A Weekend Micro SaaS That Hit $3.2K MRR — Full Breakdown With Numbers

there’s a story floating around in the micro saas community that’s worth sharing. a tool built as a joke during a slow period that ended up generating more recurring revenue than the creator’s day job.

backstory: a backend dev at a mid-size company, stuck between projects and bored out of their mind, decided to build something stupid over a weekend — a tool that texts you when your favorite subreddits hit the front page with a certain number of upvotes. the kind of thing you build for laughs and forget about.

you know the use case: trying to catch a post early so you can be the funny comment. yeah. that. a tool for karma farming. called “Snooze” (terrible name, but it stuck). built in 3 days with NextJS + Supabase. the AI part came later when a feature was added that uses GPT to summarize trending threads and send the summary as a text message instead of just a link. that way you can read the gist without opening reddit at work.

put it on Product Hunt because why not. got 40 upvotes. woke up to 14 signups. laughed it off.

then people started asking for hacker news support. then twitter. then someone emailed asking if a version could be made for their team’s internal slack channels. the answer was yes — for $20/month. they said yes.

that was the first paying customer.

that was 4 months ago.

the current numbers

287 total users. 42 paying. $3,240 MRR. roughly $2,900 after stripe fees.

pricing is $9/month for individuals (tracks 2 sources with summaries), $29/month for power users (10 sources + custom filters), and $99/month for teams (everything + slack integration + priority support). most people are on the $29 plan. 5 teams on $99.

costs: $80/month supabase. $45/month for openai api (the summarization feature). $12/month for twilio (sms). $20/month vercel. $15/month miscellaneous. total ~$172/month.

profit: about $2,700/month give or take.

maintenance takes about 10 minutes a day. maybe twice. onboarding new users is fully automated — stripe handles payments, supabase handles auth, the app just works. roughly 3 support emails in the last month. one was “how do i cancel” (painful). one was “can you add hacker news” (already existed, they missed the toggle). one was asking for a lifetime deal (turned down but offered 20% off annual — accepted).

how the ai actually works

the core loop is stupid simple:

1. every 10 minutes, a cron job hits the reddit/hn/twitter API for each user’s tracked topics
2. if there’s a new post matching their filters, it grabs the content
3. sends the text to GPT-4o-mini with a prompt like “summarize this in 2-3 sentences, focus on why it matters”
4. spits out a summary. sends it via push notification or sms.
5. you read it in 8 seconds instead of scrolling for 20 minutes.

total api cost per summary: about $0.003. users get on average 30-40 summaries per month. cost per user: about $0.12. they pay $9. that’s like a 75x margin on the AI part alone.

the real moat isn’t the ai though. it’s the filtering. way more time was spent building the “irrelevant content filter” engine. users can set keywords, minimum upvote thresholds, specific subreddits or users, time windows, content types. the ai is just the polish.

what surprised the creator

1. the customers expected to use it don’t. it was built for reddit power users trying to farm karma. the real users turned out to be: investors tracking mentions of their portfolio companies, journalists monitoring breaking stories, and product managers who need to know when someone posts about their product. none of these people care about karma. they care about being first to know.

2. sms is underrated. everyone builds for email or slack or discord. sms has 98% open rate within 3 minutes. a premium is charged for the SMS tier and people happily pay because they actually read the texts. one user described it as “the only notification i don’t instantly delete.” that kind of feedback keeps a project alive.

3. the biggest growth channel was a single reddit comment made 3 months ago. someone in r/SaaS asked “what’s a micro saas that actually makes money?” and the creator answered honestly with raw numbers. that comment got 800 upvotes and drove about 80 signups. zero other marketing done. zero ads run. the comment keeps trickling in traffic to this day.

4. pricing anxiety was real. started at $5/month. got some users. felt too cheap. raised to $9. nobody complained. raised to $29 for the pro tier. people actually UPGRADED. the teams tier was set at $99 as a guess — thought it was too high. first team signed within 48 hours of launching the tier. pricing has been untouched since. moral of the story: you’re probably charging too little.

what would be done differently

should have launched with payment from day one. spent the first 2 months free / donation-based. had like 100 free users generating $0 and sending feature requests. when the paywall went up, 80% of them left. the ones who stayed are the ones who pay. the free users were just noise.

should have niched harder. “track anything on social media” is too broad. the best users are a specific archetype: solo investors monitoring their industry. if the whole thing had been branded around that from day one, the messaging would be clearer and conversion would be higher. instead a generic landing page says “never miss important posts again” which is fine but not great.

should have added team features earlier. the $99/month teams account for 5 accounts bringing in $495/month. they cost basically nothing to support. the slack integration took one weekend to build. that’s $500/month MRR for a weekend of work. should have been done in week 2, not month 4.

what’s next

working on a “brand monitoring” mode that lets companies track mentions across reddit, twitter, and HN and get a daily digest. thinking $49/month for that. already have 3 inbound requests from people asking if this can be done.

also considering opening up an API so other apps can use the monitoring + summarization pipeline. pricing undecided. probably usage-based.

the goal is $10k MRR by end of year. doable if features are built around what paying customers actually ask for. that lesson was learned the hard way after building stuff nobody wanted for free users.

final random advice

if you’re thinking about building a micro saas: pick something dead simple that scratches your own itch, launch it in a weekend, put a price tag on it, and only listen to people who have given you money. the rest is noise. also, don’t hide your numbers. the only reason this story exists is because someone else posted their numbers 6 months ago and it inspired someone to actually launch. pay it forward.