How much do indie founders make?

The short answer: most indie founders who share their revenue make under $1,000 a month. Across 390 founders who put their monthly revenue in a Reddit post title in 2025 and 2026, the median was $830 a month. Founders selling to businesses said $1,000; founders selling to consumers said $200. About one in six said $10,000 a month or more. And because people mostly post when they’ve hit a milestone, the typical founder who never posts a number is probably making less than all of this.

I’ll go through how I got there, how long it tends to take, why who you sell to matters so much, what these numbers mean in actual customers, and what founders at each level say they’re stuck on.

What founders say they make

Spend any time on r/SaaS and you’ll see “I hit $10k MRR” posts. It’s easy to come away thinking that’s normal and that you’re behind. So I collected every post title from 2025 and 2026, in seven subreddits where founders talk about what they’re building, that stated monthly or annual recurring revenue. There were 463. I read every one, took out the goals, jokes and stories about other people, and kept 390 founders saying what their own product makes. Here’s how they spread out:

The middle half sit between $100 and $3,425 a month. 9.2% posted to say they make nothing yet, usually an honest update like “4 months building in public, $0 MRR”. A whole genre of posts now ends with “not $27K, just $27”, because people are tired of the other kind.

Why it looks higher online than it is

Only 0.6% of founders’ posts put a revenue number in the title at all, and the ones that do are mostly celebrating. 13.1% of the figures are exactly $100, $1,000, $10,000 or $100,000 a month. People post when they cross a round number, not on an ordinary Tuesday.

So the $830 is the middle of the founders proud enough, or worried enough, to share. The far larger group who never post a number is very likely lower. If you’re at $0 or $100 a month, you’re not behind. Even among the people who chose to post, 90 of 390 were under $100.

How long it takes

105 of the titles also say how long the founder had been at it (“in 3 months”, “Day 60”, “a year after launch”). Here’s the median for each:

In the first three months, the middle founder who posts is at a few hundred dollars a month: $343 in the first month and $400 by month three. Those early numbers include the launch-week spikes people love to post, so a quiet first month is more common than this suggests. Between three months and a year the median is $1,700. The founders a year or more in say $10,000, but there are only 11 of them, so take that as a sign of direction, not a target.

The pattern I’d take from it: the first months are usually small, and the founders posting bigger numbers have mostly been at it for most of a year.

Who you sell to matters most

For every claim from 2025 and 2026 I read the title and the start of the post and noted who pays: businesses (companies, or people buying for their work, like a recruiter or a marketer), consumers (people paying for themselves), or developers. In 174 the post didn’t make it clear.

Founders selling to businesses said $1,000 a month; founders selling to consumers said $200. The ranges don’t overlap, so this isn’t noise. 39% of consumer founders who posted were under $100 a month, against 16.7% of business founders. Developer tools sit in between, but there are only 13, too few to say much.

I think the reason is simple. A business will pay $50 or $100 a month for something that saves an employee a few hours. A person will think hard about $5. A consumer app can work, and some here are doing very well, but it needs far more customers to get to the same place.

What that means in customers

66 of the posts also say how many paying customers they have. Divide one by the other and the median works out to about $29 per customer per month. It’s rough, since some posts mix today’s revenue with an older customer count, but it gives you a rule of thumb:

That’s the whole game in one table. $1,000 a month is about 34 customers at a normal price, or 200 at $5. If you’re pricing like a consumer app, you need consumer-app numbers of people.

Is it getting harder?

I read the 2023 and 2024 titles the same way, 160 of them, to compare:

The middle hasn’t moved much: the ranges on those two medians overlap. What changed is the bottom. The share posting under $100 a month went from 13.1% to 23.1%, and the share posting $0 went from 3.8% to 9.2%. Some of that is a healthy turn towards honest updates. Some of it fits what I found in Building got easy. Getting anyone to care didn’t: far more people are shipping products now, and many more of them are sitting near zero.

What founders at each level are stuck on

Every post in the dataset also has a label for what it’s about. Here’s what the founders at each level were posting:

Under $100 a month, 41% are asking for help getting customers. That drops once people have some revenue, but not by much: 26% of founders at $1,000 to $10,000 a month are still asking the same question. What grows is “running the business”: pricing, hiring, co-founders, taxes, which goes from 4% to 14% at $10,000 and up.

Getting customers isn’t a stage you pass. It’s the job, at every size.

What I’d do with this

If you’re at $0. You’re one of 9.2% of founders who posted a number, and almost certainly in a much bigger group who didn’t. When founders under $100 a month ask for help, it’s mostly about getting customers (41%) and almost never about the product. If you’re deciding where to put it in front of people, I compared the main subreddits in Which startup subreddit is for what?

If you’re under $100 a month. Check your price and who’s paying it. If you’re charging a few dollars to individuals, the table above tells you how many of them you’ll need. If the same product is useful to people at work, selling it to them is the biggest lever in this data: business founders here were at 5 times the consumer median.

If you’re between $100 and $1,000. You’re in the biggest group of founders who post. Founders here in their first three months were at a few hundred dollars a month, and those three months to a year in were at $1,700, so expect this stage to take months, not weeks.

If you’re over $1,000. You’re in the top half of the people proud enough to post. Expect the questions to shift towards running the business, and expect “how do I get more customers” to stay on the list.

By subreddit

These groups are small, so read them loosely. r/startups has the highest numbers, which fits with it being where people talk about running a company. r/buildinpublic has the lowest, which fits with people there posting from the very start. r/SideProject and r/Entrepreneur had too few figures to include.

What I can’t tell you

None of these numbers are checked. They’re what people wrote, and some will be rounded up, some will count one-off sales as “MRR”, and some will be made up. I took out the obvious jokes (“I’m a golden retriever and my SaaS just hit $679K MRR”), but a believable fake would get through. I only used titles, so a founder who mentions $300 MRR in the fourth paragraph isn’t here. “Who pays” is my reading of each post, and the customer counts are rough. This is Reddit, so it says nothing about founders who never post there.

How I did it

I matched post titles that pair a dollar figure with MRR or ARR, in the seven subreddits from the builder dataset, in posts from people building something. For 2025 and 2026 that found 463. I read all of them and removed 73: goals and challenges (“100 days to $5K MRR”), stories about other founders, projections, jokes, and amounts added rather than totals. In 10 I fixed the figure, usually where the title gave a goal and a current number and the match picked the goal. Annual figures are divided by 12. When the same person posted the same figure in several subreddits, it counts once. The 2023 and 2024 titles went through the same review. The medians’ 95% ranges come from resampling.

Cite as: GTM for One (gtmforone.com), “How much do indie founders make? What 390 of them posted, 2025 and 2026”, https://www.gtmforone.com/blog/how-much-do-indie-founders-make.

Going from $100 to $1,000 a month mostly means finding more of the few people who need what you built. That’s the part I built GTM for One to help with.