Most psychic marketplaces look the same behind the scenes. They rent the same white label chat software, plug in the same per minute billing, and compete on ad spend. I did not want to build another one of those.
SpiritClick is a woman owned live text chat service, and from day one I decided the software itself would be the product. Instead of licensing a chat widget and hoping it fit, we built the entire platform in house. Chat routing, advisor queues, payments, ratings, and the customer inbox were designed and rebuilt over years of shipping, breaking, and improving.
That decision changed how we charge. The industry standard is per minute billing. A customer watches a clock tick while someone types. It creates the wrong incentives: the platform profits from slowness, and the customer pays for uncertainty. We flipped the model. On SpiritClick you pay per answer, not per minute. A customer asks a question, an advisor writes a real answer, and that is what costs money. No meter running, no anxious watching the timer, no surprise bills. Customers tell us they relax the moment they realize the clock is not the product.
Building in house also let us think about the advisor experience instead of squeezing it. Advisors can be live around the clock, across time zones, and our own scheduling and notification system makes sure questions reach the right person instead of sitting in a queue nobody checks. When you own the code, you can fix the small annoyances that off the shelf tools force you to accept: clunky typing indicators, lost conversations, payouts that take weeks to reconcile.
There is a founder lesson in here for anyone building marketplaces. Renting software feels fast, but you inherit someone else's business model. Our billing model, our moderation tools, and our onboarding flow all exist because we control the stack. Every awkward white label checkout we refused to ship pushed us one step closer to a product that feels like ours.
We are still small and still iterating. The roadmap is long: better mobile layouts, richer advisor profiles, faster first response times. But the foundation is solid because it was built, not borrowed.
If you are curious how pay per answer feels compared to the old per minute meter, come try it. Your first answer is free, and you can see the difference before spending anything: https://spiritclick.com/?src=devto
We built the software, we built the team, and we are building the company one honest answer at a time. Check it out here: https://spiritclick.com/?src=devto
For entertainment only; no medical, legal, or financial advice.
Top comments (0)