Employees offered severance don't know if the deal is fair, how to negotiate for more, or how to model their financial runway post-exit.
Input your role, tenure, location, expenses, and package details. Get a fairness score benchmarked against industry data, negotiation scripts (e.g., push for 6 months), and a runway calculator showing exactly how long your money lasts.
Freemium — free basic calculator, paid tier ($29-49 one-time) for negotiation playbooks, legal template letters, and personalized runway planning
Severance is a high-stakes, emotionally charged, time-sensitive event. People are scared, uninformed, and making decisions worth tens of thousands of dollars with no tools. The Reddit thread shows real anxiety and desperation. However, it is a one-time event per person, which limits repeat engagement.
Roughly 1.5-2M layoffs per year in the US, but only a fraction receive negotiable severance packages. Tech workers (the core audience) represent maybe 200-400K of these annually. At $29-49 one-time, TAM is roughly $6-20M — a viable indie/small business but not a venture-scale market.
People facing severance are motivated but also anxious about spending money when income is about to stop. The $29-49 price point is smart — low enough to be impulsive, high enough to signal value. However, many will Google for free advice first. The key unlock is making the calculator free and charging for the negotiation playbooks that could net them thousands more.
This is fundamentally a calculator plus content product. Core MVP is form inputs, benchmark data (can start with manually curated industry averages), a scoring algorithm, and pre-written negotiation templates. A solo dev could build a polished MVP in 3-4 weeks. No complex integrations, no real-time data feeds needed initially.
There is genuinely no dedicated severance evaluation and negotiation tool. Existing solutions are either generic financial calculators, expensive human coaching, or static legal articles. Nobody has combined benchmarking + negotiation scripts + runway modeling into one focused product. This is a clear whitespace.
This is the biggest weakness. Severance is a one-time life event. Users buy once and leave. You could pivot toward broader negotiation tools (raises, job offers) or add a B2B play (HR departments offering it as a benefit), but the core product is inherently transactional, not subscription.
- +Clear whitespace — no dedicated competitor exists for this specific problem
- +High emotional urgency drives conversion at point of need
- +Very low technical complexity means fast, cheap MVP
- +Strong SEO and content marketing potential (people Google severance questions obsessively)
- +Low price point reduces friction for anxious buyers
- !One-time purchase model makes revenue lumpy and acquisition-cost-sensitive
- !Market is cyclical — revenue spikes during layoff waves, drops during hiring booms
- !Benchmarking data is hard to source accurately without scale; early data may feel thin
- !Legal liability risk if users rely on the tool and get bad outcomes
- !Free alternatives (Reddit threads, blog posts, ChatGPT) may be good enough for many users
Crowdsourced compensation data that includes some severance package reports from tech workers, allowing rough benchmarking
Offered salary negotiation tools and some severance negotiation advice, job offer evaluation
Legal publisher providing severance agreement guides, template counter-letters, and state-by-state employment law summaries
1-on-1 coaching platforms where users can get severance negotiation advice from career coaches
Financial planning tools with emergency fund calculators and budgeting features that could model post-employment runway
Landing page with a free severance fairness calculator (input role, tenure, location, package → get a score vs industry median). Gate the detailed negotiation playbook, counter-offer email templates, and personalized runway calculator behind a $29-49 one-time paywall. Build as a simple web app — no accounts needed, payment via Stripe checkout. Seed benchmark data with 50-100 manually researched severance data points from public sources, Glassdoor, and Blind posts.
Free calculator drives organic traffic and SEO → $29 basic negotiation kit (templates + scripts) → $49 premium tier with personalized runway modeling and lawyer-reviewed counter-letter templates → B2B play: license to outplacement firms and HR departments as a tool they offer departing employees → potential affiliate revenue from career coaching, resume services, and financial advisors targeting the newly-separated
4-6 weeks to MVP launch, first revenue within 1-2 weeks of launch if you nail SEO targeting terms like 'is my severance package fair' and 'how to negotiate severance'. Expect $500-2K/month within 3 months if marketed well, with spikes during layoff news cycles.
- “three months pay is almost nothing for voluntary resignation”
- “push for six months”
- “basically nothing in savings”
- “treat the 3 months like a runway, not a break”
- “Get it all in writing”