We Pulled 10,000 Verified-Revenue Startups From TrustMRR. Here's What Indie SaaS Actually Looks Like.

TrustMRR lists roughly 10,000 startups with payment-provider-verified revenue: real Stripe, RevenueCat, and Polar numbers, not screenshots. We pulled the whole dataset — MRR, growth, category, payment provider, marketing channel, and acquisition-marketplace data — and tested a few assumptions that get repeated constantly in indie-hacker circles: that AI listings are mostly hype, that everyone on these platforms is growing fast, and that a bigger business commands a bigger multiple when it sells. Two of those turned out to be backwards.

AI doesn't just win on hype — it wins on revenue too

AI is already the single biggest category on TrustMRR: 2,167 of 10,000 listings (21.7%), more than double SaaS's 962 (9.6%). That much is easy to explain away as label inflation — every landing page calls itself "AI-powered" now, so of course the category balloons. The obvious follow-up question is whether that revenue backs it up, or whether AI listings are mostly pre-revenue projects riding a trend.

Share of all 10,000 listingsShare of category clearing $1,000+ MRR

Artificial Intelligence21.7% → 11.5%n=2,167

SaaS9.6% → 8.7%n=962

Developer Tools5.9% → 5.1%n=591

Productivity6.9% → 3.0%n=692

It doesn't stop at the conversion rate. AI's top earner, GojiberryAI — an AI agent that finds and messages high-intent sales leads — sits at $500,206 verified MRR, more than double SaaS's ceiling (1Lookup, a data-validation API, at $222,240) and 16x Productivity's ceiling (HabitKit, a habit-tracking app, at $31,241). If AI were purely hype relative to SaaS, you'd expect the opposite pattern: more listings, but a lower conversion rate and a lower ceiling. Neither shows up in the data. AI is overrepresented in count and still out-converts its closest rival.

The median listing makes nothing

TrustMRR brands itself as a directory of verified-revenue startups, which makes the actual MRR distribution the more surprising finding here: most listings aren't making money right now.

Any MRR (> $0)41.7%n=4,174

Clears $100 MRR23.0%n=2,300

Clears $500 MRR13.25%n=1,325

Clears $1,000 MRR9.77%n=977

Clears $2,500 MRR6.21%n=621

Clears $10,000 MRR2.43%n=243

Clears $50,000 MRR0.49%n=49

Clears $100,000 MRR0.19%n=19

58.3% of listings — 5,826 of 10,000 — show exactly $0 in current MRR. The data can't tell us why for any individual listing: some are genuinely dead projects nobody removed, some sell one-time (not subscription) products so recurring revenue is the wrong metric, and some are between billing cycles. What it can tell us is that "verified revenue directory" doesn't mean "revenue-generating directory" — the typical listing here isn't earning anything right now, and only about 1 in 10 clears a real $1,000/month.

Growth is rare, and the "hypergrowth" leaderboard is mostly noise

Build-in-public X/Twitter threads make indie SaaS growth look constant and dramatic. The dataset doesn't back that up either.

Grew MRR18.5% · 18.46Flat (0% change)33.6% · 33.63Declining19.7% · 19.71No growth data (too new)28.2% · 28.2

Even the loudest growth numbers on TrustMRR's own leaderboard are mostly an artifact of tiny starting bases. The #1-ranked entry by 30-day revenue growth, ProjectHQ, shows a 37,950% growth figure — which sounds like a runaway success story until you see the underlying numbers: current MRR of $346. That's a jump from roughly $9 to roughly $3,700 in monthly revenue, a real percentage increase but not a meaningful business at either end of it. Rankings sorted by percentage growth will always surface near-zero-to-something jumps ahead of, say, a $200K/month business growing a genuinely hard-won 15% — worth knowing before citing any "fastest growing startup" leaderboard at face value, on this platform or any other.

Bigger businesses sell at lower multiples, not higher

The last finding is the one that runs against intuition hardest. Naively, you'd expect a bigger, more established business to sell for a premium — more proven, less risky, more defensible. Among TrustMRR's 2,201 currently-for-sale listings, the opposite shows up.

All 2,201 on-sale listings24.6%

541 listings ask 3x revenue or less

On-sale listings clearing $10,000+ MRR (n=72)55.6%

40 of 72 ask 3x revenue or less

Only 24.6% of on-sale listings overall ask a multiple of 3x revenue or less. But narrow that to the 72 on-sale listings that clear $10,000+ MRR — the businesses with the most to prove and the most established track record — and 55.6% ask 3x or less. Bigger, more mature businesses are pricing themselves cheaper relative to revenue, not more expensively. Two plausible mechanisms, neither provable from this data alone: buyers may discount for solo-founder operational complexity that doesn't shrink with scale (there's no acquiring team, no institutional support, just one person's workflow to absorb), or sellers at this size may be more motivated to move quickly rather than hold out for a premium. Separately, bigger winners list for sale more often in the first place — $10,000+ MRR businesses are on the market at a 29.6% rate (72 of 243), well above the 22.0% rate for the population as a whole (2,201 of 10,000).

Who's actually building this stuff, and how they find users

Two smaller but concrete findings round out the picture. First, on audience: of the 6,357 listings with a determinable target_audience, B2C outnumbers B2B roughly 3:2 (3,587 vs. 2,323, with 447 marked "Both"). Second, on distribution — and this is the sharper one — organic channels dominate paid acquisition by a wide margin:

SEO, blog, and content marketing alone account for 2,352 channel mentions — 6.6x the 357 mentions across every paid-ads channel combined (Google, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube ads). That lines up with the revenue data above: at the scale most of these businesses operate ($0–$1,000 MRR for the majority), few founders can afford to buy traffic, so organic and community channels aren't a preference, they're closer to the only option.

There's a clean mechanistic explanation buried in the earlier payment-provider numbers too. RevenueCat and friends aren't competing head-on with Stripe for the same customers — they're serving a different platform. Within the dedicated "Mobile Apps" category (484 listings), RevenueCat is used by 88.2% (427 of 484). Within "SaaS" (962 listings), Stripe dominates at 62.2% and RevenueCat is a rounding error at 1.5% (14 listings). Payment-provider "diversity" on TrustMRR isn't fragmented brand competition — it's mobile app billing (App Store/Play IAP) and web SaaS billing barely overlapping in the first place.

What this shows, and what it doesn't

What holds up: across all six angles tested — category revenue conversion, MRR distribution, growth rates, acquisition multiples, audience split, and payment-provider segmentation — the data consistently undercuts the more dramatic version of the "indie hacker success" narrative while still surfacing a real, if narrower, signal (AI genuinely does convert to revenue better than its peers; a real minority of listings do grow and sell for real money).

What limits it:

• This is a self-selected population, not a random sample. TrustMRR only lists founders who choose to publicly verify their revenue — that skews toward indie, bootstrapped, build-in-public culture. It says nothing about VC-backed startups, stealth companies that never opt in, or the broader SaaS market.
• Payment-provider-verified revenue only captures what routes through a connected provider. Enterprise deals paid by invoice or wire transfer, and any revenue outside Stripe/RevenueCat/Polar/etc., won't show up — so true revenue for some listings, especially anything B2B or enterprise-leaning, may be understated.
• The 58.3% zero-MRR figure can't distinguish dead projects, paused businesses, one-time-revenue products, and startups between billing cycles. Treat it as "not currently earning recurring revenue," not "failed."
• target_audience (the B2C/B2B split) is missing for 36.4% of listings — the 3,587-vs-2,323 comparison is computed against the 6,357 listings that have a value, not the full 10,000.
• growth_30d (revenue) and growth_mrr_30d (MRR) are two different fields that can diverge sharply for a single listing — TrustMRR's own leaderboard ranks by the revenue figure, which is why a listing can show a headline growth percentage in the tens of thousands while its actual MRR barely moves.
• The multiple-compression finding (finding 4) rests on 72 on-sale listings clearing $10,000+ MRR — a modest sample. The direction is consistent with the size of the gap (55.6% vs. 24.6%), but a larger sample would sharpen the exact numbers.

See the full TrustMRR dataset breakdown for the live MRR bands, payment-provider partition, and top-by-MRR/top-for-sale leaderboards behind these numbers, refreshed periodically from the same public API.

Sources

Methodology

Every number above was pulled live on 2026-08-25 from TrustMRR's public marketplace data (10,000 total listings: 9,922 active, 78 removed). MRR, growth, and acquisition-price thresholds were computed by bisection — running a filtered search (e.g. min_mrr=1000) and reading its total count — since the dataset exposes no dedicated percentile or histogram endpoint. Category conversion rates pair each category's own listing count against how many of that category's listings clear $1,000+ MRR, using TrustMRR's own category labels. Growth figures use growth_mrr_30d (30-day MRR percentage change) for the distribution breakdown; the leaderboard example uses TrustMRR's own growth_30d (30-day revenue percentage change), the metric its public leaderboard actually ranks by — the two are called out separately above because they diverge per listing. Acquisition-multiple figures are scoped to on_sale=true listings only, since the multiple field is unset for anything not actively listed for sale.

Want to pull this data yourself? How to scrape TrustMRR covers the search, facets, and leaderboard endpoints used here, and pricing has the free tier.