Five Months In: 73 SaaS Apps Later

I started this project about five months ago and spent the first ninety days in a full sprint, building and launching 73 different SaaS and micro-SaaS applications across a wide range of niches. The goal was never to build one perfect product. It was to cast a broad net, launch fast, and see what the market would respond to once real users started touching the software.

So far, the results have been mixed, but mixed in a useful way.

A few of the apps have picked up paying subscribers already, and not in the places I would have predicted. The early traction has come from some of the more fringe applications rather than the obvious ones. A number of those were built almost in passing as I ran short on “good ideas” and focused more on improving the underlying templates, deployment flow, and CLI tooling than on the apps themselves. That has been one of the more interesting parts of the project so far: the market does not care which app I thought was clever. It cares whether a specific tool solves a narrow problem well enough for someone to pay for it.

At this point, the portfolio is profitable, although only barely. That still matters. A project like this does not need to turn into some absurd $50,000-a-month success story to be worth doing. If it grows into a few thousand dollars of monthly recurring revenue over the next year, that is already a win from my perspective. A handful of low-maintenance apps producing steady income with minimal overhead is a perfectly acceptable outcome, especially when the entire system is designed to be simple to operate.

One of the more interesting surprises so far has been Simple Fax Service. It has been making consistent sales, and the total revenue from those one-off fax transactions is already keeping pace with the subscription apps. There is no onboarding funnel, no retention strategy, no feature ladder, and no subscription pitch. Someone needs to send a fax, pays for the transaction, gets the result, and leaves. That is it.

I have probably been too quick to discount those kinds of no-frills utility tools in favor of recurring subscription products. Subscriptions are still the cleaner path to predictable annual revenue, but simple transactional software has its own advantages. The customer intent is obvious, the value proposition is immediate, and there is very little friction between landing on the site and paying for the tool. The early performance of Simple Fax Service is a good reminder that not every useful software business needs to be dressed up as a recurring SaaS platform.

That is really the advantage of the portfolio model overall. Most of these apps are easy to maintain, and almost all of the maintenance burden is centralized into the shared templates, deployment workflow, and common infrastructure. When something breaks or needs improvement, I can usually fix it once in the underlying system instead of fighting 73 separate products. That changes the economics quite a bit. It means even relatively small earners can still be worth keeping if they continue to bring in revenue without creating much operational drag.

So the plan from here is not especially dramatic. I am going to keep an eye on the SEO, continue writing targeted blog posts for the applications that are showing signs of life, and resist the urge to overreact too early. I am still not advertising, and I am still not putting much effort into promotion. Most of my time is spent doing contract software development during the day anyway, which means I can afford to be patient and let the portfolio develop on its own timeline.

Right now, this project looks less like a single breakout product and more like a long, uneven filtering process. Some of these apps will die quietly. A few will probably surprise me. That is fine. The point was never to be right about every launch. The point was to build enough surface area for the market to tell me where the real opportunities are.

So far, things have developed into a comfortable but boring "meh"