Micro-SaaS as a Side Project for Developers

The Developer’s Dream

You write code for someone else. Your skills make other people money. Every feature you ship, every bug you fix, every system you build—the value flows to your employer. The thought surfaces repeatedly: what if you built something for yourself?

The fantasy version involves quitting your job, raising venture capital, building the next big thing, and retiring early. The realistic version is different. It involves keeping your job, building something small, charging money for it, and gradually creating financial optionality.

Micro-SaaS is the realistic version. Small software products with recurring revenue, built and maintained by one person or a tiny team. Not trying to become the next Salesforce. Just trying to create something useful that people pay for monthly.

My British lilac cat, Mochi, runs a micro-SaaS of sorts. She provides companionship services in exchange for recurring food and shelter payments. Her customer base is small (one household), but retention is excellent. She understood the model before I did.

This article covers the practical path from developer to Micro-SaaS owner. Not the hype—the reality. The idea validation, the building, the marketing, the maintenance, and the actual numbers. By the end, you’ll know whether this path suits you and how to start if it does.

What Micro-SaaS Actually Means

Micro-SaaS has characteristics that distinguish it from traditional startups:

Small scope: Solves one specific problem well rather than building a platform. Think “email signature generator” rather than “communication suite.”

Solo or tiny team: Usually one person, sometimes two or three. No employees, no office, no HR department.

Bootstrapped: No investors, no funding rounds. Revenue funds everything from day one.

Recurring revenue: Monthly or annual subscriptions rather than one-time purchases. This is the “SaaS” part—predictable, compounding revenue.

Lifestyle compatible: Designed to run alongside other work, at least initially. Doesn’t require 80-hour weeks.

Modest ambitions: Success might be $5K/month, not $5M/month. The goal is sustainable income, not explosive growth.

The combination creates something developers can actually build while employed, that generates real money, without the risks of traditional entrepreneurship.

The Economics of Micro-SaaS

Let’s get concrete about numbers. Understanding the economics helps assess whether it’s worth your time.

Revenue Math

A typical Micro-SaaS might charge $15-50/month for individual plans, more for team plans. Let’s use $29/month as an example.

Monthly Revenue	Customers Needed	Annual Revenue
$1,000	35	$12,000
$2,500	86	$30,000
$5,000	172	$60,000
$10,000	345	$120,000

These aren’t impossible numbers. 172 paying customers for a useful tool is achievable. It’s not easy, but it’s achievable.

Cost Structure

Micro-SaaS has favorable economics:

• Hosting: $20-200/month for most products (scales with customers)
• Domain + email: $20-50/year
• Payment processing: 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction (Stripe)
• Tools and services: $50-200/month (analytics, email, etc.)
• Marketing: Variable, can be $0 with content marketing

At $5,000/month revenue, expenses might be $300-500/month. Gross margins of 90%+ are typical.

Time Investment

The overlooked cost is your time:

• Building: 100-500 hours for MVP (varies enormously)
• Launch and marketing: 20-50 hours
• Ongoing maintenance: 5-20 hours/month
• Customer support: 2-10 hours/month (scales with customers)

At $5,000/month revenue and 20 hours/month maintenance, that’s $250/hour. But the building time must be amortized. If you spent 300 hours building and run for 3 years, add 8 hours/month of amortized build time. Still good economics, but the build time is real investment.

Finding Your Idea

The idea phase kills most Micro-SaaS attempts. Developers either:

• Can’t think of anything to build
• Think of ideas too big for side projects
• Think of ideas that already exist (and conclude the market is saturated)
• Think of ideas nobody wants

Here’s how to find viable ideas:

Scratch Your Own Itch

What problems do you face in your work? What tools do you wish existed? What tedious tasks would you pay to automate?

Your domain expertise matters. A developer who works in e-commerce understands e-commerce problems. A developer who works with data pipelines understands data problems. Build in domains you understand.

Advantage: You’re the target customer. You know the problem deeply. You can validate by checking whether you’d pay.

Risk: Your problem might be unique to you. Check if others share it.

Observe Frustrations

Watch what annoys people in online communities. Reddit, Twitter, Hacker News, niche forums—people complain constantly. Some complaints indicate market opportunities.

Look for:

• Repeated complaints (not one person, many)
• Complaints with economic impact (costs money or time)
• Complaints in growing domains
• Complaints without obvious solutions

Improve Existing Products

Perfect products don’t exist. Successful products have weaknesses. Find a successful product with a consistent complaint and build a better alternative focused on that specific dimension.

Example: “Tool X is great but too complicated” → Build a simpler alternative for users who don’t need all features.

Example: “Tool Y is too expensive for small teams” → Build an affordable alternative targeting solo users.

Follow Platform Changes

When platforms launch new features or APIs, opportunities emerge. Shopify launches a new feature → tools helping merchants use that feature have a market. Apple announces new capabilities → developers building on those capabilities find customers.

Being early to platform changes creates windows before competition intensifies.

Validate Before Building

The temptation is to start coding immediately. Resist. Validation before building saves months of wasted work.

Validation methods:

1. Talk to potential customers: Find people who have the problem. Do they actually have it? How do they solve it now? Would they pay to solve it better?

2. Landing page test: Create a simple page describing the product. Drive traffic. Measure signup interest. If nobody cares, don’t build.

3. Competitive analysis: Existing competitors prove market exists. Study their reviews—what do customers complain about? That’s your differentiation opportunity.

4. Search volume: Do people search for solutions to this problem? Google Keyword Planner and similar tools reveal demand.

5. Pre-sell: Can you sell the product before it exists? If people commit money (even refundable), demand is validated.

flowchart TD
    A[Idea] --> B{Does the problem exist?}
    B -->|No| C[Find new idea]
    B -->|Yes| D{Do people pay to solve it?}
    D -->|No| C
    D -->|Yes| E{Can you reach them?}
    E -->|No| C
    E -->|Yes| F{Can you build it?}
    F -->|No| C
    F -->|Yes| G[Start building]

Building Your Micro-SaaS

The building phase is where developers feel comfortable. A few principles keep it manageable:

Start Embarrassingly Small

Your first version should embarrass you. If it doesn’t, you’ve built too much. The minimum viable product truly should be minimal—the smallest thing that delivers core value.

Example: A reporting tool’s MVP might be: users connect one data source, see one pre-built report, export to PDF. No custom reports, no multiple sources, no team features. Just the core value.

Users don’t care about features you might add. They care about whether the product solves their problem now.

Choose Boring Technology

Micro-SaaS doesn’t need cutting-edge tech. It needs reliable, well-documented, easily hosted tech. Boring is good.

Safe choices in 2026:

• Backend: Node.js, Python/Django, Ruby on Rails, Go
• Frontend: React, Vue, or server-rendered HTML
• Database: PostgreSQL
• Hosting: Railway, Render, Fly.io, or AWS/GCP with managed services
• Payments: Stripe (overwhelmingly dominant for good reason)
• Auth: Clerk, Auth0, or built-in framework auth

Avoid complexity. Every technology choice adds maintenance burden. Choose technologies you already know.

Ship Fast, Iterate Based on Feedback

Your assumptions about what users want are probably wrong. The faster you ship, the faster you learn what’s actually valuable.

Ship the MVP. Watch how people use it. Ask what they wish it did. Build that. Repeat.

This feels uncomfortable. Developers want to build complete solutions. But premature completeness wastes effort on features nobody wanted.

Handle the Essentials

Certain things must work before launch:

• Authentication: Users must be able to sign up, log in, and recover passwords reliably.
• Payments: Subscriptions must work correctly. Test thoroughly.
• Data safety: Users’ data must be backed up and secure. Loss of customer data is catastrophic.
• Uptime: The product must stay up. Basic monitoring is essential.
• Support channel: Users must be able to contact you. Email works fine.

Everything else can be imperfect at launch.

Method

This guide draws from several sources:

Step 1: Personal Experience I’ve built side projects, some successful, some not. The patterns described come from direct experience.

Step 2: Case Study Analysis I studied publicly documented Micro-SaaS journeys—the transparent founders who share revenue, decisions, and mistakes.

Step 3: Community Observation Communities like Indie Hackers, MicroConf, and various Twitter circles provide ongoing case studies and pattern recognition.

Step 4: Economic Analysis I modeled the economics of Micro-SaaS at various scales to understand what’s viable.

Step 5: Interviews Conversations with Micro-SaaS founders (successful and unsuccessful) informed understanding of practical challenges.

Marketing Without a Marketing Team

Marketing is where most developer side projects fail. Developers build great products that nobody discovers. Marketing feels uncomfortable, unfamiliar, and often distasteful. But without marketing, products don’t succeed.

The good news: marketing for Micro-SaaS doesn’t require being sleazy or spending fortunes.

Content Marketing

Write about the problem you solve. Not promotional content—genuinely useful content. If you build an email signature tool, write about email professionalism, signature best practices, and corporate communication.

Why it works: Content attracts people with the problem. Some percentage convert to customers. Content compounds—articles written years ago still attract readers.

Time investment: 4-8 hours per quality article. Publish 1-2 per month.

SEO for Micro-SaaS

Most Micro-SaaS traffic comes from Google. People search for solutions. If you rank, you get customers.

Keyword strategy: Target specific, lower-volume keywords. “Best CRM” is too competitive. “CRM for real estate agents solo” might be achievable.

On-page basics: Clear titles, good structure, relevant content, fast loading. Not complicated.

Time investment: Learn SEO basics (10-20 hours), then ongoing content creation.

Building in Public

Share your journey—what you’re building, decisions you’re making, lessons you’re learning. Twitter, blogs, newsletters. This creates audience before product.

Why it works: People root for founders they follow. They share launches. They provide feedback. The audience becomes early customers.

Caution: Building in public can become procrastination. Don’t let “sharing the journey” replace actually building.

Launch Platforms

Product Hunt, Hacker News, relevant subreddits—these provide initial traffic spikes. Spikes don’t sustain businesses, but they provide initial users who provide feedback and word-of-mouth.

Product Hunt: Plan your launch. Have assets ready. Recruit early supporters. Time zones matter.

Hacker News: Show HN posts can drive significant traffic if the product resonates. Success is unpredictable.

Subreddits: Find communities where your target users gather. Don’t spam—contribute genuinely, mention your product when relevant.

Paid Acquisition

Once unit economics are proven (you know that a customer pays more than acquisition cost over their lifetime), paid acquisition accelerates growth.

Channels: Google Ads for search intent, Facebook/Instagram for awareness, LinkedIn for B2B.

Caution: Easy to lose money on paid acquisition. Start small, measure carefully, scale what works.

Pricing Your Product

Pricing causes endless anxiety. Most developers underprice. The standard advice: charge more than feels comfortable.

Pricing Principles

Value-based pricing: Price based on value delivered, not cost to you. If your tool saves 10 hours/month, and those hours are worth $50/hour, the value is $500/month. Capturing 10% of that value ($50/month) is reasonable.

Simple tiers: Don’t overthink. Start with two or three plans. Individual, Team, Enterprise. Or Free, Pro. Simple is better.

Annual discount: Offer 15-20% discount for annual payment. Improves cash flow, reduces churn.

Avoid free tiers initially: Free users cost money (support, hosting) and rarely convert. Start with paid-only or limited trials.

Typical Micro-SaaS Pricing

• Very simple tools: $9-19/month
• Standard tools: $19-49/month
• Professional tools: $49-99/month
• Team tools: $99-299/month

These are individual or small team prices. Enterprise pricing is different.

Pricing Experiments

You can change prices. Existing customers typically keep old prices. New customers see new prices. Raise prices, see what happens. If signups stay stable, you were underpriced.

Customer Support as Solo Founder

Support seems daunting when you’re one person. It’s manageable with the right approach:

Set Expectations

Response time expectations matter. If you promise 24-hour response, meet it. If you only answer on weekdays, state that clearly. Customers accept reasonable timeframes when expectations are set.

Create Self-Service Resources

Documentation reduces support volume. FAQ pages answer common questions. Video tutorials explain complex features. Invest in documentation—it scales infinitely.

Use Help Desk Software

Even solo, a proper help desk (Help Scout, Intercom, or Crisp) beats email. It tracks conversations, enables templates, and provides analytics.

Batch Support Time

Don’t context-switch constantly. Set support hours—maybe twice daily. Handle all tickets in those windows. Outside those windows, focus on building.

Support Informs Product

Every support request reveals something. Confusing feature? Improve UX or documentation. Bug report? Fix it. Feature request? Consider it. Support is market research.

The Maintenance Reality

Unlike one-time projects, SaaS requires ongoing work:

Technical Maintenance

• Dependencies: Libraries need updating. Security patches need applying.
• Infrastructure: Hosting needs monitoring. Databases need optimization.
• Bugs: Users find bugs in edge cases you didn’t anticipate.
• Platform changes: APIs you depend on change. Browsers update.

Budget 5-10 hours/month for technical maintenance at minimum.

Business Maintenance

• Customer support: Ongoing, scales with customers
• Content creation: Blog posts, documentation updates
• Financial admin: Invoices, taxes, bookkeeping
• Marketing: Ongoing acquisition efforts

Budget 5-15 hours/month for business maintenance.

The Total Picture

A stable Micro-SaaS with several hundred customers might require 15-30 hours/month total. That’s compatible with full-time employment—but it’s not passive income. The “passive” myth needs dying.

Scaling (Or Not)

At some point, you decide: grow bigger or stay stable?

Staying Small

Nothing wrong with a $5,000/month product requiring 20 hours/month. That’s an excellent outcome for a side project. Some founders deliberately stay small, enjoying the income and flexibility.

Growing Bigger

Growth requires more investment:

• More features (more development time)
• More marketing (more money or time)
• More support (eventually hire help)
• More complexity (eventually hire developers)

Growth changes the nature of the project. What was a side project becomes a real business with employees and obligations. Some founders want this. Others don’t.

The Exit Option

Micro-SaaS products sell. Marketplaces like Acquire.com connect buyers and sellers. Typical valuations are 2-4x annual revenue for healthy products.

A $60K/year product might sell for $120-240K. That’s meaningful money for a side project.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Building Before Validating

The #1 mistake. Developers love building. They hate validating. Result: beautiful products nobody wants.

Targeting Too Broad

“Everyone” is not a target market. “Marketing agencies with 5-20 employees using HubSpot” is a target market. Specificity enables focused marketing.

Underpricing

Developers think $9/month is reasonable. Users with business problems gladly pay $99/month. Don’t assume users think like developers.

Neglecting Marketing

“If I build it, they will come” is false. Marketing starts before launch and never stops. Budget at least 30% of your time for marketing, especially early.

Over-Engineering

You don’t need Kubernetes. You don’t need microservices. You don’t need event sourcing. A simple monolith on a managed platform handles vast scale for Micro-SaaS. Build boring, ship fast.

Ignoring Churn

New customers matter less than keeping existing customers. Monitor churn. Talk to churned customers. Fix the reasons they leave.

Giving Up Too Early

Micro-SaaS typically takes 1-2 years to reach meaningful revenue. Most quit before this timeline. Persistence wins if the fundamentals are sound.

Generative Engine Optimization

The connection between Micro-SaaS and Generative Engine Optimization is increasingly significant. AI tools are transforming how Micro-SaaS products are built, marketed, and operated.

Building with AI

AI accelerates Micro-SaaS development:

• Code generation: AI writes boilerplate, handles common patterns, accelerates development
• Documentation: AI helps write docs, FAQs, and help content
• Design: AI generates UI components, logos, and marketing assets
• Testing: AI writes test cases and identifies edge cases

A solo developer with AI assistance can build what previously required a small team.

Marketing with AI

AI transforms Micro-SaaS marketing:

• Content creation: AI drafts blog posts, social content, and email sequences
• SEO: AI helps identify keywords, optimize content, and analyze competitors
• Copywriting: AI writes landing page copy, ad creative, and email templates

The GEO skill for Micro-SaaS founders is leveraging AI to amplify limited time. One person can now produce marketing output that previously required a marketing hire.

AI-Powered Features

Many Micro-SaaS products now include AI features:

• Data analysis and insights
• Content generation within the product
• Smart automation and recommendations
• Natural language interfaces

Understanding AI capabilities helps identify Micro-SaaS opportunities and differentiate products.

A Realistic Timeline

What does the journey actually look like?

Months 1-2: Idea and Validation

• Identify problem
• Validate with potential customers
• Define MVP scope
• Choose technology stack

Months 3-5: Building

• Develop MVP
• Set up infrastructure
• Implement payments
• Create basic marketing site

Month 6: Launch

• Beta launch to small group
• Gather feedback
• Fix critical issues
• Public launch on relevant platforms

Months 7-12: Growth Struggles

• Slow customer acquisition
• Iterate on marketing approaches
• Add features based on feedback
• Maybe reach $500-2,000/month

Year 2: Traction

• Find channels that work
• Growth accelerates
• Reach $3,000-10,000/month
• Decide whether to grow or stabilize

Year 3+: Sustainability

• Stable revenue
• Optimized operations
• Clear path forward (maintain, grow, or sell)

This timeline is optimistic-realistic. Many products never reach meaningful revenue. Some reach it faster. But this is the typical successful trajectory.

Final Thoughts

Mochi doesn’t understand passive income or recurring revenue. She understands something simpler: provide value (companionship), receive value (food and shelter). Her business model has worked for thousands of years.

Micro-SaaS is essentially the same. Provide value (software that solves problems), receive value (monthly payments). The model works. The execution is hard but achievable.

You don’t need to quit your job. You don’t need to raise money. You don’t need a co-founder or a team. You need a problem worth solving, the skills to build a solution, and the persistence to find customers.

The developer’s dream of building something for yourself isn’t fantasy. It’s a side project that generates $3,000, then $5,000, then maybe $10,000 per month. It’s financial optionality you didn’t have before. It’s skills you develop that transfer everywhere.

Most developers who start won’t finish. Most who finish won’t succeed. But some will. The question is whether you try.

Start with the problem. Validate before building. Build small. Launch fast. Market constantly. Iterate based on feedback. Be patient. The path is clear even if the outcome isn’t guaranteed.

Your Micro-SaaS journey could start this weekend. What problem will you solve?