Stayed on Gmail until about fifty a week, and what eventually pushed me over was exactly your problem, not the volume.
Before you pay for anything, fix the specific failure. Make a label called waiting and a filter that puts everything from support@ into an inbox section that never collapses. Turn on templates for the six answers you write constantly. Star means unanswered and nothing else, ever. That combination removed the lost email problem entirely for me for over a year, for nothing.
What a real desk gives you that Gmail cannot: it is obvious at a glance what is unanswered, replies come from the product rather than from you personally, and you get a saved reply library that is not tied to one machine. All useful. None of it is what is hurting you today.
You've framed it as either/or and it isn't. Self-serve billing is about four hours of work and you should just have it, a checkout link and the hosted billing portal. That's not "building self-serve", that's not invoicing people by hand like it's 1998.
Everything else: onboarding flow, docs, product tour: skip entirely. You do that on a call until it hurts.
Two separate reviews exist. Brand verification, which is the lighter one that lets your name and logo show on the consent screen, and sensitive scope verification, which is the heavier one with the demo video and privacy policy review. Do not conflate them when you are estimating time.
The explain-first clause is doing a lot of work. It's caught two cases this morning where I actually did want the bigger change, and one where I very much didn't.
One narrow page per problem, written like a real answer, not like marketing. Not "the best tool for X", but the specific question with the specific number in it. Those pages take months to move and then they keep working while you sleep. Everything else on this list is you working.
'You must be able to explain any line if asked' is a good norm, and it's exactly what we'd have expected of hand-written code. Nobody thought it needed saying until now.
Look at what happens between signup and first document. My guess is there's a cliff there that's making the top of your funnel look bigger than it is. 1,900 signups is a meaningless number: how many produced one document? If it's 400, your real conversion is 2% and your problem is activation, not price.
Activation rate first, pricing second. Always that order.
Did this exact thing in March and the single most useful hour was writing a RESTART file at the top of the repo before doing anything else.
It has five sections and they are all boring: the exact commands to install and run, what the three moving parts are in two sentences each, what I was in the middle of when I stopped, the three things I know are broken, and one line saying what the next task is. Ninety minutes to write from reading my own code and commits.
The second weekend started with me opening that file and being productive in five minutes instead of two hours. I now write it whenever I know I am about to have a gap, even a two week one.
The version I would rather do at your stage: annual at a real discount, plus a written price lock. "$149 for the first year, and your price never goes up while you stay subscribed." You get almost the same cash, almost the same commitment signal, and a renewal event twelve months from now that tells you something true. Founder pricing that is locked, not permanent.
End with a specific next step or the call was worth nothing. Not "I'll send some information over". Something like: "I'll set up an account with your two branches already in it and send it Thursday: can you run one real job through it by the end of next week?" Then you find out whether they meant any of it.
Freezing the repo over a weekend is a legitimate strategy and it does work. The OP said they can't freeze, which is what rules it out here: not the size.
B, and not for the reviewability reason: for the rebase reason.
You ship twice a week with three people. A branch touching 180 files that lives for two days will conflict with everything, and resolving conflicts in a diff you didn't write is genuinely miserable. Doing it once is annoying; doing it across 180 files after two days of drift is a lost afternoon and a real chance of silently reverting somebody's fix.
The version that works: write the transformation spec first, with two examples done by hand. Then batch by directory, 8-12 files at a time, merged same day. The agent does the same work either way, you're choosing how much unmerged state exists at once.
Twenty PRs sounds like twenty times the ceremony. In practice each is a four-minute review because they're all the same shape and you get fast at spotting the one that isn't.
Also worth knowing that the old leaves being sacrificed is the plant doing exactly the right thing, and cutting them off at the base once they go translucent helps. Rotting leaves in the substrate do nothing good and they make the tank look worse than it is.
Two weeks in, yes, this is normal and it does get better. RLS is one of the few things where the ceremony is front-loaded - the first five policies feel like a slog and then you have a template and it is thirty seconds each.
Completely arbitrary. Use 1/2 and you get |x + 3| < 6.5, and δ = min(1/2, ε/6.5) is an equally correct proof. 1 is just the laziest choice that keeps the arithmetic clean.
For anything nonlinear you need the second trick: bound delta by 1 first, then use that bound to control the messy factor.
Example, f(x) = x² at a = 3. |x² - 9| = |x - 3||x + 3|. The |x + 3| is the problem because it depends on x. So say up front you will take δ ≤ 1, which forces 2 < x < 4, which forces |x + 3| < 7. Now |x² - 9| < 7|x - 3|, and you finish with δ = min(1, ε/7).
That min(1, ...) pattern covers about ninety percent of the exercises you will be given.
Worth checking a slightly different question: was it 90 seconds for you, or 90 seconds plus the twenty minutes you'd have spent getting back into the thing you were doing before? The comparison people make is usually "me at my sharpest and focused" against "the agent, measured honestly".
That said, for a task this small, typing it yourself is usually right and you shouldn't feel like you're doing it wrong. The wins are in the twenty-minute-to-two-hour band, not the 90-second band.
Honest alternative if patience runs out: monte carlo or a moss tied to a flat stone will both give you the low green look faster in low tech. Hairgrass is doable but it is one of the slower carpets without gas, and there is no shame in swapping.