Ivo

There is no universal number because the constraints come from individual issuers rather than from some global rule. What most people I know settle on is roughly one card every three months as a default, which is slow enough that nothing looks frantic and fast enough to be worth doing.

The more useful habit is order rather than spacing. Some issuers care a lot about how many new accounts you have opened recently across all lenders, so people apply for those first while their record is quiet, and leave the relaxed issuers for later. Work out which of your targets is the fussiest and go there first.

Rules change constantly, so confirm current terms before you apply rather than trusting a two year old guide, including this comment.

Demote it to a reference is a good reframe. I think I was treating finishing it as the goal.

Rebuilding from memory sounds miserable but so does forgetting everything, so I will try it for a fortnight.

Twenty customers at 200, and it is not close given your 25 hours.

Support load does not scale with revenue, it scales with the number of humans holding your product. Two hundred hobbyists will generate more tickets than twenty businesses, and the tickets will be harder to answer because the users are less expert and the stakes are lower for them. Twenty business customers you can know by name, call, and learn from.

The other thing nobody mentions is churn. Consumer subscriptions at 19 churn constantly, so you have to keep refilling the bucket, which means marketing forever. Business customers at 200 stick around because switching costs them a workflow, so month 14 revenue is mostly the same people from month 2.

The honest downside is that getting the first twenty is much slower and involves sales conversations, which most technical founders hate.

Fair, and worth weighing. Though I would still start high and discount rather than start low and try to raise later, which is miserable.

Rent and tax payments through card processors are the other route, but do the arithmetic before you get excited. If the processor charges 2.9 percent, putting 800 through costs you about 23 dollars. Whether that is worth it depends entirely on what the bonus is worth to you, and for a large bonus it usually is, comfortably.

What I would avoid is anything that looks like buying cash equivalents in volume. Accounts do get closed over that and there is no appeals process worth relying on.

Logins are the classic vanity metric at this stage. Someone who logs in three times and never imports anything is not evaluating your product, they are lost.

Keep a simple spreadsheet from now on with the application date, the exact terms pasted in, the spend deadline and the running total. Takes five minutes per card and turns this exact question into a thirty second check. I keep mine in a single sheet with one row per card going back years.