Any simple SaaS or app making money now?

Are simple SaaS and apps still making real money today?

Yes: simple SaaS and focused apps are still making serious money today, including products doing $20,000, $40,000, $100,000 and even $400,000+ in recurring monthly revenue.

The current examples are surprisingly mundane. Tally is a form builder and reported $422,000 MRR in its latest public update. Zigpoll sells surveys and customer feedback and recently reached about $125,000 MRR with one founder. Stripe-verified data on TrustMRR currently puts Simple Analytics at roughly $40,000 MRR. SEO Stack, essentially a better layer over Search Console, analytics and AI-search tracking, is around $25,000 MRR from roughly 200 active subscriptions.

Even narrower tools are working. TrustMRR currently shows Draft AI, which turns voice recordings into social posts, at about $24,000 MRR. FriendFilter and GroupFilter, Chrome extensions for managing Facebook friends and groups, are around $9,000 MRR. ScreenshotOne has built a business around one very literal API request: give it a URL and get a screenshot.

At the higher end, 1Lookup currently shows roughly $222,000 MRR from 667 active subscriptions. Its core proposition is still easy to understand: check whether phone numbers, emails and IP addresses are valid, although the product has expanded well beyond its original scope.

So there are enough fresh examples to remove any doubt about the basic claim. Small, easy-to-explain software is making money right now. The harder question is how unusual those winners are.

Product	What customers basically buy	Latest figure we could verify
Tally	Online forms	~$422K MRR
1Lookup	Data validation API	~$222K MRR
Zigpoll	Ecommerce surveys	~$125K MRR
Simple Analytics	Privacy-friendly analytics	~$40K MRR
SEO Stack	SEO and search analytics	~$25K MRR
Draft AI	Voice-to-social-content app	~$24K MRR

Why is a simple app harder to win with now?

Simple apps are harder to win with today because the number of people who can build them has exploded much faster than the number of customers looking for another app.

RevenueCat's 2026 subscription-app study covers more than 115,000 apps and $16 billion in revenue. It found roughly 2,000 new subscription apps launching each month in early 2022. That number has climbed above 14,700. We are dealing with about seven times as much new supply in only four years.

The acceleration became especially visible once AI coding tools went mainstream. A founder can now ship an iOS app, browser tool or narrow SaaS in days without hiring a conventional engineering team. RevenueCat itself describes the current market as a supply shock.

Customers did not suddenly start spending seven times as much money on new apps. Apps launched before 2020 still collect 69% of subscription-app revenue in RevenueCat's dataset, while apps launched in 2025 or later collect only about 3%.

That changes the economics of “easy to build.” Easy development gets us into the market, but thousands of other founders receive exactly the same advantage. These days, the scarce part is getting noticed, getting trusted and giving customers a reason to stay.

How rare is it for a new app to reach $10K a month?

Reaching $10,000 a month with a new subscription app is currently a top-few-percent outcome, not a normal result for a decent product.

RevenueCat found that 17.3% of newly launched subscription apps reached $1,000 in monthly revenue within their first two years. Only 4.6% reached $10,000. Even after an app has crossed $1,000, roughly three quarters still fail to reach $10,000 during that window.

The one-year numbers are harsher. The median app makes only about $72 per month after one year. Around $429 puts an app in the top quarter, while $2,574 is enough to reach the top 10%.

Those numbers are useful because founder communities naturally show us the winners. We see a $30,000-MRR screenshot, a $100,000-MRR solo founder and a launch that suddenly took off. We rarely see the huge pile of apps sitting at $0, $80 or $300 per month.

The opportunity is real and brutally skewed. A founder can still build a tiny product that becomes life-changing, but merely getting something working puts us nowhere near the finish line.

Revenue level	Current RevenueCat benchmark
Median revenue after one year	~$72/month
Top 25% after one year	>$429/month
Top 10% after one year	>$2,574/month
Reach $1K/month within two years	17.3% of apps
Reach $10K/month within two years	4.6% of apps

What does “simple SaaS” actually mean when it works?

The successful simple SaaS products we found are usually simple for the customer to understand, even when years of work are hiding behind that simplicity.

Letterly is a good example. The pitch takes a few seconds: talk into the app and get well-written text back. Founder Anton Samarsky says simplicity is the company's competitive advantage. Yet he also says the team has spent thousands of hours rebuilding and refining that experience.

Tally looks equally obvious from outside. Create a form, share it, collect responses. Behind that interface sits a product developed since 2020, an 11-person team, integrations, analytics, payments, conditional logic and years of accumulated UX work.

A screenshot API sounds even smaller. ScreenshotOne nevertheless has to handle browser infrastructure, reliability, blocking, rendering differences and large request volumes.

Here, “simple” describes the customer's mental model. Good simple software answers “What does this do?” almost immediately. The engineering and operational work can still be substantial.

Can one person still build a serious SaaS business?

Yes: solo founders can still build serious SaaS businesses today, and Zigpoll at roughly $125,000 MRR shows how far the model can go.

Jason Zigelbaum runs Zigpoll without a cofounder, funding or sales team. He started the year around $1.03 million ARR and later reported roughly $125,000 MRR, equivalent to a $1.5 million annual run rate. That was about 44% growth in six months.

The timeline is more instructive than the headline. Zigpoll took roughly two years to find meaningful traction. Revenue then doubled in successive years as Zigelbaum narrowed the product around ecommerce surveys and paid closer attention to the customers who naturally expanded.

That is much closer to the pattern behind good solo SaaS businesses: years of compounding hidden behind a number that suddenly looks impressive on social media.

AI should make the solo model more viable. Tally, despite having a team, says AI now reduces time spent on coding, copy and documentation, which leaves more human attention for product decisions and quality. That leverage is even more valuable when one person runs the entire company.

A solo $100,000-MRR SaaS is still exceptional. A solo founder reaching a few thousand or tens of thousands in recurring revenue has become much more technically plausible than it was a few years ago.

Are simple mobile apps still making money today?

Yes: simple mobile apps are still making money now, but current revenue data shows an enormous gap between the handful of winners and the average new app.

Letterly is one of the clearest winners we found. The company reported about $250,000 in monthly revenue, 20,000 paying subscribers and 30,000 monthly active users for an app whose core action is turning speech into polished text.

Draft AI is a newer and smaller example with externally verified numbers. RevenueCat-linked data on TrustMRR currently shows roughly $24,000 MRR, around $32,000 in revenue over the latest 30-day period and about 1,900 active subscriptions. Its job is similarly narrow: record an idea and turn it into social-media content.

Then look at the other end. Appshots creates App Store screenshots for developers and currently has about 21 active subscriptions and $278 MRR. FormNX has nearly 9,000 registered users according to its TrustMRR profile, yet only 49 active subscriptions and roughly $687 MRR.

These products are all “simple apps.” Their revenue ranges from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars per month.

Product complexity clearly explains very little on its own.

Is B2B micro-SaaS a better bet than a cheap consumer app?

For a small founder trying to reach meaningful revenue, B2B micro-SaaS currently has a much friendlier customer-count equation.

ChartMogul analyzed revenue data from more than 2,500 private SaaS businesses and found that 53% of companies reaching $10,000 MRR got there with something close to 100 customers paying $100 a month. Companies that began with customers worth roughly $300 to $2,999 per month later grew three to five times faster than companies starting with very cheap accounts or huge enterprise contracts.

The arithmetic is hard to ignore. A $100-per-month SaaS needs 100 customers for $10,000 MRR. A $10 consumer subscription needs 1,000. At $5, we need 2,000 paying customers before app-store fees, refunds and acquisition costs.

That does not make B2B easy. RevenueCat actually found that only 1.6% of newly launched apps in its Business category reached $10,000 in monthly revenue within two years, below the overall app average. Business apps also take longer than most categories to reach their first $1,000.

The advantage appears once we find the right customers. A small B2B product can become economically interesting with dozens or hundreds of accounts. Consumer apps generally need much more volume, which makes distribution and retention far less forgiving.

Does adding AI actually make a simple app stronger?

AI currently helps simple apps sell, but the retention data says it can also make them surprisingly disposable.

RevenueCat found AI-powered subscription apps generating 41% more revenue per payer than non-AI apps. They also churn about 30% faster.

The gap persists deep into the subscription. Median 12-month retention for monthly AI plans was around 6.1%, compared with 9.5% for non-AI apps. For annual plans, AI apps retained around 21.1% versus 30.7%.

That pattern makes intuitive sense when we look at products currently flooding the stores. “Upload a selfie and transform it,” “record something and summarize it,” or “generate this piece of content” produces a great first demo. Customers can understand the value immediately and paying once feels easy.

Keeping that subscription for a year is another problem. Similar functionality keeps appearing in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and hundreds of competing apps.

Letterly has held up much better than a generic wrapper because the company has spent years making one recurring behavior extremely convenient. As seen above, its users can record, rewrite, append and export from an interface designed specifically around voice-to-text work.

AI looks strongest these days when it removes friction from a job people already repeat. Novel output can produce revenue. Recurring behavior gives the subscription a chance to survive.

What is actually driving distribution for simple SaaS right now?

The best current simple SaaS businesses usually have a distribution mechanism tied directly to where their customers already spend time.

Zigpoll is unusually transparent here. As seen above, the business is around $125,000 MRR. Roughly one-third of new signups currently come from the Shopify App Store. Another quarter comes from word of mouth, much of it generated by freelancers and agencies installing Zigpoll across several client stores.

One good agency relationship can therefore create multiple customers. Zigelbaum eventually redesigned the product around these multi-store operators, and revenue per account rose 24% in a year without a price increase.

Tally has another version of the same loop. Free forms carry a “Made with Tally” badge. Someone fills in the form, sees Tally, creates an account and can eventually become a paying customer. Tally says roughly 2% of users convert to Pro, and this loop has compounded since the early days.

These businesses have very different products, but distribution happens unusually close to product usage. Shopify merchants search inside Shopify. Tally users expose Tally to form respondents. Agencies introduce Zigpoll to their next client.

A much better test for simple SaaS than “does this idea sound cool?” is: where will customer number 101 actually come from?

Is ChatGPT becoming a real acquisition channel for small SaaS?

Yes: ChatGPT, Claude and other AI assistants are already sending a meaningful number of new customers to some small SaaS products.

Tally says AI-powered search has recently overtaken its long-running viral product loop as its largest acquisition channel. Its onboarding surveys increasingly show users discovering the form builder through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and AI search results.

Zigpoll gives us a harder number. About 14% of its new signups currently come from ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini recommendations. That makes AI assistants its third-largest acquisition source.

Two companies cannot tell us what percentage of the entire SaaS market now comes from LLMs. They do show that the channel is already large enough to matter for real businesses rather than just appearing in marketing discussions.

There is also a useful connection with simplicity. “Form builder that is easy and free” is easy for an AI assistant to retrieve and recommend. So is “post-purchase surveys for Shopify stores.”

Small products with painfully clear positioning may have an advantage here. An AI has to understand what the product does before it can confidently recommend it, which puts vague all-in-one SaaS products at a disadvantage.

Can you still copy a simple SaaS idea and win?

Yes, but copying the visible product is usually the least interesting part of the opportunity now.

Most of the winners we found entered markets where alternatives already existed. Forms existed long before Tally. Customer surveys existed before Zigpoll. Speech transcription existed before Letterly. Website analytics existed before Simple Analytics.

So originality is clearly unnecessary.

What has changed is the value of simply reproducing features. We can now build a credible clone much faster, and so can everybody else. RevenueCat's current launch numbers show the consequence: almost 15,000 new subscription apps are appearing each month.

The interesting opportunity is usually a specific reason to choose the new entrant. That reason could be radically simpler UX, better pricing, a narrow audience, better integration with one ecosystem, privacy, a specific workflow or access to a distribution channel incumbents have ignored.

The fresh form-builder examples make the point almost comically well. Tally is above $5 million ARR, while newer Tally-style competitors currently visible on revenue-verification platforms range from a few hundred dollars a month down to almost nothing.

Copying proves that we can build the product. Customers still have to explain why they chose ours.

Is it better to solve one tiny problem or serve one tiny niche?

The strongest simple SaaS businesses we found usually narrow either the job or the customer very aggressively.

ScreenshotOne chooses an extremely narrow job. Its customers can come from many industries, but the promise barely changes: automatically take screenshots of web pages.

Zigpoll went the other way. Surveys are broad, so the company became much more deliberate about ecommerce brands and, eventually, agencies operating multiple Shopify stores.

FriendFilter and GroupFilter are even more literal. The tools deal with Facebook friend and group management. The total market is smaller than “social-media software,” but anyone searching for the product already understands the problem.

We should be careful with the generic advice to “niche down.” A tiny market with a weak problem can still be terrible.

The useful pattern is making at least one dimension very clear. We can solve one narrow job for many people, or several related jobs for one narrow customer group. Staying broad on both usually makes the product harder to explain and much harder to distribute.

Does high revenue from a simple app mean high profit?

No: a simple app can show huge revenue while spending most of that money to keep acquiring users.

Letterly gives us unusually good numbers. The company reported roughly $250,000 in monthly revenue. It also disclosed around $200,000 per month in advertising, about $30,000 in salaries for a 10-person team and roughly $5,000 in AI costs.

As pointed out above, Letterly is unquestionably a successful simple app. Those disclosed costs nevertheless total around $235,000 against $250,000 of revenue before other expenses.

Advertising alone consumes about 80 cents of every reported revenue dollar.

That does not mean the company is badly run. Letterly's founder explicitly said they are choosing to reinvest aggressively because they want to grow. It does show why screenshots of consumer-app revenue can be misleading when we use them as evidence that a founder is personally making a fortune.

A $30,000-MRR B2B SaaS with one founder, low infrastructure costs and mostly organic acquisition can easily be a more attractive cash business than a $250,000-a-month consumer app buying traffic aggressively.

Revenue tells us scale. Profitability needs another set of numbers.

What usually stops a simple SaaS after it gets traction?

Churn usually becomes much more dangerous than lack of features once a simple SaaS has real revenue.

ScreenshotOne provides a useful example because founder Dmytro Krasun has publicly shared detailed operating metrics. During one teardown, the business was around $32,000 MRR, adding about $3,000 in new MRR each month and losing roughly 9% of revenue to monthly churn.

At that churn rate, almost $2,900 disappears from a $32,000 base every month. Adding $3,000 barely moves the business forward. Growth naturally flattens around that level unless acquisition improves or churn falls.

The reason tells us something important about simple utilities. Some ScreenshotOne customers embed the API deeply inside a product and can remain for years. Others need a batch of screenshots for one temporary project and leave when the project ends. Both customers look useful during signup, but their lifetime value is completely different.

RevenueCat sees a related problem across AI apps. They monetize strongly at first and then retain worse than non-AI apps.

Once a simple product has traction, another feature often isn't the most valuable question anymore. Who is still using the product after six or twelve months, and why?

Which simple SaaS ideas look strongest right now?

The strongest simple SaaS ideas today seem to solve a recurring problem for an identifiable group of customers while giving the founder a believable route to those customers.

Ecosystem-specific products remain attractive. Shopify, WordPress, HubSpot, Figma, Slack and other large software platforms already aggregate customers around known workflows. Zigpoll's Shopify App Store numbers show how powerful that can become when the product ranks well and fits the ecosystem tightly.

Small professional utilities also look good when the output has obvious economic value. Data validation, analytics, compliance, lead generation, automation and developer infrastructure can justify much higher prices than generic consumer productivity tools. Current verified data around 1Lookup, Simple Analytics and SEO Stack shows that relatively narrow business utilities can reach tens or hundreds of thousands in recurring monthly revenue.

Products with built-in exposure have another advantage. Forms, booking pages, surveys, widgets, reports and customer-facing outputs can all put the product in front of additional potential users during normal use.

Consumer apps can clearly still break out, especially around AI, content, health and productivity. The trade-off is harsher. RevenueCat currently sees better monetization from AI apps alongside worse retention, and Letterly shows how much paid acquisition can sit behind a large revenue number.

If we were looking for a simple SaaS opportunity now, we would spend less time asking “Can I build this quickly?” Almost everyone can.

We would spend much more time asking whether the problem repeats, whether a small number of customers can produce meaningful revenue, whether those customers already gather somewhere, and whether using the product can help bring in the next customer.

So, are simple SaaS and apps making money now?

Yes: simple SaaS and apps are absolutely making money now, but the current market rewards simple businesses much more selectively than the explosion of new app launches suggests.

We found live or recently disclosed examples around $24,000 MRR, $40,000 MRR, $125,000 MRR, $222,000 MRR and $422,000 MRR. We also found extremely similar-looking new products making $20, $300 or $700 a month.

As we saw previously, RevenueCat now tracks almost 15,000 new subscription-app launches every month, while only 4.6% of new apps reach $10,000 in monthly revenue within two years. The median app is around $72 per month after its first year.

That is the current reality behind the tempting revenue screenshots. Building the product has become cheap enough that simplicity alone gives us almost no advantage.

The businesses that keep appearing at the top have something else attached to that simplicity: a recurring job, customers with real willingness to pay, strong retention, access to an existing audience or a product loop that keeps introducing new people.

Simple SaaS is very much alive. The easy-money version of simple SaaS is much harder to find.