SaaS case studies: revenue and exits
SaaS (Software as a Service) is software sold as a monthly or annual subscription. Small Start records the revenue, ARR, sale prices and acquisition channels of SaaS businesses run by individuals and small teams, each with a source.
Recurring revenue makes SaaS numbers look stable. The archive also holds the other side: an MRR that decayed 90% through neglect, and a deal that died after six months of due diligence.
- Case studies
- 107
- Sale price
- 120億円
SaaS cases
1–24 of 107
CyberLeads: After 19 Failed Projects, a "Freshly Funded Companies" Lead List Built in 31 Days Now Makes $53.7K/Month — with a Free Newsletter as the Sales Engine
Greek developer Alex West launched CyberLeads in February 2020 — his 20th project after 19 failures, built in 31 days. It sells monthly lists of freshly funded companies. From $290 MRR in month one to $53.7K/month by October 2024, with a free 10-lead weekly newsletter funneling buyers to the paid tiers.
Feather: The "Write in Notion, Publish as a Blog" SaaS Sold for $250K Two Years In — the Buyer Was Tibo, Who Exited Tweet Hunter
Bhanu Teja P built Feather in public on X, reaching $50K ARR 9.5 months after launch. In June 2024 it sold for $250K at $6K MRR — roughly 3.5x annual revenue. The buyer was Tibo, known for exiting Tweet Hunter. A rare look at how peer-to-peer micro-M&A gets priced.
SEObot: An AI That Writes SEO Articles Hits $46K MRR and $1.8M Lifetime — the Numbers Come from a Public Stripe-Linked Dashboard
John Rush's SEObot is a SaaS where AI keeps writing SEO articles. As of August 2026, its $46,517 MRR, $1.82M lifetime revenue, and 636 subscriptions are verifiable by anyone on a Stripe-connected public dashboard. Reading the numbers, AI-content controversy and all.
GummySearch: The Reddit Research SaaS That Chose to Close While Profitable — Four Years Ended by a Commercial API License That Never Came
After roughly four years running his Reddit research tool alone, founder Fed shut GummySearch down in November 2025 when commercial-license negotiations over the Data API fell through. Failory reported $35K MRR at closure. With 140,000 users and the business in the black, this was an ending caused by neither churn nor running out of money.
BoltAI: $15K a Month on One-Time Licenses in a Subscription-Only AI Market
Vietnamese solo developer Daniel Nguyen went against the "AI tools = subscriptions" consensus and sells BoltAI, a native macOS AI app, as a one-time license: an average of $15K a month and 7,000 customers 18 months after launch. He also documented the $19→$79 price climb and the year lost on his failed first product, KTool.
ProjectionLab: $1M ARR from 4–6 Hours a Night, Every Weeknight, for 4 Years — the Growth Curve of a Financial-Planning SaaS Raised by the FIRE Community
ProjectionLab started at $150 MRR in 2021 and reached $1M ARR in June 2025. Developer Kyle Nolan quit his job only at $23K MRR. A Hacker News post, one word from Mr. Money Mustache, and an 8,500-member Discord were the main engines of growth.
Inkdrop: ¥150,000 a Month from a $4.99 Markdown Note App — Two Years of an Indie SaaS That Stopped PR Emails and Refused to Go Freemium
Japanese developer TAKUYA's Inkdrop reached ¥150,000 in monthly sales about two years after launch, with a ¥950,000 single-month spike in August 2019. A 1,000-person private beta, a 60-day free trial, no freemium, no more PR emails — the reasoning behind each decision is public, alongside the numbers.
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.
Faceless.video: $1M ARR in 10 Months — a Non-Engineer's Seventh Bubble App After Six Misses
A former music producer built six failed apps on no-code Bubble, then hit with the seventh: Faceless.video reached $1M ARR ten months after launch. Current MRR exceeds $83,000, with 2.5 million cumulative signups.
Youform: The First 200 Users Came One DM at a Time, then $18,000 MRR Two Years Later
Youform found its first 200 users by searching X and Reddit for people complaining about Typeform's price hike and DMing them individually. A 40-day lifetime deal raised $35,000 up front; about two years in, MRR is $18,000 with 80,000 signups.
Base44: Six Months Old, Eight Employees, an $80M All-Cash Sale — but $25M of It Was Retention Pay
Base44, the AI app-building platform started by one person, sold to Wix for $80M in cash about six months after founding. But $25M of that is retention compensation for its eight employees — the headline number cannot be read as the founder's take.
Questgen & Supermeme Today: 2.5 Million Signups, $6,500–7,000 a Month — Three AI Tools Down From a $100K Peak Year
Three AI tools run by a data scientist alongside his day job. Combined signups exceed 2.5 million, yet current monthly revenue is $6,500–7,000 — down from the 2025 peak of $100K a year.
Damon Chen: Bought a GitHub Repo for $20K, Grew It to $1.5M ARR — the “Buy, Don’t Build” Indie Playbook
Former engineer Damon Chen grew Testimonial.to to over $2M cumulative revenue in four years, then in the early ChatGPT boom bought a pre-revenue repository (now PDF.ai) for $20K. Repositioned as "AI you can chat with about PDFs," it grew to $1.5M ARR within months. A defining example of indie development that buys the seed instead of building from scratch.
A high schooler's paid Discord bot nets ¥12,000/month profit — reading the logic behind pricing ¥500 on top of a ¥320 cost
Entering a Discord text-to-speech market full of free bots at ¥500/month, cost about ¥320 per 200,000 characters, and ¥12,000/month profit by year two. Even the signup pace is quantified.
8 failures, 3 hits in 5 years — the turning point where a solo developer with ¥0 revenue reached ¥200,000–¥1,000,000/month
Of 8 failed products earning ¥0 to a few thousand yen, one successful paid learning service hit ¥200,000–¥1,000,000/month within six months on 50–200 users. Laying out all 11 side by side reveals what actually split them.
Employee-Referral Hiring Platform EmployUs, at $700K ARR, Sold to HR Giant Hireology: A Sale That Chose to Become "a Feature"
EmployUs, which systematizes employee referral hiring, was sold to hiring-management SaaS Hireology at the $700K ARR stage (about ¥100M). Too small to fight alone, strong as a feature — a real case study in the decision to "become part of a suite."
AIContentfy: $1M ARR in Under 2 Years, 100+ LOIs — Selling Itself by Splitting Into Three
Teemu Raitaluoto's AIContentfy started with a single article driving over 10,000 monthly visitors via SEO, reaching $1M ARR in under two years. At exit, he split the business into three listings, drew 100+ LOIs, and secured an all-cash offer from among the final three bidders.
MDZ.AI: Bundling $200/Month of AI Tool Subscriptions Into a $49 Plan — $165K/Month in Two Years
Su Jimmy's AI tool for e-commerce sellers, "MDZ.AI," launched in January 2024. Bundling 15+ AI models into a $49/month plan, it hit 500 beta signups in 24 hours and 100 paying users in two weeks, now generating $165K/month (about ¥24.75M).
Screenshot-Annotation Tool InstaCap Sold for 6x Revenue to a Serial Entrepreneur: Why It Beat the Standard Micro-SaaS Multiple
InstaCap, a tool for annotating and sharing screenshots, was sold by founder Samee Hassan to serial entrepreneur Joe Speiser at 6x revenue. Material for thinking about what conditions produce a multiple above the standard 3–5x range.
Shopify App Portfolio Plug in Useful, 37,000 Users, Sold to SureSwift: An App Business Built by "The SEO Guy"
Plug in Useful, a portfolio of Shopify apps run solo by Daniel Sim with 37,000 users, was sold to SureSwift Capital, a serial acquirer of SaaS businesses. A real example of a specialist-turned-founder building an ecosystem by turning his own SEO expertise into apps.
Amazon x eBay Support Integrator ChannelReply Sold to Threecolts for Eight Figures: A Plain "Connector" Pulls Off a Big Win
ChannelReply, which routes buyer messages from Amazon, eBay, and other marketplaces into help desks like Zendesk, was sold by Michael Dash and team to e-commerce software roll-up Threecolts for eight figures in dollars. A case where a piece that merely "connects two systems" turned into a several-billion-yen exit.
Sidekiq: Open Source to $7M+ a Year, Solo — the Finished Form of a 20-Year “OSS + Paid Edition” Strategy
Mike Perham, creator of Sidekiq, the open-source background job processor for Ruby, has run a free-OSS-plus-paid-Pro/Enterprise model entirely alone and grown it past $7M (about ¥1.05 billion) in annual revenue (in 2023 he said it was "closer to $10M than $1M"). The pinnacle of commercializing OSS with zero employees.
Visual Quiz Builder: A Shopify Diagnostic-Quiz App Sold for $1M With Zero Ad Spend — the Quiet Growth
Visual Quiz Builder, which adds "find the product that fits you" diagnostic quizzes to Shopify stores, was sold to Alleyway Capital for around $1 million while spending almost nothing on advertising or traditional marketing. A record of reaching an exit purely on organic growth inside an app store.
Sales SaaS Autoklose: From a Conference Demo to Acquisition — the Negotiation That Doubled the Offer
Autoklose, a bootstrapped sales-automation SaaS, was sold to sales-engagement veteran VanillaSoft after a demo at an industry conference sparked the deal. The founder pushed the sale price to double the initial offer — a rare, concrete example of small-SaaS negotiation.
FAQ
- How much can a solo SaaS founder earn?
- Documented cases include BuiltWith at $14M/year run by one person, and Sidekiq at $7M+/year on an open-source-plus-paid model — alongside a cold-email SaaS whose MRR fell from $2,800 to $340.
- What do small SaaS businesses sell for?
- Recorded deals range from Potion at $300K between individuals, to Boardroom Insiders at $25M on $5M ARR, and AppArmor taking $40M all-cash. Bootstrapped SaaS deals here cluster around 3–6x annual revenue.