses. A recent pain point analysis from Dev.to reveals that many founders aren't even tracking this metric, let alone optimizing for it.

dev.to
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Analytics & experimentation

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posthog alternatives
High pain

AI training on end-user data raises serious privacy concerns

In May 2026, PostHog announced plans to train AI models on developer data — which includes millions of end-users' session replays and interaction data. Users reacted with alarm, feeling the communication was deliberately misleading, and began seeking privacy-respecting alternatives.

Posthog wants to train on developer data which means MILLIONS of end-users' session replays, interaction data, metadata, etc. What's worse is they were trying to sugar coat it with their 'funny' emails (even the subject line was hella sugar coated).

news.ycombinator.com
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Google Analytics alternative
High pain

Inability to access raw / high-volume event data

Teams generating tens of millions of events per day find that GA and Firebase Analytics do not provide easy access to raw data pipelines, forcing complex workarounds via BigQuery exports.

My company is using Firebase Analytics to track events from our apps. Everyday, these apps can generate over 30-40 million event tracking lo… I have problem with finding a service which can be alternative to Google Analytics

stackoverflow.com
View evidence report
best product analytics tools
High pain

No single tool covers all core analytics needs (support, session recording, flexible events)

Users consistently find that no single product analytics tool satisfies all their requirements simultaneously — good customer support, session recordings, and flexible event/insight creation. This forces them to evaluate and juggle multiple tools without finding a satisfactory fit.

Tried out Posthog, June, Amplitude, Logsnag and none of them satisfy the conditions.

news.ycombinator.com
View evidence report
product analytics tools
High pain

No single B2B product analytics tool satisfies support quality, session recordings, and flexible insights together

Teams evaluating B2B product analytics tools find that no single platform combines good customer support, session recordings, and flexible event/insight creation. Multiple tools were tried and rejected. This was raised in 2023.

Tried out Posthog, June, Amplitude, Logsnag and none of them satisfy the conditions.

news.ycombinator.com
View evidence report

Support & success

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best customer support tools
High pain

Scaling support tools degrades quality and customer satisfaction

SaaS founders report that adopting mainstream support platforms (Zendesk, Intercom, chatbots) paradoxically worsens customer satisfaction, increases response times, and drives churn — the opposite of what was promised. This is a prominent, recent (2025) pain point.

Month 24: 8 support reps + Zendesk + Intercom + 'best practices.' Response time: 18 hours. Customer satisfaction: 43%. People leave angry reviews.

news.ycombinator.com
View evidence report
intercom alternatives
High pain

AI chat widgets hallucinate and are poor quality despite high cost

As of late 2023, users report that AI-powered live chat widgets — including Intercom's Fin — hallucinate frequently and fail to justify their premium price points. This is a recent pain driven by the AI feature wave and reflects unmet expectations for reliable AI support automation.

We are now on our forth live chat widget, they are all embarrassingly bad, hallucinate with their AI, and are almost amusingly expensive. Most of the functionality to justify a pricepoint like Intercom simply isn't needed with OpenAI's RAG agent.

news.ycombinator.com
View evidence report
zendesk alternatives
High pain

Shared-inbox tools suffer from sync conflicts and UX confusion at team scale

Teams using shared inboxes (Exchange or shared-mailbox SaaS tools like Front) hit desync bugs and confusing UX as headcount grows, but don't want a full heavyweight helpdesk. This gap between 'email client' and 'full helpdesk' is unmet.

The more people we are, the more desync issues we have. For example, an email I moved to a folder is moved back when another user syncs at the same time, categorizing emails (we use that a lot) gets reset about 3-4 times until the tag actually stays in place.

softwarerecs.stackexchange.comnews.ycombinator.com
View evidence report
chatwoot alternatives
High pain

Insufficient URL targeting / exclusion rules for live chat campaigns

Campaign URL targeting lacks negative/exclusion pattern support, making it impossible to precisely target multilingual sites where language variants are path-based. Users cannot exclude specific URL paths from wildcard campaign rules.

If I create a campaign for `https://example.com/*`, it also matches `/pl/*` and `/ru/*`. There is no way to create a 'default language' campaign that matches all pages except specific language folders.

github.com
View evidence report

AI workflows

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best llm observability tools
High pain

Unclear standard for LLM audit trails and compliance logging

Teams building AI apps for production are unsure how to implement proper audit trails for prompts, responses, and model calls — especially for debugging or compliance. The standard approach is not established, and it's unclear whether to build custom pipelines or rely on existing tools.

with LLM-based apps it feels less clear what the standard approach is, especially if you need proper audit trails for debugging or compliance. curious how teams are handling this in production are people mostly building their own logging pipelines, or are there reliable tools/platforms that help with storing and auditing LLM interactions?

news.ycombinator.com
View evidence report
best rag tools
High pain

Poor document parsing corrupts RAG retrieval quality from the start

A recurring root cause of RAG failures is data quality loss at the parsing stage. Critical information — key phrases, numbers, table rows — is silently dropped during document ingestion, leading to retrieval failures that are hard to diagnose and often misattributed to the LLM or retrieval logic.

Important information was frequently missed during retrieval, and we kept hitting dead ends. After endless debugging, we realized the problem wasn't the LLM; it was classic 'garbage in, garbage out.' We traced the retrieval failures back to the very first step: document parsing. Whether we used open-source libraries or expensive paid APIs, the story was the same. Precision was lost. Key phrases, critical numbers, and entire table rows would just vanish during the parsing process.

news.ycombinator.com
View evidence report
AI OS for teams that ship fast
High pain

Hyper-fragmented SaaS tooling kills team productivity

Teams juggling 150–250 different SaaS tools suffer from constant context-switching, underutilized features, and data redundancy. This was flagged in a 2023 HN post and remains a live pain for modern B2B teams.

The frequent switching between different apps and contexts results in a notable 10% drop in productivity, as reported by HBR.

news.ycombinator.com
View evidence report
https://www.openacti.com/?ref=producthunt
High pain

Lack of control over AI web-search and desktop actions

Users building or using AI desktop agents are frustrated by the inability to control what the AI can access or do on their system, prompting them to build alternatives with more granular control.

Lack of control You can't control the web-sear

news.ycombinator.com
View evidence report

Pricing & billing

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Budgeting app
High pain

Loss of reliable bank data import / sync features

Users depend on automatic bank imports for accurate budgeting, and when providers remove or degrade this feature, it breaks core workflows.

YNAB will partly remove direct bank imports It was a bummer to me that the famous budget app YNAB announced in a private in-app message that the direct bank data import will be removed.

news.ycombinator.com
View evidence report
ynab
High pain

Loss of direct bank import functionality

YNAB's removal of direct bank data imports (due to third-party provider issues) is a significant pain point, breaking a core workflow users rely on.

YNAB will partly remove direct bank imports

news.ycombinator.com
View evidence report
usage cost AI
High pain

Token usage metrics from AI APIs don't match billing/cost management data

Developers relying on API-reported token counts to estimate costs find discrepancies with what cloud cost management tools actually bill, making cost forecasting unreliable.

Token usage from `response.done` event does not match Azure Cost Management meter data

stackoverflow.com
View evidence report
Budgeting
High pain

Subscription fatigue with mainstream budgeting apps

Users are frustrated by recurring subscription costs for budgeting tools, especially after beloved one-time-purchase products were discontinued or moved to subscription models.

Ditch your budget app subscription. Surebeans is a modern YNAB4

news.ycombinator.com
View evidence report

Collaboration & productivity

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notion alternatives
High pain

Lack of open-source / FOSS options with full collaboration support

Users—especially technical communities and privacy-conscious teams—repeatedly seek open-source alternatives to Notion that support real-time collaboration. This demand spans 2020 through 2023, with multiple dedicated HN threads asking for FOSS alternatives.

we were curious what are some really good alternatives to both which can be collab and used, if it is OSS Solution then would be great, so we can also volunteer for the development too.

news.ycombinator.com
View evidence report
project management software complaints
High pain

Vendor lock-in and poor data portability when switching tools

Organizations report that switching costs are underestimated at procurement time, with architectural constraints and data export limitations making it difficult to migrate away from incumbent tools like Teamwork.

Software procurement decisions in project management often focus heavily on surface-level feature lists and initial onboarding ease, while entirely ignoring software lock-in and exit friction. With Teamwork, organizations frequently encounter steep architectural constraints and unexpected financial lock-in over time.

dev.to
View evidence report
jira alternatives
High pain

Jira is too complex, bloated, and hard to configure

Across many years of discussions (2011–2021), users consistently describe Jira as overly complicated, bloated, and difficult to configure — even when they acknowledge its flexibility. This is the single most recurring complaint and remains a live pain point as of 2021.

We find Jira very clunky and hard to use, although it's very flexible (though extremely hard to configure).

news.ycombinator.comstackoverflow.com
View evidence report
notion
Medium pain

App performance and cognitive overhead

Users find feature-heavy tools like Notion slow to open and distracting, preferring lightweight apps that let them focus on content rather than the tool itself.

Nothing comes close to Windows Notepad. As it opens instantly, you spend all of your cognitive load on the note itself rather than the app

news.ycombinator.com
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Customer feedback

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looona.fr
High pain

Fragmented feedback channels are hard to consolidate

Teams receive feedback from many sources (social media, app stores, support tickets, sales calls, Slack, etc.) and struggle to aggregate it into one place for analysis and action.

We get customer feedback thr

news.ycombinator.com
View evidence report
feedback tools
High pain

Chasing users for feedback and screenshots is a manual, painful process

Developers building multi-app products find themselves repeatedly building custom feedback forms and manually requesting screenshots from users. This friction was highlighted in 2024 as a key motivation for building dedicated tooling.

I got fed up with chasing users for screenshots and building custom feedback forms for every app, so I built FeedbackThing.Pro to make it easier. Now, all I do is drop in a simple <script> tag, and users can send feedback, screenshots, bug reports, and ratings effortlessly.

news.ycombinator.com
View evidence report
customer support software complaints
High pain

Pricing confusion: unclear tiers and limits

Across many SaaS products, customers repeatedly report that pricing tiers and usage limits are not clearly communicated, leading to frustration and negative reviews. This is a systemic, recurring pattern observed as recently as March 2026.

Pricing confusion – tiers and limits aren't clear.

reddit.com
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customer feedback tools
High pain

Lack of targeted / contextual feedback — no way to tie feedback to specific features or flows

Users report that most tools only capture generic, unstructured feedback and do not let teams target what feedback relates to which part of the product. Screenshot capture is also missing, forcing users to manually attach images. This pain was articulated clearly in 2017 and remains unresolved in later discussions.

All I've found so far doesn't emphasize on the need of targeting what feedback relates to what. General feedback is often required. Comments, screenshots (here another problem! there is not such tool -afaik- for providing issues screenshots to a startup, instead, the end user has to do it manually and send it, in case she/he decides to report it), but it's such a mess to define concretely what the feedback is about.

news.ycombinator.com
View evidence report

Sales & marketing

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marketing tools
High pain

AI marketing tools stop at suggestions and don't execute

Founders and marketers find that most AI-powered marketing tools only generate recommendations or content ideas but fail to actually carry out the work, leaving execution still on the user.

Most AI tools stop at suggestions. Vect AI is built to help founders and marketers actually do the work

news.ycombinator.com
View evidence report