What I learned shipping an open-source AI companion to the App Store

A month ago Scowld was a paid, hosted app. Today it's free, open source, and bring-your-own-key.

Lessons:

• Removing payments removed more code than it cost.
• BYOK is a great privacy story and a great way to avoid running infra.
• App Review + BYOK needs very explicit reviewer notes.
• Open-sourcing forced the codebase to be presentable, which made it better.

Repo: https://github.com/apoorvdarshan/scowld • App: https://scowld.xyz