Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?

#351

Post by CloudNetworking » Tue, Apr 23, 2019, 9:51 AM UTC

jborak wrote: post #324

Packetriot ( https://packetriot.com ) - around 4 months old and I haven't begun seriously marketing, but it generates $60/month and makes a tiny profit. With it you can create a secure public endpoints (HTTP/TCP) from any network. The client can host static sites, reverse-proxy to other hosts, terminate TLS. It manages Lets-Encrypt for you. The higher-end tiers provides access logs, metrics, firewall rules, and servi…

Interested in hearing more about your very low running costs (I understand below $60/month).

Re: Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?

#352

Post by dinkydani » Tue, Apr 23, 2019, 11:24 AM UTC

spekulatius2410 wrote: post #330

jivings wrote: post #36

Two-person but close enough - We're building Leave Me Alone ( https://leavemealone.xyz ), an app that helps you unsubscribe from spammy mailing lists. Currently at ~$500/month (full stats are public here https://leavemealone.xyz/open )

awesome you are actually sharing numbers - love it!

Yup we share all of our numbers and we also build in the open and include our users in every step and decision possible :)

Re: Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?

#353

Post by mickel » Tue, Apr 23, 2019, 6:40 PM UTC

sharedmocha wrote: post #343

mickel wrote: post #326

I'm a one-man team developing TAYL, a service that turns websites into podcasts using AI. I built everything in 3 months (while working full-time with other things) and it's been profitable since week 1 of public release https://www.tayl.app

Website looks really neat and clean. Did you use any website builder for this ?

Thanks! I used gatsby.js (http://gatsbyjs.org) but no CSS framework or such, all very simple custom react components + CSS modules.

Re: Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?

#354

Post by mickel » Tue, Apr 23, 2019, 6:41 PM UTC

bbayer wrote: post #344

mickel wrote: post #326

I'm a one-man team developing TAYL, a service that turns websites into podcasts using AI. I built everything in 3 months (while working full-time with other things) and it's been profitable since week 1 of public release https://www.tayl.app

It looks very promising. What text-to-speech engine are you using?

Thanks! GCP and AWS.

Re: Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?

#355

Post by therealdrag0 » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 4:41 PM UTC

jwr wrote: post #337

laydn wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're waiting for an on-premise version of PartsBox to be released :-) Is that wishful thinking???

I'm afraid so. On-premises is expensive (VERY expensive). I tried to estimate the necessary pricing for on-premises deployment and the final price was never attractive to customers. In all cases it turned out the need for on-premises deployment was not a business need (we must deploy this locally because of X and Y, which implies a value of Z in USD), but rather a point of view (I'd rather have this locally because t…

You are very wise. The last company I worked for started as a SaaS product but in an industry that was on-prem. They were unable to resist customer demands for on-prem, so now have mostly hybrid solutions that are very costly and terrible to support.

Re: Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?

#356

Post by therealdrag0 » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 5:11 PM UTC

deforciant wrote: post #82

I have been running https://webhookrelay.com/ as I side project for the last two years and since last March it's quite profitable. Environment is highly automated, running on GKE, builds and testing on drone.io while deployments are rolled out by keel.sh, some alerting goes through Node-RED so I don't have to interfere. Still doing full-time consulting but hopefully in the next year or two I will transition full-time…

Love the idea; love how small the feature set is and how the domain is interesting from a software-engineering perspective. And really like the UX of your site. Kudos all around.

Re: Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?

#357

Post by therealdrag0 » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 5:38 PM UTC

albydarned wrote: post #35

I co-founded Pigeon SMS ( https://pigeonsms.com ) with my dad just a couple of years ago and we reached profitability just a few months after founding. We provide business texting services to businesses of all sizes. Some of our customers include a city, vet clinic, glass shop, screen printing firm, boutique retailers, and on and on. Really any business can benefit from adding texting to their communications. My advi…

I have a friend who works for ZipWhip which seems like the same sort of space. And they just raised $51 mil, so I guess there's need for this sort of product!

Re: Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?

#358

Post by selterdurst » Thu, Apr 25, 2019, 11:04 AM UTC

coderholic wrote: post #147

brianwillis wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's a reasonable explanation. I'm near enough to the middle of my town for that to be the cause.

Yeah, the geolocation is city/zip level accuracy. The coordinates are the centroid of the city or zip, not a specific point.

Read an article where people were coming to people's houses demanding their phone etc. because the location for that "region" was mapped to their backyard.

Re: Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?

#359

Post by owenwil » Thu, Apr 25, 2019, 12:33 PM UTC

_justirma wrote: post #318

owenwil wrote: post #41

I run a one-person ‘SaaS’ that delivers morning tech briefings each day for industry insight, without ads, that I wanted to see, called recharged: https://char.gd/recharged . I both write the newsletters + develop the platform behind the scenes that enables seamless community access involved, and our MRR is approximately $2,500/month for about 18 months. I’ll admit it’s a struggle to properly grow at this point, but…

I follow your work! If you need a hand on Recharged I'd love to help and keep it live and up.

<3 thank you! I'm working out a plan for our next iteration at the moment, but I'll totally let you know if I need help or feedback.

Re: Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?

#360

Post by ed » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 4:21 AM UTC

nicholas73 wrote: post #333

ed wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 to this advice. Don't incorporate until you're already paying yourself a good salary. The wrong structure can easily cost you thousands per year in taxes and fees.

Would it be "piercing the corporate veil" to accept payments before incorporating, then moving everything to separate accounts afterwards?

No you simply convert the sole proprietorship to an LLC (or corporation). You "sell" your intellectual property to the newly created corporation in exchange for your founder stock. A sole proprietorship is sort of like the default business structure, you don't really need to do anything to start it, everything just ends up on your personal tax return.

"Piercing the corporate veil" is different. Google will be helpful if you're interested, but basically if you run a company don't do shady shit -- don't commit fraud or gross negligence, and respect the separation between company and personal finances. Otherwise you may lose the protection of the corporation (the "limited liability" part of LLC) and become personally liable if things go bad.