MRR and indie SaaS

MRR is monthly recurring revenue. In a subscription product it is the sum of what active customers are set to pay, stated as a month. Indie SaaS is the culture that treats that number as the plot: a small software company, usually bootstrapped, with a dashboard and a price per month.

The number is useful. It is also asked to do too much. It is not profit. It is not a year of cash. It is not a census of indie hackers. A screenshot of it is not the same thing as the books.

What the number is

Take a product at $29 a month. Forty customers who have not canceled are $1,160 MRR. If ten of them are on a $290 annual plan, you do not count $290 twelve times in one month. You spread the annual plan across twelve months, about $24 each, or you follow whatever convention your dashboard uses and you say so. The point of MRR is to make months comparable. A big annual prepay should not look like the business suddenly got twelve times better for thirty days.

ARR is that figure times twelve, annual recurring revenue. A tweet that says “$12k ARR” may mean $1k MRR times twelve, not $12k that arrived this year. Read the letters. People swap them when they want the larger one.

Churn is the leak. If you add $1,000 in new MRR and lose $800 from cancellations, the net change is $200. Gross new MRR is a launch-week number. Net MRR is closer to a business. Public posts often show the gross, or a single day’s Stripe balance, and label it loosely. The first $1,000 is only a milestone if it is still there next month.

One-time revenue is not MRR. A boilerplate sold for $199, a course, a job listing, a winning bid on a leaderboard: cash, sometimes repeatable, not a subscription. Lou’s portfolio mixes them. Levels’ sites mix subscriptions and other fees. Calling all of it MRR makes the comparison fake. The models are different shapes. Keep the shape in the sentence.

Why indie SaaS adopted it

Subscription software is easy to compare, and comparison is what a feed wants. From the build-in-public years, a payments screenshot was a progress report anyone could rank. That habit taught a picture: a narrow SaaS, a launch, a number. Job boards, info products, and quiet service businesses dropped out of the argument because they had nothing that looked like a SaaS dashboard.

Bootstrap SaaS became a culture inside the wider word. Self-funded, small on purpose, often aimed at a job someone already does in a browser tab. MicroConf and the Indie Hackers interviews sit in that culture. So do ShipFast customers who bought a starter kit so their app would look like a SaaS on day one. The kit can include Stripe. It cannot include the retention.

Indie hacking is wider than SaaS. The test is ownership and a customer who pays. MRR is the dialect of one model. When a post treats MRR as the only adult number, it is describing the dialect, not the economy.

Founder-reported, verified, and made up

Three layers get mashed together.

Founder-reported means the maker said it. Levels’ $83,333 month in 2019, Tony Dinh’s TypingMind range, Lou’s March 2026 split, Hallam’s bio line about SuperX: this site cites them because they are public and specific, and labels them as theirs. They are not an audit.

Stripe-connected means a product like TrustMRR has a read-only key and displays what Stripe returns. Lou started TrustMRR after fake screenshots became the complaint, in his account around 28 October 2025. On 15 September 2026 the Postiz page showed about $222,851 MRR. That is a stronger print than a cropped image. It is still a single account’s Stripe, for the products connected, at a moment in time. It does not explain churn, refunds in flight, or what share came from which channel. The Postiz story uses it that way.

Made up means the image is fiction. The scene had enough of those that verification became a product category. A pretty dashboard is not evidence. If a number matters, prefer the primary post plus any verified page, and expect them to disagree by a rounding error or by a real gap. SuperX on 25 September 2026 is the example already on this site: TrustMRR near $19,756 MRR, a bio still saying about $22,000. Do not average them into a new fake precision.

Labels move. If the post does not say which layer it is, it is not a benchmark. More of the public datasets are on revenue benchmarks.

How to read a number in 2026

Ask what is included. Software only, or investing, ads, and a course? Lou’s $1,032,000 for 2025 included investing and X payouts. Levels’ $10 million line in September 2026 was revenue plus investment gains, with the shops still described around $200,000–$250,000 a month. The headline is a mix. The money question goes wrong when the mix is flattened.

Ask whether it is a month that held. Launch weeks spike. Bidding revenue spikes and does not renew like a subscription. Wilke’s week-one bid total is not MRR. Hallam’s course balance the morning after a pre-sale is not SuperX’s MRR.

Ask who is absent. TrustMRR is whoever connected. ChartMogul is whoever uses that analytics. A pyramid with most products near zero can be true of the listed set and still miss quiet businesses that never join a leaderboard. Absence from the board is not a zero. Presence on the board is not a typical founder.

A useful habit is to keep a one-line definition next to any number you repeat. “Stripe-connected MRR on TrustMRR, 15 September 2026” is a different object from “he said the month was about $20k” and from “the balance screenshot said $14,481.90.” The glossary is the short version of those labels. The 2026 state is what happens when the labels get dropped and every cash event is called MRR.

Indie SaaS is still a normal way to charge for software a small team can run. MRR is still the right number for a subscription, used narrowly. The costume around it — the screenshot as a personality — is the part that filled up, got faked, and grew a verification product in response. Use the number. Name the layer. Do not let the layer pretend to be a life.

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