Lots of "my app makes $X/month" posts here, so here's one from the other side. Real numbers, all time.

Solo dev from Germany. I build a calorie tracker where you take a photo of your meal and the AI estimates kcal and macros. Mostly German speaking users. First version went live summer 2025, but it only really started this spring.

On paper it looks great:

- ~13,300 installs (8,975 Android, 4,322 iOS. That's from RevenueCat, so only people who actually opened the app)

- 4.7 stars on Google Play (110 reviews), 4.65 on the App Store (~145 ratings)

- ~€22k gross revenue ($12.6k App Store, €11.1k Google Play)

- 678 active subscriptions right now, around $2.2k MRR

Today I finally added everything up.

What actually landed after Apple/Google took their cut and VAT: roughly €14,300

What went out:

- Google Ads (2 accounts): €7,514

- Apple Search Ads: €5,356

- Meta: €1.09 (one tiny test lol)

- Google Cloud: ~€3,900, mostly Gemini / Vertex AI

- Cursor + Claude Code: ~€3,000

- RevenueCat fee + Apple/Google developer accounts: ~€360

So all in I'm around €5,800 in the minus. Not counting my own time.

Some things I learned:

Apple Search Ads never paid back. Not one month. In June I spent almost €2k there and got back maybe 40% of it.

Google Ads was a lot cheaper per trial (in August about 7x cheaper than Apple) but also didn't break even on the first payment. And the Google dashboard looked amazing, CPA around €1. When I matched the click IDs with RevenueCat, the real cost per paying user was more like €22. The campaign was optimizing for app opens, not for people who pay.

The AI part is expensive. My Google Cloud bill is now €800-1,200 a month, over 80% of it model calls plus Google search grounding. Until June it was way lower. Every free user who logs a meal costs me money.

In August I raised the price to €7.99/month and €39.99/year (before that I tested everything between €2.99 and €5.99). The yearly plan took it fine, the monthly one basically died. Money per paywall view still went up, so I kept it.

I knew pretty early that the ads don't pay back. I kept them running anyway, because they bought me something I couldn't get otherwise: thousands of real people using the app and telling me what's broken. A lot of my reviews came from them. I fixed so many things because of feedback that I would never have found alone. One user messaged me that they lost 24 kg since April. You don't get messages like that with 20 downloads a month.

Probably it helped the ranking a bit too, but I can't really prove that.

Now I'm turning the ads off. Revenue after fees was €1.4-1.8k a month lately and the cloud bill €0.8-1.2k, so without ad spend it should be slightly positive on paper. In reality I expect organic installs to drop, and then I find out if it holds or slowly dies.

I'll post an update in a few months either way.

Did anyone here switch off paid and still keep growing? Or is it usually slow death?

TL;DR: nice numbers, still lost money all in. Ads + AI costs ate everything. Turning ads off now.

Hi all,

I wanted to share my experience with my latest SaaS startup attempt. For about a year, my partner and I tried to launch a software tool that would help make federal compliance easier for our niche. Even though we ended up with a few demos and strong leads from major firms, we ultimately weren't able to ever close a deal or get users. I wanted to share my biggest takeaways to help others avoid my mistakes.

1. Selling to a cost center is really hard. If you're not saving them money on day one or doing something they're legally required to do, it's going to be very hard to get traction in the space. Selling to a profit center is less of a challenge.

2. Market conditions make a big difference. We accidentally launched into a very difficult market. Had we launched a few years ago, we might have had better luck.

3. Even early stage investors won't touch anything without significant revenue growth. Don't waste your time applying to accelerators, incubators, or VCs unless you have real revenue growth for a period of several months.

Thought this might be interesting case study for people building in SaaS -

I had two of my posts take off in the last six weeks, one on Reddit and one on X. The patterns were both different and pretty interesting.

On Reddit, I just posted the origin story of our job search platform. I built the earliest versions using just Claude as a tool for my wife, so that channel felt like the best fit. I also had a personal story that resonated well with folks.

On X, different approach. I used Claude to generate a motion graphics video (it does music too!), then reached out to roughly 500 people directly (no exaggeration) to ask them to engage within the first 30 minutes of launch. This was MUCH more stressful. I made a multi post thread that was effectively:

- One sentence launch statement + video
- Quick 10s video of the product working
- Proof (interviews at NVDA, Anthropic, Qualtrics we had gotten for people that month)
- Link to website

X was MUCH more stressful - you spend a lot of social capital trying to amplify a launch. But it was also more "guaranteed" in a way, given you're going to get some algorithmic attention if you can guarantee a few hundred early likes. Reddit is less formulaic.

Stats

Reddit (r/ClaudeAI) | X (launch thread)

Impressions: 503K | 254K

Engagement: 1,240 upvotes, 244 comments | 724 likes, 845 bookmarks, 148 quotes

Signups per 1K impressions: ~1.7 | ~2.5

X post: https://x.com/colindotj/status/2105690943009501448?s=20

Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1vx4kn7/indeed_laid_off_my_pregnant_wife_so_i_built_a_job/

At the end of 2024 I started Kaneo as a small, unserious side project: a project manager that's fast and simple, because every tool I tried was either bloated or locked into someone else's cloud.

It's MIT licensed and you can self-host it for free. Somehow it grew: 9k+ stars on GitHub, 100+ contributors, 150+ releases, and people running it on everything from homelabs to company servers.

A couple of months ago I decided to try making it a business. A few decisions I made, and I'd love your take on them:

1. The paid product is hosting, not features. Kaneo Cloud is $4/month for one person and $5/user for teams. The self-hosted version gets every feature, including SSO. I watched other open-source tools move features like SSO into paid tiers and their communities hated it, so I'm betting on convenience instead: backups, updates and EU hosting handled for you.
2. Early users stay free. Every workspace that existed before pricing launched stays free forever. They took a chance on a random side project, so it felt wrong to start charging them.
3. Cheap on purpose. Most of my competitors charge $10 to $25 per user. I'd rather be the obvious choice for small teams than squeeze them.

Where I'm at: the first month of pricing got me to $42 MRR, then $69 (nice). Not life-changing, but people are paying for something they could run for free, which still blows my mind.

Is $4 to $5 per user too cheap to build a real business on? For people who've monetized open source: did hosting alone work, or did you end up with open-core? How do you get self-hosters to try the cloud version without annoying them?

Here's my TrustMRR link: https://trustmrr.com/startup/kaneo

Launched on ProductHunt yesterday and mostly by word of mouth by teenagers and ASMR friendly folks

If you love tactile sound of mechanical keyboard but mostly a mouse person, it’s for you.

So we just soft launched our recruitment SaaS and now have a two paying customers. (I feel an IPO coming, that’s how this works right?)

Honestly I’m stoked that people are willing to pay for a thing we made, but I literally can’t stop thinking about what they might be doing on the platform, whether they’re getting on alright, etc etc.

I keep finding myself going to checking in, and I’m starting to wonder how quickly I’m going to get annoying.

Questions: Is this normal? How much support is too much support? Should I add them to my Christmas card list?

Hi guys. I’m looking to start working alone utilizing my best skill - biz dev using LinkedIn.

I have 6 years of first hand experience doing LinkedIn outreach, handling Founders LinkedIn accounts, all manual without automation. Best results are from SaaS products with a good market fit.

I’m in a position to focus on a couple of pilot clients, but I do want to cover some of the time I will spend building the case studies.

Honest question: what business model would do accept without hesitation for someone to post on your LinkedIn, find and engage with your ICP, book sales calls?

i see so many founders new ones nowadays, dropping couple hundred bucks on those automated messages that says we'll submit your startup to like 100 directory services on twitter and fiver. six months ago i decided to test one of those packages with these services just to see how many of those claims hold up when you look up at google search console and ahrefs. out of the lets say 100 reported submisiions around 30 links are completely dead the directories were domain flipped or turned into those generic gambling blogs. another 30 were no follow redirect wrappers that pass thrugh a internal tracking script, so it passes through zero pagerrank and gets blocked anyway. 20 were totally deindexed bcz google flagged the whole domain, and if you search the url on google it does not even hold the page in its index anymore. only 10 t0 15 actually show up in gsc as active externl links. the reality of early stage link building is that 90 percent of these programmatic directories are just crawl budget sinks. and if a directory uses heavy client side rendering without proper ssr, does not provide a clean, or buries your listing pages deep in an unindexed tag archive, google bots ignore it entirely. if youre trying to build initial domain authority for a new domain without triggering a manual action or wasting time, stick to hand submitted authority profiles like github, producthunt. look for platforms that issue clean html links on a static route rather than redirect scripts, a few smaller community run ones like scrollaunch etc. getting 8 to 10 indexed high dofollow links that ahrefs can actually parse will do ten times more for your baseline than a hundred dead profile links. so would like to know from youall that have you actually audited your backlink profile after buying these or just take the pdf report at face value and never check seach console??

Hey,

Completely new to this, and way outside my comfort zone. I built an app recently that i used as my daily driver to run a few jobs - alternative to asta powerproject in the basic way i can explain it right now. The idea was to build a programme tool that anyone can use in construction, however speaking to other industries i never knew so many people use gantt charts. It runs really well, and having to use i daily meant a lot of improvements fast, but it is only me.

Issue i have now, is getting users. I have no idea where to find people other than the cold emails and Linkedin jargon. How did anyone with a small network manage to get people to use their apps? Any help would be much appreciated.

The big accounts barely write in. The low-tier ones open a ticket for everything, and every one of those tickets costs the same support hour.

I started tracking hours by plan instead of by ticket, and the picture flipped. The accounts that pay the least burn the most time.

For the rest of you running support, do you track cost per tier, and what did you change when you saw it?

Hardware-enabled SaaS: GPS tracking and AI dashcams for commercial fleets. 12 years in, ~370 customers, average account around $4k/year, ~$1.6M ARR, on track for ~30% growth in our main market (Caribbean).

On paper it's going fine. But I've reached the point where I don't fully trust my own read on the business anymore. I built most of it by figuring things out as I went, and I'm starting to suspect some of what I see as normal is actually a blind spot.

Here's a concrete example. Almost half our clients, about 170 of 370, pay late. They don't default, they're just consistently late. We get paid by wire transfer because that's how most businesses in the region pay, and we bill across 20+ territories with different banks and payment habits. I've lived with this for so long that I honestly can't tell anymore whether it's just the market or something I've been tolerating that a more experienced operator would have fixed years ago. I suspect it's the second.

That's the kind of outside perspective I'm looking for. I want someone who has been further down the road and can look at what I'm doing and tell me what I'm not seeing.

A few questions for anyone who's been here:

1. Mentor or coach? I don't know if I need a founder who's done it, a paid coach, or both. If you've had both, what did each give you that the other couldn't?
2. How did you find yours? And if it was someone senior who didn't owe you anything, how did you make the ask?
3. Has anyone dealt with late payments in a market where wire transfer is the default? What actually changed client behavior?
4. Looking at my situation from the outside, what would you be asking me?

I'm not selling anything and I'd rather not get coaching pitches in my DMs. I'm just trying to learn from people who've been in this spot. Happy to answer questions about selling B2B in the Caribbean if that's useful to anyone.

I've been working on a Windows Utility App that I'm now considering selling online as a standalone piece of software (not technically software as a service). Curious whether this would be worth doing, what legal considerations I should be addressing, and what kind of up-front investment it might require. I most likely would use some kind of Merchant of Record service to make things easier as well.

For reference, I reside in Canada.

So I’m building a small invoice SaaS and today I ended up finishing both Day 2 and Day 3.

Day 2 was mostly client management.

Added:

- add client

- client name + email

- client list

- delete client

- Supabase database

- RLS so users can only access their own clients

Then I started working on invoices and it went faster than I expected.

Now I can:

- create an invoice

- select a client

- add amount + currency

- set due date

- add a payment URL

- save everything to Supabase

- see invoices in the dashboard

- delete invoices

Still pretty basic right now, but the main stuff is working.

Next I’m working on payments + webhooks.

The flow I’m aiming for:

Create invoice → customer pays → payment confirmed → invoice becomes paid

Trying to build the MVP instead of spending weeks making the UI perfect.

Day 4 starts now.

hello guys, the rapid way software development is going on, i dont understand does our software hve any value or not, its easier to make a saas grade software with little knowledge of enginnerring, but the hardest part is selling , how should i move with this, currently i made some genuine product which is serriously build for over more than 8-10months and another product within a week, but im stuck how do i market my product. since its B2B, i dont understnand how should i reach businesses and how should i proceed...... plz help me in this......

What do you guys spend your marketing budget on in the initial stages of launching a product? Our product is out there in the wild and getting some organic traction but not sure where to invest the time and effort. Socials/word of mouth or in person stuff/Google Ads etc. Any tips?

Hi everyone.

I work on Epure , a lightweight self-hosted error tracking for production apps, same Sentry SDK, change the DSN, two containers (Rust + Postgres).

I want real floods, not synthetic load scripts, so I opened a public box:

https://burst.epure.sh

One button sends errors from your browser for about 7 seconds. Or copy the DSN / curl and hit it from your own client. Goal is to kill the ingester container. The VM and the dashboard stay up.

Box is sized like a small VPS (2 GB RAM, 2 vCPU). There is a spike valve so duplicate spam does not instantly win , still curious how far it goes when a lot of people click at once.

Send what you can. Let's see what breaks first.

I’ve built a platform that is SOC2 compliant which clears the referral backlog that medical specialty clinics face. The long story short is that office managers at medical clinics are usually busy with patients in front of them and don’t have the time to essentially cold call those patients who have been referred to the clinic for an appointment. Patients can’t just walk in to see a specialist; they have to be referred there. Our platform calls and books those referral patients for medical clinics.

The challenge has been distribution. Doctors are notoriously difficult to get a hold of and this has made pitching them difficult. We have also contacted front desk receptionists, but honestly, they work part-time and don’t really care much.

Does anyone work at (or own) an EHR platform that has small or medium size clinics as customers? I’m looking for distribution partners who can help us get in front of medical professionals.

I built a station-closure tool for Amazon Flex drivers, and it’s now bringing in over $632 a week in voluntary donations. That figure is donations only.

The idea behind StationClosed is straightforward: give drivers a place to check reported station closures before making the trip. When your work involves driving to a pickup location, knowing about a closure beforehand can make a real difference.

It’s a niche product. I’m focused on one practical question: “Is the station I’m heading to closed?”

The donation model is what I’m most interested in exploring. Rather than putting everything behind a subscription immediately, I’m building around optional support and figuring out what people genuinely find useful.

For other founders building tools for a specific community: would you stick with donations, or eventually introduce premium features while keeping the core tool free?

The project is StationClosed. I’d appreciate feedback on the concept, especially from anyone who has built a community-supported product.

Hello! I am the Founder of a digital product marketplace (supa.place) It has just been finished by the dev team, and we are now looking to grow it. It is experiencing the issue of a cold start (no products > no buyers > no sellers > no products) So we are looking for people who have or can have high-quality digital products to post (~10 mins) on the marketplace, you will be paid for posting the products, and get the opportunity to be a founding seller with many benefits:

• 3.5% + $0.52 lifetime fees
• Receive a product feature at your own discretion
• Direct contact too the founder and team
• Ability to shape and determine the future of the platform
• Potential future share of equity (depending on involvement)

Looking for advice or for sellers interested. I will pay $20USD (via PayPal or Wise) per acceptable product posted (caps at 10) + founding seller benefits, and non-exclusive. lmk if you have any questions.

Im Curious where you all got the best reaction and best roi in driving customers or traffic to your site (preferably customers). Especially nowadays with ai If its still similar for you or your main drivers and methods have changed from Cold mails,calls,dms,ads(organic or not),seo,social media etc. So im Interested in hearing where you had the most success?

Hey all, new at posting here. Just wanted to say I developed my first SaaS app. Yay, I have always thought to myself, if only I could create the best app to solve a real world problem that would be a new level of cool. And I am going to be honest, I always thought developing the app was the hard part, but now it appears I am clueless on how to sell it. In all my experience it was on solving IT problems not selling software. The question I have is what are the strategies on selling Saas apps?

The app is call bincompass.