Any boring SaaS or App making money now?

Are boring SaaS products actually making serious money today?

Yes. Plain software for forms, surveys, scheduling, software deployment, website analytics and presentations is currently producing millions of dollars in recurring revenue.

We found enough fresh examples to get well beyond anecdote. Ghost's live dashboard currently shows roughly $11.1 million in annual run rate from its hosted publishing software. Tally's latest founder update put its form builder above $5 million ARR. Zigpoll's founder recently reported $125,000 MRR from customer surveys. Pckgr is above $1 million ARR automating application packaging for Microsoft Intune administrators. Simple Analytics' live dashboard is around $50,000 MRR. Senja's current hiring page says the testimonial tool is above $1 million ARR and profitable.

Recent, smaller examples make the picture more convincing. Slides With Friends is above $40,000 MRR. Kommodo reported $42,000 MRR from screen recording and team knowledge tools. SavvyCal is still doing five-figure MRR from scheduling. AppAlchemy reached more than $10,000 MRR helping people build mobile apps in a browser. A founder interview published only days ago put PostFast, a social-media scheduler competing in an extremely crowded category, at €5,400 MRR.

If we take seven straightforward SaaS products featured in recent founder interviews and keep only the USD-denominated figures, their reported revenue adds up to at least $393,000 per month, or more than $4.7 million annualized. This is obviously a selected sample rather than an estimate of the whole market. But it kills the idea that ordinary SaaS has somehow stopped making money.

For this article, "boring" means the customer is paying for a familiar job rather than a fashionable technological category. Create a survey. Schedule a meeting. Package Windows apps. Record a screen. Collect a testimonial. See website traffic. None of these requires a new explanation of human behavior.

Product	What customers basically pay for	Latest useful revenue evidence
Ghost	Hosted publishing software	~$11.1M annual run rate, live
Tally	Online forms	$5M+ ARR
Zigpoll	Customer surveys	$125K MRR
Pckgr	Microsoft Intune app packaging	$1M+ ARR
Senja	Testimonials	$1M+ ARR
Simple Analytics	Website analytics	~$50K MRR, live
Slides With Friends	Interactive presentations	$40K+ MRR
Kommodo	Screen recording	$42K MRR
SavvyCal	Scheduling	$10K+ MRR
PostFast	Social-media scheduling	€5.4K MRR

Are these mostly old SaaS companies living off legacy customers?

No. People are still launching very ordinary software products and getting them to meaningful revenue now.

PostFast is the freshest example we found. Founder Petar Georgiev entered social-media scheduling, a category already packed with large incumbents, and recently reported €5,400 MRR. He said the business became profitable after roughly half a year. His differentiation is almost mundane: faster software, better UX and more reliable processing of images and videos before they are sent to social platforms.

AppAlchemy is another recent case. Diego Roshardt launched a browser tool for building native mobile apps and reached more than $10,000 MRR within roughly a year. The first version took about two weeks to build. Growth started slowly through Reddit and Twitter rather than exploding from a launch.

Tally gives us a longer trajectory. The founders started building the form product in 2020, entered a category already dominated by Google Forms, Typeform and Jotform, and eventually crossed $5 million ARR. Revenue kept growing through the period when generative AI made software dramatically cheaper to build.

So yes, new boring SaaS can still work. That does not mean it has become easy. PostFast's founder had previous SEO skills, AppAlchemy's founder had software experience, and Tally spent years compounding its distribution. These businesses are recent enough to rule out a legacy-only explanation, but they are also good examples of how much execution still sits behind a simple-looking product.

Can a tiny boring workflow really become a $1M SaaS?

Yes. Several seven-figure SaaS businesses today are built around jobs that sound almost too narrow to support a company.

Pckgr may be the clearest example. The product helps IT administrators package and maintain Windows applications inside Microsoft Intune. Software has to be deployed, updated and replaced repeatedly, so the task keeps coming back. Pckgr started with a $25 monthly subscription after a free testing period and has since expanded to four pricing tiers. A recent founder profile put the business above $1 million ARR.

Zigpoll has reached an even higher run rate from surveys. The core product asks customers questions at moments such as checkout, after purchase or when they are about to leave a store. Founder Jason Zigelbaum said the company began the year at roughly $1.03 million ARR and reached about $125,000 MRR around the middle of the year, equivalent to a $1.5 million annual run rate.

Content Snare gets paid to chase information from clients. Accountants, bookkeepers and other professional-service firms use it to collect documents and answers without endless email follow-ups. Founder James Rose said the company had gone beyond $1 million ARR after previously stalling around $300,000.

These products work because the "small" feature sits inside a repeated workflow. An Intune administrator does not package an application once in a lifetime. An ecommerce brand keeps collecting customer feedback. An accounting firm keeps onboarding clients.

A narrow workflow can produce a large business when the same annoyance comes back every week.

Can one person still build a serious SaaS business?

Yes. Zigpoll currently makes the strongest case we found: roughly $125,000 MRR with a solo founder.

Jason Zigelbaum says Zigpoll has no cofounder, funding or sales team. Revenue doubled each year after the product finally found traction, and the run rate grew by roughly 44% during the first half of this year. One person was operating a business approaching $1.5 million in annualized recurring revenue.

Small teams are doing even more. Steady, which grew out of the Status Hero team-coordination product, recently reported seven-figure ARR with four people running hundreds of accounts. The founder says heavy automation of deployments, onboarding, transactional emails and other repetitive work was necessary from the beginning.

As seen above, Tally has gone much further in absolute dollars. Its $5 million ARR milestone came with a team of only 11 people. That works out to roughly $450,000 of ARR per employee, although revenue per employee obviously tells us nothing about salaries, infrastructure costs or actual profit.

The economics of small SaaS teams have clearly improved. Stripe handles billing, cloud providers handle infrastructure, third-party services handle authentication and email, and AI coding tools now remove another layer of repetitive work.

None of that removes customer support, positioning, distribution or product judgment. Zigpoll took about two years to find real traction. The striking change is how far revenue can now scale before headcount has to follow it.

Why does boring vertical SaaS keep working?

Vertical SaaS works especially well when the software sits inside a task that directly affects how a specific kind of business operates.

ZenMaid serves residential cleaning companies. The original product was basically a simple calendar plus client and cleaner communication. Founder Amar Ghose had previously operated a cleaning business himself, so he already understood the workflow. A founder interview put ZenMaid above $250,000 in monthly revenue.

Pckgr follows the same logic inside IT administration. Founder Thomas Mahony had worked with Microsoft Intune before building the product. He already knew the packaging failures and edge cases administrators dealt with. Pckgr now serves customers managing anywhere from fewer than 100 devices to more than 100,000.

Content Snare actually became stronger after narrowing its attention toward professional services. The product had stalled around $300,000 ARR while serving web agencies. Research led the founders toward accountants and similar businesses where collecting client information was more painful and more repetitive. Revenue later passed $1 million ARR.

The advantage here is practical. A cleaning company can connect ZenMaid to appointments and client communication. An IT department keeps needing Pckgr as applications change. An accountant collects documents every time a new client or reporting cycle arrives.

That creates much better conditions for retention than a fun utility somebody opens three times and forgets.

Do customers really pay enough for software this simple?

Yes. Boring SaaS can become large without charging each customer hundreds or thousands of dollars per month.

Ghost's live dashboard currently shows about $921,000 in monthly run rate from roughly 30,500 active customers. That comes to approximately $30 per customer per month.

Simple Analytics is even smaller at the account level. Its live dashboard currently shows around $50,000 MRR and roughly 1,320 paying customers, which works out to around $38 per paying customer.

At the end of last year, Tally reported more than 12,000 subscribers and about $4.3 million ARR. Tally subsequently crossed $5 million ARR, but the year-end numbers give us a clean customer comparison: roughly $30 in monthly recurring revenue per subscriber.

The important number here is the customer count. These companies do not need enterprise-sized contracts to build substantial revenue. Tens of dollars multiplied across thousands or tens of thousands of customers can still produce a very good software business.

Product	Revenue at comparable disclosure	Paying customers	Rough monthly revenue per customer
Ghost	~$921K monthly run rate	~30,500	~$30
Simple Analytics	~$50K MRR	~1,320	~$38
Tally	~$358K MRR at year-end	12,000+	~$30

Can we actually trust these boring SaaS revenue numbers?

Some of them, yes. Others should be treated as credible founder disclosures rather than audited financial statements.

Ghost and Simple Analytics give us unusually strong evidence because both expose live first-party dashboards. Ghost currently publishes annual run rate, monthly run rate, churn and active customers. Simple Analytics displays MRR and paying customers directly from its operating data.

Tally's figures are also first-party. The founders publish milestone updates showing the progression from $10,000 MRR through $100,000, $1 million-plus ARR and eventually $5 million ARR. Senja's current company hiring page publicly says the business is above $1 million ARR and profitable.

The recent Indie Hackers figures for Zigpoll, Pckgr, Kommodo, Slides With Friends, SavvyCal and PostFast come from interviews with the founders. We have no reason from the available evidence to reject them, but they are still self-reported.

That distinction is worth keeping. We are using these numbers to establish orders of magnitude and repeated examples, not to value the companies to the nearest dollar.

The conclusion is very robust even if a few founder numbers are somewhat rounded. Ghost alone is above $11 million in live annual run rate, Simple Analytics is around $50,000 live MRR, and multiple independent founders are reporting five-, six- and seven-figure recurring revenue from extremely normal software.

Is AI killing boring SaaS now?

No. AI is currently disrupting how boring SaaS gets built and discovered much faster than it is eliminating the underlying software.

Zigpoll offers a surprisingly concrete data point. Its founder says roughly 14% of new signups now come through recommendations from ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. That makes AI assistants the company's third-largest acquisition channel. People still want survey software; they have simply started asking an AI which survey product to use.

Slides With Friends shows the uncomfortable side. Founder Cecilia Razak recently said organic search had historically been its strongest growth channel, but changes around AI search reduced traffic enough to hurt revenue. The company is responding by focusing more heavily on high-LTV business customers rather than relying as much on SEO-driven self-service signups.

SavvyCal gives us another angle. Scheduling already faces free incumbents and AI assistants capable of manipulating calendars, yet a very recent founder interview still put Derrick Reimer's two-product portfolio at five-figure MRR, with SavvyCal supplying most of that revenue.

AI is creating winners and losers inside boring SaaS without removing the category. Products that exist mainly to generate text, summarize something trivial or wrap a single model call face much more direct substitution. Software tied to permissions, customer data, recurring workflows, integrations and operational records is harder to collapse into one prompt.

The evidence looks much more like evolution than extinction.

If AI can code the clone, what stops boring SaaS from being copied?

The first version is easier to copy now, so boring SaaS increasingly wins through accumulated distribution, edge cases and trust.

PostFast is a good current example. Anyone with modern coding tools can attempt another social-media scheduler. Founder Petar Georgiev still found room in the category by making uploads faster and preprocessing media to reduce posting failures. He also personally answers customer support and has spent months building search rankings. The code is only one part of what a new clone would have to reproduce.

Pckgr has accumulated hundreds of edge cases around Windows application packaging. Its founder had already worked extensively with Intune before starting the company. Microsoft even announced a similar product while Pckgr was preparing to launch. The founder nearly abandoned the project, launched anyway, and subsequently built the business past $1 million ARR.

Featurebase started from the opposite direction. Its founders openly say the original idea came from finding an existing product category that made money and seemed possible to improve. They began with the standard feature set at a lower price. By the end of last year, the company had crossed $1 million ARR, expanded its team from three founders to six people and launched several additional support products.

Copying the visible interface has become cheaper. A competitor still has to acquire customers, handle weird customer cases, build integrations, earn reviews, rank in search, get recommended by communities and keep the product reliable for years.

That gap is wide enough for plenty of boring software businesses to survive.

Which distribution channels are actually working for boring SaaS now?

The best current boring SaaS businesses tend to win where buyers already are: app marketplaces, search results, niche communities, shared product links and referrals from existing users.

Zigpoll gives us unusually precise numbers. About one-third of its new signups come from the Shopify App Store. Roughly another quarter comes through word of mouth, especially agencies installing Zigpoll across several client stores. AI assistants now contribute about 14%. Google, YouTube, partnerships, LinkedIn and paid social make up the rest.

Pckgr launched free inside Reddit communities and Facebook groups where Microsoft Intune administrators were already talking about application deployment. The company later partnered with Microsoft MVPs to demonstrate the product on YouTube. Those old demos continue sending customers long after publication.

Kommodo got a different product loop. Screen recordings are meant to be shared with another person, so every recording can expose a recipient to the software. The company grew from a tool initially aimed at teachers into a broader team product and eventually reached about $42,000 MRR.

A boring SaaS with a natural distribution surface has a huge advantage. Forms get submitted by other people. Scheduling links get sent to other people. Surveys appear inside stores. Recordings get shared with colleagues. Marketplace apps appear directly where customers search for extensions.

The strongest distribution is often attached to an action the customer was going to perform anyway.

Distribution route	Current example	Why it works
App marketplace	Zigpoll	Shopify supplies roughly one-third of signups
Agency referrals	Zigpoll	One operator can install it for many clients
Niche communities	Pckgr	Intune admins were already discussing the exact problem
Specialist YouTube	Pckgr	Trusted Microsoft experts reach highly specific buyers
Shared product output	Kommodo, SavvyCal	Recipients encounter the product during normal use
Search	PostFast	High-intent pages compound over time
AI recommendations	Zigpoll	ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini now send meaningful signups

Does SEO still work for boring SaaS today?

Yes, but current evidence shows a real split: search is still building some SaaS businesses while AI search is weakening the old playbook for others.

PostFast is a particularly fresh example. Its founder says SEO produces most, possibly almost all, of his customers. He spends heavily on backlink research, comparison pages, commercial pages, tools and on-site optimization. Product Hunt, building in public and attempts to go viral produced very little for him. SEO helped a new entrant reach €5,400 MRR against competitors with decades of domain history.

Zigpoll has a broader acquisition mix, but ordinary Google search still contributes customers while AI recommendations already account for roughly 14% of signups. Its founder treats visibility inside ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini as a new version of the same discoverability problem.

Slides With Friends provides the warning. Search used to be its strongest growth channel. The founder now says changes in the AI-search environment reduced traffic and contributed to lower revenue, pushing the company toward higher-value inbound customers and more business-focused use cases.

So "SEO is dead" is too broad. High-intent search still works extremely well for some boring products. What looks weaker today is depending on Google traffic as though the search interface will remain unchanged forever.

A safer setup combines searchable demand with another channel the company controls better, such as a marketplace, referrals, integrations, product sharing or a niche audience.

Are boring SaaS businesses actually profitable?

Quite a few of the strongest examples are profitable, which makes their revenue much more interesting than a venture-backed ARR number sitting on top of a huge burn rate.

Senja's current company page describes the testimonial SaaS as profitable, above $1 million ARR and operating with an extremely small team. The business has no VC funding.

PostFast is much smaller but more recent. Its founder says the social scheduling product became profitable after around six months and currently produces €5,400 MRR.

Featurebase reported a stronger change in its own economics. Alongside crossing $1 million ARR last year, founder Markus Palm said revenue had grown fourfold while net profit increased sixfold. The company remained fully bootstrapped.

Steady is above seven figures of ARR with four people and no dedicated sales staff. We do not have a current public profit number for Steady, so we should not pretend we know its margin. Its headcount does at least show how little organizational overhead a seven-figure software business can require.

Profitability is one reason the definition of "success" matters here. A $1 million ARR bootstrapped SaaS with three or four people can be an excellent company without ever becoming remotely interesting to a large venture fund.

For a founder who wants cash flow and ownership rather than a billion-dollar outcome, boring SaaS remains unusually well matched to the goal.

Which boring SaaS ideas are traps now?

The weakest boring SaaS ideas are usually easy to replace, rarely used and expensive to distribute.

Slides With Friends shows one version of the problem. The company is above $40,000 MRR, but its founder says the category has a novelty problem: customers may use an interactive group experience and then churn after the annual subscription. The team has been moving toward recurring business use cases because those customers have more reasons to stay.

Content Snare hit another ceiling. It had a real product, real customers and roughly $300,000 ARR, yet growth stalled. The company broke through only after moving deeper into industries such as accounting where the information-collection problem happened more often and carried more value.

Senja's early history is also instructive. The testimonial product spent months with effectively no recurring revenue. Its founder later wrote that the original version mostly copied competitors and lacked a clear reason to choose it. Growth improved after the team developed a more distinctive product direction.

A plain utility therefore needs more than usefulness. We would be particularly cautious when customers need the job only once, ChatGPT can perform the full task directly, a platform can absorb the feature easily, switching costs are effectively zero, and every new customer must be bought individually.

The better boring SaaS opportunities have recurrence somewhere in the business. The customer keeps generating forms, surveys, documents, bookings, deployments, invoices, reports or other operational work.

Recurring pain gives recurring software a reason to exist.

So can you still build a boring SaaS or app that makes money now?

Yes. Boring SaaS is clearly still working today, including for recently launched products, solo founders and tiny bootstrapped teams.

The strongest evidence goes well beyond one famous form builder. We have a solo survey SaaS around a $1.5 million run rate, Intune deployment software above $1 million ARR, a testimonial tool above $1 million ARR, a privacy analytics product around $50,000 live MRR, an interactive presentation tool above $40,000 MRR, screen-recording software around $42,000 MRR, a recent social scheduler at €5,400 MRR and a scheduling company still doing five figures monthly. At the top end, a boring hosted publishing service is currently above $11 million in annual run rate.

AI has raised the bar. A founder can recreate a basic SaaS interface much faster than before, which makes "I can build this" far less valuable as an advantage. Distribution, domain knowledge, integrations, accumulated edge cases, recurring usage and reputation now carry more of the weight.

The recent examples are remarkably consistent on that point. Zigpoll sits inside Shopify and spreads through agencies. Pckgr found Intune administrators and Microsoft specialists. PostFast compounds high-intent SEO. Kommodo's recordings travel from user to recipient. Vertical products such as Content Snare and ZenMaid sit inside jobs customers repeat constantly.

So yes, there are plenty of boring SaaS and apps making money now. Some are making millions.

These days, the better opportunity is a boring job people already repeat, where an existing product still annoys them and where we can see a realistic path to the first thousand customers before writing much code.