Grow or Die
Profit analytics that joins product activity, payment revenue, and server-side AI usage
An agent can build the honest personal version: a first-party tracker, a Stripe webhook, an OpenAI usage wrapper, and a SQLite join keyed by your own account ID. That is enough to show which customers make money. The paid product starts earning its fee when the inputs stop being tidy. Analytics exports drift, refunds arrive late, model prices change, streaming calls fail after consuming tokens, and anonymous visitors do not naturally become the same people who paid. A weekend build can give one founder a useful ledger for one stack. Matching Grow or Die's connector coverage, SDKs, missing-data discipline, retention, and production reliability is ongoing analytics infrastructure, not a prompt.
Build verification: not recorded. How we judge buildability
What you give up
- ready-made GA4, PostHog, Stripe, and Lemon Squeezy connectors
- maintained OpenAI and Anthropic pricing rules, including cached tokens
- seven language SDKs with streaming, failure, timeout, and cancellation tracking
- careful unknown, unpriced, unmatched, and incomplete data states
- managed retention, backups, source health, and production reliability
Why people still pay
A profit number is useful only when every input means the same customer and reporting window. Paying avoids maintaining analytics OAuth, payment webhooks, provider usage edge cases, model pricing, identity joins, retention, and the boring rule that missing data must stay missing.
Your build guide
The stack, security requirements, and agent rules for a focused replacement.
Before you start
- Runtime and tools: TypeScript, React, Node, SQLite and decimal.js for explicit decimal calculations.
- Before starting: A representative CSV with known totals, currency and date conventions, and an agreed calculation specification.
Use these project rules and optional skill references alongside the prompt. Review each skill before adding it to your agent; the AGENTS.md export includes the same guidance.
Project rule — domain: Store CustomerMapping, RevenueEvent, Refund, UsageEvent and CostRateVersion; unmatched events remain in a reconciliation queue, and net contribution uses explicitly named included costs.
Project rule — scope and recovery: This is an operational contribution view, not audited profit. Show payment fees, refunds, model-pricing dates and missing usage; subscription receipts and accrual revenue are different measures.
Project rule — acceptance: Import a refund twice and a model call with no customer mapping; deduplicate the refund, exclude unresolved attribution from per-customer rankings and expose its amount separately.
Project rule — delivery: document real setup commands and permissions; do not claim a build, accuracy level, performance result or security certification that has not been demonstrated.
Recommended skill: web-design-guidelines — review keyboard access, focus, validation, error recovery and the readable work/review interface or HTML report. Follow the maintainer's installation instructions and match its requirements to the chosen runtime.
Recommended skill: sharp-edges — review configuration and API defaults against the app-specific invariants and recovery boundaries above; this is not a security certification. Follow the maintainer's installation instructions and match its requirements to the chosen runtime.
Implementation plan
Phase 1
Pin the working slice and create its example input: Join first-party product activity, Stripe revenue and AI usage by one stable customer ID to inspect contribution profit for a chosen period. Confirm setup: A representative CSV with known totals, currency and date conventions, and an agreed calculation specification.
Phase 2
Implement persistence and write-time invariants before decorating the UI: Store CustomerMapping, RevenueEvent, Refund, UsageEvent and CostRateVersion; unmatched events remain in a reconciliation queue, and net contribution uses explicitly named included costs.
Phase 3
Connect the working view to real saved state. Preserve imported source rows and units, use decimal arithmetic with stated rounding, and retain correction history. Missing values are unknown rather than zero; reports describe records and assumptions rather than giving advice.
Phase 4
Expose the app-specific limits and recovery path in context: This is an operational contribution view, not audited profit. Show payment fees, refunds, model-pricing dates and missing usage; subscription receipts and accrual revenue are different measures.
Phase 5
Walk through this concrete acceptance case and preserve its exported evidence: Import a refund twice and a model call with no customer mapping; deduplicate the refund, exclude unresolved attribution from per-customer rankings and expose its amount separately. Finish the README and backup/restore instructions; report unfinished capabilities explicitly.
Build the following focused alternative to Grow or Die. This is a deliberately limited personal or small-team substitute, not parity with the paid service. WORKING SLICE Join first-party product activity, Stripe revenue and AI usage by one stable customer ID to inspect contribution profit for a chosen period. SETUP AND ARCHITECTURE Use TypeScript, React, Node, SQLite and decimal.js for explicit decimal calculations. Prerequisites: A representative CSV with known totals, currency and date conventions, and an agreed calculation specification. Before integrating anything, record actual versions and permissions, plus model files or provider limits only where used, in the README; make unavailable dependencies visible rather than simulating success. DOMAIN MODEL AND INVARIANTS Store CustomerMapping, RevenueEvent, Refund, UsageEvent and CostRateVersion; unmatched events remain in a reconciliation queue, and net contribution uses explicitly named included costs. IMPLEMENTATION CONTRACT Preserve imported source rows and units, use decimal arithmetic with stated rounding, and retain correction history. Missing values are unknown rather than zero; reports describe records and assumptions rather than giving advice. Provide an input/setup view, the main work view, and a review/export view appropriate to this workflow. Preserve the last saved state if a job or save fails. Include empty, loading, permission-denied, partial and retryable-error states. Log identifiers and error categories without secret values or unnecessary private content. APP-SPECIFIC BOUNDARY AND RECOVERY This is an operational contribution view, not audited profit. Show payment fees, refunds, model-pricing dates and missing usage; subscription receipts and accrual revenue are different measures. ACCEPTANCE SCENARIO Import a refund twice and a model call with no customer mapping; deduplicate the refund, exclude unresolved attribution from per-customer rankings and expose its amount separately. Also reopen the app after an interrupted operation, confirm the saved record/export remains inspectable, and document the recovery action. These are implementation acceptance requirements, not a claim that this guide has been tested. DELIVERY Deliver a runnable repository with migrations or project-format versioning, a non-sensitive example, environment/permission setup, the exact manual acceptance steps, and a backup/export-and-restore walkthrough. Implement the working slice before optional integrations; list any deferred paid-product capabilities honestly. Do not add capabilities outside the working slice just to resemble the original product. PROJECT RULES FOR AGENTS.md Keep the domain invariants above executable at the write boundary. Propose scope changes before adding providers or permissions. Never fabricate source evidence, publish results, identity matches or successful delivery. Preserve user originals and require an explicit confirmation for destructive changes or external publication.
$ open in your agent (prompt prefilled, you press enter), copy the prompt or copy or download AGENTS.md
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Grow or Die pricing
founder$24.08/mo · $289 billed annually, equivalent to $24.08 per month · $288.96/yr
free tierThere is no permanent free tier; the Founder plan starts with a 7-day free trial.
pricing source checked 2026-08-10 · pricing source ↗
Questions about Grow or Die
Can you build your own Grow or Die with AI?
Partly. An agent can build the honest personal version: a first-party tracker, a Stripe webhook, an OpenAI usage wrapper, and a SQLite join keyed by your own account ID. That is enough to show which customers make money. The paid product starts earning its fee when the inputs stop being tidy. Analytics exports drift, refunds arrive late, model prices change, streaming calls fail after consuming tokens, and anonymous visitors do not naturally become the same people who paid. A weekend build can give one founder a useful ledger for one stack. Matching Grow or Die's connector coverage, SDKs, missing-data discipline, retention, and production reliability is ongoing analytics infrastructure, not a prompt.
What does the Grow or Die build prompt cover?
The prompt starts with this scope: Join first-party product activity, Stripe revenue and AI usage by one stable customer ID to inspect contribution profit for a chosen period. Full-product capabilities excluded from the comparison include: ready-made GA4, PostHog, Stripe, and Lemon Squeezy connectors; maintained OpenAI and Anthropic pricing rules, including cached tokens; seven language SDKs with streaming, failure, timeout, and cancellation tracking. Follow the implementation plan and its prerequisites before expanding the build.
How do I use the prompt, AGENTS.md and agent skills?
Start with the Grow or Die prerequisites and stack, then copy the prompt into your coding agent. Save the project rules as AGENTS.md in the project root. Linked skills are optional packages or source instructions for specific tasks; review their current contents and install only those matching the chosen stack. A skill does not supply API credentials or verify the finished app.
How long will this Grow or Die project take?
The catalogue estimate is weekend for one stack, ongoing work for trustworthy connectors for the limited scope. Setup, integration approvals, debugging, deployment and ongoing maintenance can add time. This is an estimate, not a delivery guarantee.
What would I give up by replacing Grow or Die?
ready-made GA4, PostHog, Stripe, and Lemon Squeezy connectors; maintained OpenAI and Anthropic pricing rules, including cached tokens; seven language SDKs with streaming, failure, timeout, and cancellation tracking; careful unknown, unpriced, unmatched, and incomplete data states; managed retention, backups, source health, and production reliability. A profit number is useful only when every input means the same customer and reporting window. Paying avoids maintaining analytics OAuth, payment webhooks, provider usage edge cases, model pricing, identity joins, retention, and the boring rule that missing data must stay missing.
What price is this guide comparing against?
The recorded Founder plan is $24.08/mo ($289 billed annually, equivalent to $24.08 per month), checked 2026-08-10. Check the linked pricing source before buying. Building your own also has hosting, API and maintenance costs; the recorded amount is not a guaranteed saving.
What can I use instead of building Grow or Die?
The prior-art section lists PostHog, OpenMeter as starting points. Review their current scope, license and maintenance before adopting one.