Operating

Leadverse Gets All Its Customers From Reddit, and 90% of Its Costs Are LLM Fees — $3,300 MRR Built Between a Day Job and a Newborn

Leadverse, an AI tool that finds prospects on social media, reached $3,300 MRR and 130+ paying customers ten months after launch. Every dollar of revenue comes from Reddit, and LLM API fees make up about 90% of operating costs.

Leadverse Gets All Its Customers From Reddit, and 90% of Its Costs Are LLM Fees — $3,300 MRR Built Between a Day Job and a Newborn

Is a business whose revenue comes from exactly one place strong, or fragile? Leadverse’s record shows both at once.

Jakub Mužík of the Czech Republic built this tool at night and on weekends while working as a Salesforce developer — with a newborn at home. Ten months after launch, MRR is $3,300. And 100% of that revenue comes from Reddit.

The numbers

ItemDetail
MRR$3,300
Cumulative revenue$20,000+
Paying customers130+
Launched~10 months before the interview
PricingInitially €9 and €14 → switched to USD → added a $19 plan
Custom-plan users30+
TeamOne person; still employed as a Salesforce developer
Costs~90% of operating costs are LLM API fees

Mužík says he had shipped countless apps before this, almost all of which earned nothing. Leadverse was the one that landed.

Changing the currency raised conversion

The concrete pricing detail is about currency. He launched at €9 and €14; switching the display to USD improved conversion. A $19 plan came later.

Numbers moving on displayed currency rather than price is a rare, useful report. For SaaS with internationally scattered buyers, dollar pricing likely reads as “the standard quote.” As interventions go, it is drastically lighter than shipping features.

The other change was the billing funnel: from a permanent free plan to a 7-day trial requiring a card. Narrow the door. Raise the quality of who walks through.

Also notable: of 130+ customers, 30+ are on custom plans, over a fifth outside the published price list, meaning the $19 sticker may not represent the true average price.

There is only Reddit

The acquisition section is short. Post twice a week. Use his own tool for his own lead-gen. That’s it, and it accounts for all of the revenue.

The danger of a single channel is something our archive keeps demonstrating: the Pinterest-focused AI writing SaaS that fell from $15,000 MRR to under $1,000 in eighteen months combined channel dependence with a platform rule change. Reddit communities are famously hostile to self-promotion. A policy shift could hit this revenue directly, same structure.

By contrast, the API developer who only enters markets with $20,000–$80,000/month competitors invests in SEO and content because “channels that compound beat channels that spike.” Mužík chose the opposite: the place where reactions come back this week. Given the hours a side project allows, not being able to wait for compounding is an understandable trade.

Ninety percent of costs are the LLM

The most practical number in the record: about 90% of operating costs are LLM API fees.

How much of the $3,300 MRR they consume isn’t disclosed, but the ratio alone characterizes the business. A SaaS wrapped around AI grows its costs with usage. More users don’t necessarily help if per-unit margin stays thin.

We touched the same issue in the AI infrastructure case propped up by grants and vendor credits. There, credits hid the costs. Here, he pays out of pocket and publishes the ratio. The stack (React, Supabase, Stripe, Resend) is light. The model bill is the only heavy thing.

The “countless apps” before the hit

Before Leadverse, Mužík shipped more apps than he can count, nearly all at zero revenue. Neither the count nor the names are public, so no batting average can be computed.

What’s knowable: multiple misses preceded the one hit. The pattern recurs across our archive, and so does the observation that few people keep their misses in countable form.

Position among our cases

¥495,000 a month is a third of the median among revenue-disclosing cases here (~¥1.5M). Restrict to side projects and the median is about ¥150K, more than three times that level.

The reference value isn’t the amount but the breakdown: revenue traced to a single source, a cost ratio actually disclosed, conversion moved by a currency change. All of it is granularity that vanishes in bigger cases.

The other reading: $20,000 lifetime

Alongside $3,300 MRR sits $20,000+ cumulative over ten months, about $2,000 a month on average.

So the current MRR runs above the ten-month average: a business still climbing. Yet $20,000 total is small pay for ten months of nights and weekends. The same business can be written as “growing” or as “hasn’t paid back yet”. That is the difficulty of records at this scale.

Between a newborn and a day job

The constraints are concrete: full-time Salesforce work, a newborn, nights and weekends.

Under those constraints the available moves are few. No time for deep product work → pick the channel with the fastest feedback. No capacity for cost optimization → the LLM stays at 90%. The constraints are the design.

The takeaway: in side-project indie development, the chosen move is not the right move but the move available that week. Two Reddit posts a week may not be optimal, it is sustainable.

Not disclosed: profit, churn, average price, and the custom-plan price band. We know $3,300. We don’t know what remains in hand, nor how long a business can stand on a single community.

Sources

This article summarizes and analyzes the public sources above. Please refer to the primary sources for details.

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