Which solo apps make over $10K/month now?

What actually counts as a solo app?

For this article, a solo app means a business that is still run mainly by one founder today, because “started by one person” is far too loose to answer the question properly.

That distinction removes several famous indie success stories. Postiz was genuinely a one-person business while Nevo David was pushing it through major revenue milestones, but its current LinkedIn page lists four employees. Floga also started as a very lean founder story, while its current website presents a team with a co-founder, developer, designer and illustrator.

At the other end, Jason Zigelbaum says he still runs Zigpoll without a co-founder, investors or a sales team. Dmytro Krasun continues to describe ScreenshotOne as his solo business. Joe Rozek presented Waitly as a solo-founder operation when he opened its numbers publicly. Those fit the definition much better.

We still allow outside software, infrastructure and occasional contractors. Otherwise almost no modern software company could qualify. The important test is whether the founder has built a permanent team around the product.

Which solo apps are making more than $10K a month now?

Several solo apps currently clear $10K a month by a wide margin, with the strongest documented examples stretching from roughly $33K to $125K per month.

Zigpoll is the clearest high-end case. Jason Zigelbaum told Indie Hackers that the customer-survey SaaS had reached about $125K MRR after starting the year around $1.03 million ARR. He explicitly described himself as solo, with no co-founder, funding or sales team.

Photo AI is close behind. Pieter Levels published figures showing roughly $105K in monthly revenue and $80K in monthly profit. He still operates his portfolio without employees.

Laravel Shift generates more than $50K in a typical month according to founder Jason McCreary's latest public business breakdowns, although only about half comes from subscriptions. Waitly was above $40K a month when Joe Rozek opened the business to Starter Story. ScreenshotOne has moved higher since our earlier draft: Dmytro Krasun announced that the screenshot API had reached $33K MRR, more than 1,000 paying customers and 100 million processed API requests.

The useful range is much wider than the title implies. $10K/month is already well below the revenue level reached by the strongest one-person apps we can document.

App	Latest useful revenue figure	What it sells	Solo confidence
Zigpoll	~$125K MRR	Customer surveys for e-commerce and SaaS	High
Photo AI	~$105K monthly revenue	AI-generated photography	High
Laravel Shift	$50K+/month	Automated Laravel upgrades	High
Waitly	$40K+/month	Waitlists and reservations	Medium
ScreenshotOne	~$33K MRR	Website screenshot API	High

Which solo app is making the most money?

Zigpoll is currently the strongest clean example we found, at about $125K MRR while Jason Zigelbaum still says he runs the company alone.

That works out to roughly a $1.5 million annual run rate. More interestingly, Zigpoll began the year around $1.03 million ARR, so the business added close to half a million dollars of annualized recurring revenue in about six months. For a one-person SaaS, that is a meaningful jump in actual scale.

Photo AI sits slightly lower at around $105K in monthly revenue, although Pieter Levels' economics are exceptional because he also reported approximately $80K in monthly profit. Earlier Photo AI figures reached around $132K-$138K per month, but we prefer his newer $105K disclosure because it is more recent and comes with a corresponding profit figure.

Happierleads could theoretically take the top spot. Founder George Georgiadis currently advertises $1.5 million ARR, equivalent to about $125K MRR, and one company page calls Happierleads a zero-employee business. However, another recent Happierleads article says, “we have people who could do this,” which creates a direct contradiction around current team size. We therefore leave Happierleads out of the clean ranking rather than pretend the evidence is clearer than it is.

Postiz has already gone much further, recently reaching about $2.2 million ARR. But Postiz currently lists four employees on LinkedIn, so it tells us how far a product can grow during and immediately after its solo phase rather than which company remains literally solo today.

Can we really trust these solo-app revenue numbers?

We can trust the direction and order of magnitude of the strongest solo-app figures, but almost all of them remain founder-reported rather than audited.

Zigpoll's $125K MRR comes from a detailed founder interview containing the previous annual run rate, current MRR and growth rate. Photo AI's $105K monthly revenue and $80K profit come directly from Pieter Levels. ScreenshotOne has an unusually useful trail because Dmytro Krasun has repeatedly published revenue, customer counts, expenses and API usage as the business grew.

There is still room for differences in definitions. Laravel Shift is a good example. Public descriptions sometimes call its $50K monthly figure “MRR,” yet Jason McCreary says roughly half of revenue comes from one-time upgrade purchases. Calling all $50K recurring revenue would inflate the quality of the number even though the underlying business really does generate around that amount.

The same caution applies to ARR. A recent Business Insider report found growing concern among investors about startups annualizing unusually strong months and presenting them as recurring revenue. That problem is especially common in AI businesses with volatile usage.

So we use recent founder disclosures when possible, check whether the metric means revenue, MRR or run rate, and downgrade examples where the current team or revenue definition becomes unclear.

Are AI apps dominating the solo-app winners now?

AI has created some spectacular one-person businesses, but today's strongest solo-app list is still surprisingly mixed.

Photo AI gives AI the obvious flagship case at roughly $105K per month. Pieter Levels has kept the product extremely lean while outsourcing the expensive model infrastructure rather than building an AI research organization himself.

The rest of the list quickly becomes much less fashionable. Zigpoll sells surveys. Waitly manages customer queues. Laravel Shift upgrades PHP applications. ScreenshotOne captures web pages through an API. Together, those four products generate roughly a quarter of a million dollars in monthly revenue based on their latest useful public figures.

AI becomes more important when we look at how these companies operate. Solo founders can write code faster, draft documentation, answer support questions, create marketing material and inspect problems without adding a person for each job. George Georgiadis has described using AI agents across Happierleads' support and operations. Pieter Levels frequently shows AI coding tools inside his own workflow.

AI looks most powerful here as leverage for the founder. The customer does not necessarily need to be buying an AI product.

Are boring B2B apps better than consumer apps for getting past $10K/month?

For a solo founder trying to build durable monthly revenue, narrow B2B apps currently have a clear advantage.

The arithmetic is forgiving. A B2B product averaging $100 per month needs about 100 paying customers to reach $10K MRR. At $20 per month, the founder needs 500. A $5 consumer subscription requires 2,000 paying users before accounting for churn, store fees and acquisition costs.

The companies we found fit that pattern. Waitly charges around $100 per month for businesses using its full product. ScreenshotOne sells infrastructure to companies and developers. Zigpoll can expand with agencies running surveys across several clients. Laravel Shift charges developers to remove a task that would otherwise consume engineering time.

Photo AI proves consumer software can reach a much bigger number. Its roughly $105K monthly revenue makes it one of the strongest examples in the whole group. Yet Photo AI also benefits from Pieter Levels' unusually large personal distribution and years of experience launching internet products.

For someone starting without those advantages, a small group of businesses with an expensive problem usually gives a solo founder an easier route to $10K than a huge group of consumers paying a few dollars each.

Do solo apps need thousands of customers to make serious money?

Solo apps can reach $10K-$50K per month with surprisingly modest customer counts when the pricing matches a valuable problem.

ScreenshotOne gives us unusually good numbers. When Dmytro Krasun reported $21,609 MRR, the product had 575 paying customers. That works out to roughly $38 of recurring revenue per customer each month. ScreenshotOne later passed $33K MRR and 1,000 customers, so the customer base grew substantially without requiring anything close to consumer scale.

Waitly offers another useful comparison. Joe Rozek said the product charges roughly $100 per month to unlock its features. At $40K+ monthly revenue, the business only needs hundreds of typical customer accounts, although the exact mix of subscriptions can vary.

Zigpoll improved the same equation from the pricing side. Jason Zigelbaum said changes aimed at agencies increased revenue per account by roughly 24% without simply raising every customer's price. That is a powerful move for a one-person company because higher revenue per customer usually adds less work than finding 24% more customers.

Once pricing gets into the tens or hundreds of dollars per month, the $10K threshold becomes a customer-quality problem much more than an audience-size problem.

Where do solo apps find enough customers without a sales team or huge audience?

Successful solo apps usually borrow distribution from an ecosystem, search engine or platform instead of building a traditional sales organization.

Zigpoll gets roughly one-third of new signups from the Shopify App Store, according to Jason Zigelbaum. Shopify has already gathered the exact businesses Zigpoll wants to reach, so the app can appear when a merchant is actively searching for a solution.

Laravel Shift gets a similar advantage from the Laravel ecosystem. Every major framework upgrade recreates the same painful job for developers. The framework itself keeps producing potential customers.

ScreenshotOne has leaned heavily on developer SEO, free tools, integrations and technical content. Someone searching for a screenshot API already understands what the product does, which makes that traffic much more valuable than a large audience with weak buying intent.

Pieter Levels represents the opposite route. He has a huge founder audience, so Photo AI launches with distribution that most developers simply do not have.

The common ingredient is access to buyers. A founder can get that through 500,000 followers, Shopify search, Google, a developer community or an app marketplace. Building a giant personal brand is only one route.

How long does it usually take a solo app to reach $10K/month?

The better-documented solo apps usually take years to reach $10K/month, even though the fastest stories dominate social media.

ScreenshotOne makes the timeline unusually clear. Dmytro Krasun launched it in 2022, reached $10K MRR a little over two years later, then doubled to $20K roughly eight months after that. More recently, the product crossed $33K MRR. The curve accelerated once years of SEO, integrations, customer referrals and product work had accumulated.

Zigpoll followed a similar pattern. Jason Zigelbaum says the business needed roughly two years to get meaningful traction. Revenue then doubled year after year, eventually reaching around $125K MRR.

Laravel Shift is an even longer compounding story. Jason McCreary launched it more than a decade ago and has automated the product enough that it can now generate more than $50K in a month without turning into a conventional software company.

Postiz shows the faster possibility. Nevo David spent a long period at much lower revenue, then Postiz jumped from around $100K MRR in the spring to roughly $2.2 million ARR more recently as its AI-agent positioning and distribution took off.

The viral screenshots capture the steep part of the curve. They usually leave out the years before it.

App	What the path looked like	Latest useful level
ScreenshotOne	More than 2 years to $10K, then faster compounding	~$33K MRR
Zigpoll	Roughly 2 years before strong traction, then repeated doubling	~$125K MRR
Laravel Shift	Decade-long compounding around one developer problem	$50K+/month
Postiz	Long early grind followed by an exceptional growth burst	~$2.2M ARR, now with employees

Does a solo app need subscription revenue to make more than $10K/month?

Subscriptions make solo businesses easier to predict, although Laravel Shift shows that one-time purchases can still produce a very strong one-person company.

Zigpoll and ScreenshotOne have the cleanest recurring models in our group. Every existing subscription gives the founder a base to build on before a single new customer arrives the following month.

Laravel Shift works differently. Developers pay for automated framework upgrades when they need them, alongside recurring subscriptions and services. Jason McCreary says roughly half of revenue comes from one-time purchases, yet the business still produces more than $50K in a typical month.

Launch revenue deserves separate treatment. A founder can sell $100K of lifetime deals in a weekend and still have very little recurring revenue the next month. Floga famously generated roughly $120K during its launch and later reached around $10K MRR. Those are two different achievements.

For our title, the strongest examples are products where $10K keeps coming back rather than appearing once after a launch.

Can one person really run a $100K-a-month app now?

Yes. Zigpoll and Photo AI show that one founder can run a software business above $100K per month when most customer work has been pushed into software, platforms and automation.

Zigpoll reaches customers through Shopify, lets them install and configure the product themselves, and expands revenue through usage and agency accounts. Jason Zigelbaum does not need a salesperson attached to each customer.

Photo AI works for a different reason. Pieter Levels relies on external AI infrastructure to perform the expensive computation while the product handles ordering, generation and payment automatically. His published $105K revenue and $80K profit figures would be extremely difficult to reproduce with a service business requiring human work for each customer.

AI is making this model easier to push further. Coding assistants reduce engineering time. Support agents can answer repeat questions. Automated monitoring can catch operational problems. Content tools reduce some marketing workload.

There is still a point where founders choose to hire. Postiz has already crossed it: the company now lists four employees after climbing to roughly $2.2 million ARR. George Georgiadis has also publicly discussed hiring after building Happierleads to a reported $1.5 million ARR.

The technical ceiling for solo software is already above $100K per month. Whether the founder still wants to remain alone at that level is a separate decision.

How profitable can a solo app actually be?

Photo AI shows that a solo app can keep an extraordinary share of its revenue, with Pieter Levels reporting about $80K monthly profit on $105K revenue.

That implies a margin around 76%. The number is especially striking because AI image generation has a real variable compute cost. Removing employee payroll still leaves plenty of room for infrastructure, payment fees and model usage.

ScreenshotOne gives us another detailed data point. When Dmytro Krasun reported $21,609 MRR, monthly expenses were around $5,500, including roughly $5,000 for the screenshot-processing cluster. At that point, direct operating expenses represented about one quarter of revenue. In a later update after reaching $300K ARR, he said expenses were roughly 30%-50% before taxes.

Waitly's costs are also concrete. Joe Rozek reported roughly $700 per month for Firebase, about $2,500 for text messaging, payment fees, around $500 in Apple search ads and a collection of relatively small software subscriptions. Against more than $40K monthly revenue, there is still substantial room left before counting taxes and the founder's own labor.

The absence of payroll changes the economics dramatically. A $30K-MRR solo app can leave its owner with more money than a much larger startup supporting several full-time salaries.

Which famous “solo apps” no longer belong on a strict solo list?

Postiz is the clearest example of a business that outgrew the solo label, even though its one-person growth story remains exceptional.

Nevo David took Postiz through $100K MRR while publicly describing the operation as a one-person company. The business kept accelerating and recently reached roughly $186K MRR, or $2.2 million ARR. Today, Postiz's LinkedIn page lists four employees and a company size of two to ten people.

Floga also belongs in the historical bucket. Its original founder story involved an explosive roughly $120K launch followed by around $10K MRR, while the company's current site presents several people working on the product.

Happierleads is more ambiguous. Its founder page still says George Georgiadis bootstrapped the company to $1.5 million ARR “solo,” and a recent podcast page says “no team.” Yet another recent article from Georgiadis says Happierleads has people who could take over some of his work. We cannot reconcile those statements confidently enough to call it a clean one-person company today.

Current team status is the deciding factor. Without checking it, a list of “solo apps” quickly becomes a list of companies that happened to be solo several years ago.

So which solo apps really make over $10K/month now?

Yes, we can currently identify several credible solo apps above $10K per month, and the strongest evidence puts the one-person revenue ceiling above $100K a month.

Zigpoll is our clearest current leader at roughly $125K MRR. Photo AI follows at around $105K monthly revenue with approximately $80K profit. Laravel Shift produces more than $50K a month, although a meaningful share comes from one-time purchases. Waitly's last detailed founder disclosure puts it above $40K monthly revenue. ScreenshotOne has now reached roughly $33K MRR, up from the $20K figure that still appears on some stale revenue directories.

Those companies also show that there is no single winning category. We have an e-commerce survey tool, an AI photography app, a PHP upgrade tool, restaurant waitlist software and a screenshot API. Their products barely resemble one another.

What they share is a business shape that works unusually well for one person: customers can buy without a salesperson, the software performs most of the work, pricing is high enough that the founder does not need millions of users, and customer acquisition comes from channels that keep working without a marketing department.

So the interesting threshold today is already higher than $10K. The strongest solo founders have proved that one person can get into the $30K-$125K monthly range. Staying solo once the business moves beyond that is becoming a choice rather than an obvious operational limit.

App	Best current revenue evidence	Current status	Verdict
Zigpoll	~$125K MRR	Founder says he still runs it solo	Clearly qualifies
Photo AI	~$105K/month revenue	Pieter Levels operates without employees	Clearly qualifies
Laravel Shift	$50K+/month	Jason McCreary remains the solo operator	Clearly qualifies, but revenue is partly one-time
Waitly	$40K+/month	Last detailed disclosure describes Joe Rozek as solo	Likely qualifies
ScreenshotOne	~$33K MRR	Dmytro Krasun continues to run the product solo	Clearly qualifies
Happierleads	~$1.5M ARR	Current company statements conflict on team status	Too ambiguous for the strict list
Postiz	~$2.2M ARR	LinkedIn currently lists four employees	No longer qualifies as strictly solo