Why this exists

The resume-SaaS category is dominated by a handful of brands that monetize through the same trick: a $1.95 or $2.95 paid "trial" that auto-converts to a $25–$30 charge every four weeks — not monthly — so the user pays thirteen times a year instead of twelve. PDF and Word export are gated behind the paywall after the user has spent twenty minutes filling out the builder. Cancellation routes through "confirmation emails" that sometimes never arrive. The template gallery is genuinely good. The business model is the dark pattern.

NudgeCV is the version of that product I would have wanted to find: one flat price in calendar months, the file export available from the first paid minute, a one-button cancel that doesn't ask "are you sure" three times. If you're reading this and you've been bitten by the 4-week-billing trap on a competitor, I'm sorry, and yes, this is deliberately built for you.

How it's built

Next.js 15 App Router on AWS (S3 + CloudFront + Lambda Function URL via OpenNext). AWS CDK for everything — DynamoDB single-table, Cognito User Pools, HTTP API Gateway v2, SES, SQS, plus a regional WAF and a Pre-SignUp Cognito trigger that enforce our age-16 gate and our geo-block at the source. AI lives on AWS Bedrock with Claude Haiku 4.5; we name the model on every screen that uses it. PayPal handles all payment data — we never see your card.

Every commit on github.com/allanninal is signed by a real human. The repo is private for now, not for competitive reasons but because solo founders ship messy work and I don't need that on display. Happy to share specific code on request.

Business posture

Profitable from day one because the costs are nearly all variable: ARM64 Lambdas, on-demand DynamoDB, Bedrock charged per token. There is no VPC, no NAT gateway, no provisioned concurrency, no Secrets Manager — every component the SaaS-startup playbook usually adds "just in case" is either replaced by a cheaper AWS primitive or skipped on purpose. The result is that the unit economics work at five US dollars a month and don't require growth to break even.

No investors. No advisory board. No exit play. The honest answer to "what if you 10×?" is "I'll probably hire one person to help with support, and that's it." This is a deliberately small business designed to stay small.

What's on the roadmap

The V1 surface — resume builder, ATS scan with honesty flags, LinkedIn optimizer, cover letter generator, Kanban job tracker, keyword harvester, interview prep, three resume templates with PDF and DOCX export, public profile pages, version history, $2.99 guest Quick Optimize — is shipped. The shape after that, in rough order:

Dark mode in the editor (the marketing site stays default-light; that's the 2026 trust-brand convention).
Self-serve account deletion in settings (today it's email-based at hello@nudgecv.com within 30 days, which is honest but inelegant).
More resume templates — currently three; ten is the target before we call the gallery "complete."
A Chrome extension that captures job postings into the tracker with one click. The single most-requested feature in the category.

What this product won't do

NudgeCV will never auto-apply to jobs on your behalf, won't scrape your contacts, won't sell your data, won't train models on your content. The product's entire premise rests on the user trusting that the AI suggestions are advisory, not authoritative, and the honesty score visible on every optimization exists to reinforce that. If you spot a hallucination, I treat that as a priority bug — email me a screenshot.

How to reach me

One inbox: hello@nudgecv.com. It is a real inbox, not a ticketing queue. I read every email and reply within a business day. If you want to talk about something more structural — a partnership, a bug, a complaint about a competitor who was once a sponsor of mine — the same address works.