Unlimited Free Forms Were the Whole Marketing Budget
Tally gives away what competitors meter, converts about 2% of users to paid, and passed $5M ARR bootstrapped. The math only works because free users do the distribution.
Topic
SaaS
Building and running subscription software: pricing, churn, retention, and the economics of recurring revenue.
Zero Employees, 2,000 Customers, Millions a Year
Mike Perham has run Sidekiq alone since 2012: a free open source core, paid Pro and Enterprise tiers, and a no-discounts rule. Here is how the machine works.
The 30-Hour Blog Post That Sells an API
ScrapingBee failed twice, then rode long technical tutorials to $1M ARR and an eight-figure sale to Oxylabs. Their content playbook, step by step, with the numbers.
A $4 Million Exit Where the Investors Agreed to Take Nothing
Josh Pigford published every term of his Baremetrics exit: three payments, no earnout, a guaranteed $3.7 million, and two seed investors who agreed to walk away with nothing.
One Person, 2.5 Million Sites: The Case for Charging $19 a Year
AJ built Carrd alone, priced Pro at $19 a year, and passed $1M ARR with zero paid advertising. The cheap price is the strategy, and it only works in one specific configuration.
Guillaume Moubeche Kept $60,000 of a $160,000 Launch, and It Was the Right Trade
lemlist started in 2018 with $1,000 and reached a $150M valuation without outside funding. Four times its founder traded short-term money for distribution, and the AppSumo deal shows the exact price.
Five Days to Ship, 20 Months to $1M: TypingMind's Numbers as Its Founder Posted Them
Tony Dinh launched a ChatGPT frontend five days after OpenAI opened its API and published the revenue at every stage. The second million is coming from companies, not from the customers who built the first.
The Cheaper Microsoft 365 Plan Sits Behind the Cancel Button. The CMA Opened a Case on 29 July
Classic plans keep the old feature set at the old price: 59.99 pounds a year against 84.99 for Personal. Microsoft does not document a route to them. What two regulators say happened, and the renewal audit to run.
Amazon Traced the chalk and axios Hijacks to One Group. Two npm Settings Answer It
Amazon Threat Intelligence linked four npm compromises to a single state-backed actor, all of them starting with a socially engineered maintainer. The defence is not a scanner: it is four documented npm config options, and each one has a cost worth naming.
Your Agent Run Takes 40 Minutes. Vercel Ends the Request at 300 Seconds
The documented ceilings: 300 seconds on Vercel Hobby, 900 on AWS Lambda, 30 seconds of CPU by default on a paid Cloudflare Worker. Here are all four side by side, the run length that picks your runtime, and the request shape that makes the ceiling stop mattering.
An SMS Code Proves Somebody Rented a Number: What to Check at Signup Instead
Phone verification stopped being an identity signal once controlling numbers at volume became a monthly expense. A cost-asymmetry table for signup controls at their published prices, our arithmetic at 10,000 signups a month, and Radar rules that connect the signal to the moment money moves.
$488 a Month for a Year, Then $10,455: Jon Yongfook Published Every Step
Bannerbear's founder recorded the flat 18 months as carefully as the good ones. The two changes that ended the flat line were a rebuild as an API and a price that went from $9 to $49.
Four Side Projects Made $0. The Fifth Reached $800,000 a Year
Damon Chen built Testimonial from the salvaged parts of projects that failed. The launch was a $199 lifetime deal to 30 people; the growth engine is a widget his customers put on their own sites.
Cursor Priced India at 649 Rupees: How to Choose and Defend a Second Country Price
World Bank purchasing power parity data gives you a defensible starting number for a regional price. Here it is for ten countries, next to what Cursor actually charged, plus the two mechanisms that ship a second price and the checkout dropdown that undoes one of them.
The $299 Code Template Marc Lou Built in a Week, and What It Earns Three Years On
ShipFast took about a week to package and, per Starter Story, made $528,000 in four months. Lou's own public dashboard now shows it as the fifth line in his portfolio at $4.8k a month.
The Tool Arvid Kahl Built for His Partner's Teaching Job Reached $55,000 a Month
FeedbackPanda started as a script to save one online English teacher two hours a night. Two years later it had roughly 5,000 customers at $15 a month and a seven-figure exit.
Click to Cancel Died in 2025. Your Cancel Button Is Still Mandatory in California
The Eighth Circuit vacated the FTC's click-to-cancel rule on 8 July 2025. California's automatic renewal law is stricter on the one point founders care about, and it applies to any business with a California subscriber.
Open Weights Are Free. Serving Them Costs $35 an Hour: Run the Break-Even First
Kimi K3's open release landed on Hugging Face today. Published GPU rental and API prices put the crossover at roughly 4.2 billion tokens a month against Kimi's own API and 46 billion against DeepSeek V4 Pro. Here is the arithmetic, with the duty-cycle and caching adjustments most comparisons skip.
An Affiliate Program on Stripe: What Rewardful and Tolt Cost, and the Disclosure Wording the FTC Accepts
Published pricing for both tools, worked arithmetic on two commission structures at a $50 product, and the exact affiliate disclosure phrases the FTC calls adequate and inadequate.
Profitable in Three Weeks, Independent for 18 Years: What Balsamiq's Published Numbers Show
Balsamiq launched in June 2008 and its founder reported profitability within three weeks. Eighteen years later it is still bootstrapped, and its 2024 revenue was $6.58 million, down 6%.
Zapier Sold 800 Customers a $100 Beta Before It Launched, One Forum Thread at a Time
Before Zapier launched publicly, three founders in Missouri had already taken money from 800 people. The channel was free, public, and sitting in other companies' support forums.
The $1,337 Month: How Nathan Barry Rebuilt ConvertKit by Selling One Blogger at a Time
In September 2014, ConvertKit was making $1,337 a month and looked finished. Thirteen months later it passed $30,000. The turnaround came from four decisions, none of them about the product.
ChatGPT Went Down for 50 Minutes. Build the Second Lane This Afternoon
OpenAI's worldwide outage this morning lasted about 50 minutes. The published uptime numbers say this is routine, the SLAs pay in credits, and a working fallback path is an afternoon of work rather than an architecture project.
How Plausible Went From $64 a Month to $1M ARR Without Buying a Single Ad
Plausible Analytics crossed $1 million in annual recurring revenue on June 2, 2022, three years after its first $64 month. The engine was written content aimed at a problem, not a product.