I have a confession. I spent the last three years building software that nobody wanted.
I built cool AI wrappers. I built complex dashboards. I built developer tools that saved 3 milliseconds on a deploy.
They were fun to code. They were intellectually stimulating. And they made exactly zero dollars.
Why? Because they were vitamins, not painkillers. They were "nice to have," not "I will fire you if you don't fix this."
I am done with that.
In 2026, I am only interested in building Boring Software. I want to solve problems that are so tedious, frustrating, and soul-sucking that people practically throw their credit cards at the monitor to make them stop.
To find these problems, I started keeping a list. I call it the "Shut Up And Take My Money" list.
These are the tasks that I (or my clients) currently do manually, hate with a passion, and would pay a SaaS subscription instantly to automate.
1. The "PDF to CSV" Nightmare Every month, I get invoices from random SaaS tools that don't sync with my accounting software. I spend an hour downloading PDFs, finding the VAT number, and typing it into a spreadsheet.
The Opportunity: A tool where I forward an email, it extracts line items (not just the total) using an LLM, categorizes it by tax code, and pushes it to Xero/Quickbooks via API.
Willingness to pay: $29/mo. Easily.
2*. The "Did my backups actually run?"* Anxiety I have 5 different servers running cron jobs for backups. I assume they work. I don't know. Once a year, I manually check a few tar.gz files to see if they are empty.
The Opportunity: A dead-simple "Heartbeat" monitor specifically for database dumps. It doesn't just ping a URL; it accepts a metadata payload (size, checksum) and alerts me if the file size drops by 50% (indicating a silent failure).
Willingness to pay: $19/mo for peace of mind.
3. The "GDPR Data Map" for small devs I need to maintain a "Record of Processing Activities" for GDPR. Right now, it is a dusty Excel file that is 2 years old. If an auditor comes, I am dead.
The Opportunity: A scanner that reads my codebase (Prisma schema / SQL structure) and auto-generates a living GDPR documentation site. "You store emails in the Users table. This is PII."
Willingness to pay: $99/year per project.
Now, I want to hear yours.
I am looking for my next project. But instead of guessing, I want to solve your headache.
What is the one task in your workflow (dev or admin) that you absolutely dread? What is the process you are doing manually in Excel right now because the existing tools are too expensive or too complex?
If you describe a problem that is painful enough, I might just build the solution for you next weekend.
Let's complain in the comments.
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