Pckgr: $83,000 a Month from One Narrow Intune Pain Point, Built with No Code

Dollar figures come with a rough yen equivalent converted at 1 USD = 150 JPY.

“Want to deploy Google Chrome? Sign up for Pckgr, connect it to Intune, select Chrome, and deploy it. That’s it.” — that’s the entire pitch for Pckgr, built by Thomas Mahony of Melbourne, Australia. For IT admins managing corporate Windows devices with Microsoft Intune, “packaging” an app into a deployable form and redoing that work every time there’s an update is tedious, unglamorous, endless labor. A tool that automates just that single step has reached $83,000/month (about ¥12.45M), an annualized run rate over $1M.

Where the problem was picked up

The original account doesn’t give precise calendar years for each stage. What’s certain is that the starting point was a 5-person helpdesk in 2017, and the experience of crossing Intune operations from the bottom up to enterprise-scale projects is itself the seed of the product. His customer base spans “under 100 devices to over 100,000,” centered on small IT departments and MSPs.

The turning point was deciding to give it away for free

What set Pckgr’s trajectory was pricing it at zero on release. He went completely free “to attract early users and learn how the product behaves in real environments.” And he limited where he distributed it to subreddits and Facebook groups where Intune admins were already discussing this exact problem, no broad marketing push.

After using the free period to surface bugs, he introduced $25/month, then flipped to full-time once the first paying customer appeared. That’s the second inflection point. This isn’t “build it, then figure out if it sells” nor “sell it first, then build it”. It’s a sequence of exposing it to real production use for free, fixing what breaks, and only pricing it once it stops breaking.

And a third point: on the move from a single plan to four tiers with price increases, he says plainly that “raising prices contributed massively to growth.” Staying at $25/month would never have gotten him to $83,000/month. There was room left in what the same customer base could bear.

Why this sequence worked

Going free worked not because of acquisition, but because of the quality of validation. Environments under Intune vary enormously company to company, and failures that don’t reproduce on a developer’s own machine are guaranteed to appear. Using the free period to borrow production environments as a testing ground meant that by the time paid launch rolled around, the main causes of “it didn’t work” complaints had already been eliminated. Had it launched paid, the same bugs would have converted into refunds and reputational damage.

The choice of where to drop it in was also structural. IT-admin-facing tools move faster when placed where “people are already complaining about the same problem” rather than relying on someone finding them via search ads. Subreddits and Facebook groups are places where the decision-maker is already present and has already articulated their own problem, explanation cost drops to near zero.

The single most effective acquisition channel he names is reaching out to Microsoft MVPs (Microsoft-certified technical experts). Getting an MVP to demo the product, which then lands on YouTube, works for two compounding reasons: an MVP’s audience is highly filtered down to Intune admins specifically, and the video stays up indefinitely, continuing to pull in people who find it later via search. He puts this “keeps bringing in customers long after publication” quality at the center of what made it effective.

The technical stack is consistently light: UI and logic built no-code in Bubble, packaging and testing via GitHub Actions, and a backend on Microsoft Azure serverless functions, storage, and Microsoft Graph integration. He held down costs by squeezing cloud free tiers hard while bootstrapping the launch. Building the frontend in Bubble was also a deliberate way to concentrate development time on the core differentiator: the Intune integration.

The moment it nearly broke, and the risk that remains

While in development, Microsoft itself announced a competing platform. He recalls “completely losing motivation and nearly giving up on the release.” He ended up sleeping on it and continuing (“even after hitting a wall, some idea would occur to me the next day and I’d keep going”) but the essence of the risk in this case is right there. Pckgr is a business filling a gap the platform owner hasn’t filled, sitting right next to that platform owner. The structure where the value disappears the day that gap gets filled hasn’t changed.

His own view on the barrier to entry is candid too. With AI tools spreading, “the barrier to entry feels unbelievably low, and competition is increasing,” while at the same time “building an MVP has never been easier.” That two-sided reality also means it’s easier now for newcomers to target the same niche.

What can be copied, and what can’t

What can be copied is the sequence and the choice of location: expose it to real environments for free, fix what breaks, price it only after it stops breaking, and then raise it in stages. Confining distribution to “where the target audience is already gathered” applies regardless of industry. Building the front end no-code while writing only the differentiated core yourself follows the same logic.

What’s harder to copy is where the problem came from. He was confident Pckgr was needed because he’d actually lived through Intune operations from a 5-person MSP up to enterprise projects, judgment material you can’t buy through outside market research. Getting Microsoft MVPs to engage was also possible because he shared the industry’s own language and credibility. On top of that, the terrain of the Microsoft ecosystem, where a large vendor owns the foundation and structurally keeps generating room around the edges to fill, isn’t something you can simply choose to have. He’s now conceiving “Pckgr RMM,” aimed at managing entire Windows fleets, digging deeper into the same terrain.

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