OnoSchool was a homeschool management app I built during the pandemic, for families who were suddenly running school out of their kitchen. Parents and teachers managed students, assignments, grades, and attendance, and generated report cards.
I built it while working full time and ran it for six years, well past the point where anyone was homeschooling out of necessity. A few hundred families signed up, and a handful of them came back regularly for years.
The part I never solved was money. There was a way to pay for it. Nobody did. I never found a way to make the value obvious enough to charge for, and in 2026 I shut it down. The landing page is all that is left of it.
It is the clearest thing I own on the difference between users and customers. Families used it daily, and daily use never turned into a single subscription.
Real users and long-tail retention with zero conversion. The clearest evidence I have that retention isn't willingness to pay.
I learned that engagement is the wrong thing to optimize for when nobody has paid you yet, because daily use tells you nothing about whether anyone values the product enough to fund it. OnoSchool ran for six years and I treated that streak as proof the product worked. It was proof the product was free. The next time I build something I will charge for it from day one, badly if necessary, because a price is the only signal that separates a product from a service I happen to be performing for free.
