Most recruiting tools optimize for the sender.
They make it cheaper to find developers, cheaper to enrich profiles, cheaper to send more messages, and cheaper to automate follow-ups.
That is useful if you are hiring.
It is exhausting if you are the developer receiving the messages.
I am building a small product called Reachdev around the opposite assumption:
A senior developer's attention is scarce, so the sender should pay for access to it.
The current idea is simple:
- Developers create a public profile.
- They set a price for inbound messages.
- A recruiter or founder spends credits to contact them.
- If the developer replies within the response window, the developer earns those credits.
- If they do not reply, the credits go back to the sender.
The point is not to make developers rich from reading messages. The point is to change the incentive.
If sending costs nothing, every inbox eventually becomes spam.
If sending costs even a small amount, lazy outreach starts to disappear.
What I am trying to validate
I do not want to pretend this is already solved.
The hard part is not building profiles, messaging, credits, or payments. Those are product and engineering problems.
The hard part is whether the market actually wants this shape.
There are two questions I care about right now.
1. Would senior developers publish a profile like this?
Not a CV.
Not another LinkedIn clone.
Something closer to:
- what kind of work they actually want;
- what stacks they want to be contacted about;
- what kind of companies they do not want to hear from;
- what evidence makes them credible;
- how much friction a sender should face before reaching them.
For a developer, the upside is obvious only if the quality bar is real.
If the platform becomes another place where low-effort recruiting messages arrive, it fails.
So the first validation is supply quality: can I get a small number of strong European developers to create profiles that they are not embarrassed to share?
2. Would serious recruiters pay before sending?
This is the more uncomfortable question.
Recruiters are used to paying for tools, databases, LinkedIn seats, enrichment, sourcing software, and applicant tracking systems.
But paying the candidate directly for a reply changes the mental model.
Some will hate it.
That is fine.
The target is not every recruiter. It is the recruiter, founder, or hiring manager who thinks:
I do not need to message 500 people. I need five senior engineers to actually read something specific.
If that person exists, paying a few euros to open a real conversation is not expensive.
It is cheaper than wasting hours on cold outreach that gets ignored.
What I am not sure about yet
There are several open questions.
- Should the developer's price be low enough to encourage volume, or high enough to be a strong filter?
- Should replies earn credits only when they are substantive, or is any reply enough?
- Should companies be able to message developers directly, or should the platform review the pitch first?
- Should this start with one narrow wedge, like senior backend, DevOps, SRE, infrastructure, or ML engineers in Europe?
- Would developers trust the platform more if public profiles were useful even without paid messages?
My bias right now: start narrow, keep the profiles high quality, and let developers control the price.
Why I care
I have worked around software long enough to see the same recruiting failure repeat constantly.
Good engineers are hard to reach.
Most inbound messages are not malicious. They are just cheap.
And because they are cheap, they scale until the entire channel becomes useless.
That hurts both sides.
Developers stop reading.
Recruiters send more messages.
The best companies and the best candidates miss each other inside the noise.
I want to see if a tiny economic change can fix part of that.
The ask
If you are a senior developer, I would genuinely like your opinion:
Would you create a profile where companies had to pay a small amount to contact you?
If yes, what would make it worth trusting?
If no, what part feels wrong?
And if you work in recruiting: would you ever pay the candidate directly for a guaranteed read and possible reply, assuming unused credits were returned?
I am testing this with a small group of European developers first.
The site is here: https://reachdev.io/?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=founder_validation_2026_09_02
I am much more interested in critical feedback than polite encouragement.
Top comments (1)
So a while ago, I built TUB, essentially automating the inbetween with exact match, single CV sends to employers. Though due to geographical and legal constraints, I couldnt launch it. But I did learn from it.
Employers pay a premium for recruiters. BUT they only pay the recruiter on successful hire.
So while the credit system makes sense in theory, it fails in practice, because you'd need hundreds of developers and interested companies, before it becomes useful. Same way I looked at TUB with developers and employers, you need a bridge.
Eg. outreach to developers, outreach to employers, it needs to bridge to the platforms they already use, so once the first user logs in, there's someone on the other end. Eg. start off with per-developer, or 'a relevant developer', skim linkedin and send it to the developer via DM (Company X has a question for you:... - Answer it and earn Y credits (Z in USD) you can cash out to a currency of your choosing.
that way you get engagement and they get service from day 1. Without that bridge, you wont get your first customer. Consider also sending out freebie trials to a few companies on linkedin that are searching for employees, so they can try it out, see if the developers are actually useful. Or start a linkedin for it and post 'ADA - Ask a developer anything', which is necessary business expenses if you want to run the platform. Developers see it, answer in the comment section to the people's questions, have an automated dm system for the developers "So why answer for free? Sign in, set up your profile, actually get paid for answering the questions employers ask".
You need to drive engagement, if you dont, you end up with a dead platform.