Only 2.4 percent of listed indie products hit 100k dollars a year
Reviewed by Helen Jones
A 4 September 2026 snapshot of 10,150 products on TrustMRR found 245 with fresh monthly recurring revenue of at least 8,333 dollars, or 2.41 percent of the list, a run rate that matches 100,000 dollars a year. Researcher Mifanr published the anonymized data and method on GitHub. The analysis appeared on 28 September. Just under half of the products, 49.1 percent, took money in the previous 30 days. Among those 4,987 earners, median 30-day revenue was 169 dollars. The top 1 percent took 76.1 percent of platform revenue in that window. A quarter of listings, 26.1 percent, had never recorded a payment through connected channels. Receipts were 2.08 times summed MRR, or 1.69 after dropping Gumroad, and 40.7 percent of the money sat outside subscriptions. TrustMRR is self-selected and launched in October 2025, so this is not a lifetime success rate.
Build-in-public culture still treats six-figure ARR as a normal checkpoint once a Stripe account exists. That story made it easy to treat a SaaS meter as the only scoreboard and to treat a quiet month as personal failure rather than a common outcome. The snapshot puts a number on the tail and on the mix. Most listed products that earn anything earn a few hundred dollars in a month, a large share of cash is not recurring, and the 100k ARR club is tiny even among people who chose to publish revenue. The useful change is not despair. It is dropping the idea that shipping a subscription product is the same as joining that tail.
Analysis
Treat this as a planning constraint, not a motivation poster. Before you add another recurring feature, write down last month's actual cash by source, subscription versus one-time, and decide whether the next bottleneck is more product or a clearer offer that can sell without waiting for 8,333 dollars of MRR.
Source note
Pulse published by Collab365 Spaces, reviewed by Helen Jones on . Cite as "Only 2.4 percent of listed indie products hit 100k dollars a year", Collab365 Spaces. 4 sources referenced.