We scraped 51 indie SaaS revenue claims. 11 didn't survive.

Hey, welcome to Indie Receipts.

Before we get into numbers, a confession. To build this newsletter's foundation, we spent the past few days scraping public revenue claims from indie SaaS lists, founder interviews, TrustMRR dashboards, and "$X MRR in Y months" tweets.

We started with 51 named entries.

After three rounds of verification, 30 made it through - 27 still independent today, plus 3 acquired-outcome reference cases included with explicit caveats. But only after we also caught eight entries with the wrong founder name attached to real revenue figures. Yes, eight. Across both the original list and our own replacement candidates we sourced.

Here's what fell out, what we restored with caveats, and what we caught attached to wrong names. All of it matters for how you read indie SaaS data going forward.

Fabricated (3 entries): One article on arnjen.com listed "PT Distinction: $1.5M ARR with 10,000 trainers at $39/month average." Do the math: 10,000 × $39 × 12 = $4.68M. The numbers don't multiply. We searched for primary sources. Zero hits. The author also fabricated TrueCoach's "$500k+ ARR after ABC Fitness acquisition" with no acquisition record findable. AI-generated content mills are now publishing invented revenue data with founder names attached. Treat single-source revenue claims as unverified by default.

Misclassified (5 entries): TrustMRR's top earner Stan ($2.84M MRR verified) is a 225-employee VC-funded creator platform, not a micro-SaaS. PushPress ($15M ARR) raised $32.6M and runs with 100 people. Both are real businesses with verified revenue, but calling them "indie" or "micro-SaaS" stretches the definition past usefulness. TrimRx ($246k MRR) sells weight-loss medication through a pharmacy LLC - not SaaS at all. We pulled all three.

Numbers off by 5-8x (3 entries): We had Hevy listed at $20k MRR based on an outdated source. Ottawa Business Journal puts them at $2M ARR Mar 2023. Carrd was at $146k/mo in older reports; AJ's own AMA confirms $1.2M ARR / ~$100k MRR. Sleek.design didn't hit $10k MRR "in one month" - Mattia did it in six weeks, and built it on top of his existing Reweb tool.

Acquired but listed as if still indie (3 entries we restored with caveats): Plann was acquired by Linktree in August 2024. Baremetrics was sold to General Audience in 2020 - Josh Pigford no longer operates it. Lemon Squeezy was acquired by Stripe in July 2024. We initially dropped all three for the same reason, then put them back as labeled reference cases - their pre-acquisition bootstrap stories still matter as exit-outcome data points. But none of them is independent today, and we say so in their entry boxes.

Founder name swapped on real revenue (5 entries, the worst category): The numbers for Chatbase, HabitKit, HelpKit, "Bank Statement Converter" and "Mentions" were correct or close-to-correct - but the wrong founder names were on them. Chatbase's $8M ARR is Yasser Elsaid's, not Danny Postma's (Postma runs HeadshotPro, a completely different product). HabitKit is Sebastian Röhl's, not "Jakob." Bank Statement Converter has a real founder (Angus Cheng, Hong Kong, $12.5k MRR) - the "(anon)" label was an AI hallucination. Same for "Mentions" - that's Jake Ward, Lara Acosta, Rob Hoffman and Cameron Trew, the same team behind Kleo. We fixed every name before publishing.

Most indie SaaS revenue lists you read in 2026 are written by AI to rank for keywords. The numbers feel concrete because they include team sizes and decimal places, but the underlying facts are often invented or stitched together from multiple time periods.

We're building Indie Receipts to do the opposite. Every entry we publish needs a primary source: TrustMRR with payment verification, a founder interview on SaaSClub or Failory or Indie Hackers, the founder's own blog. If we can't link to it, we don't publish it.

The 30 verified entries span $7.9k MRR to roughly $666k MRR. The shape:

Median team size: 1-3 people. Median time to $5k MRR: 8-14 months. None of them are "$0 to $50k MRR in 4 weeks" stories. Those exist, but they require pre-existing audience (Kleo: Jake Ward and Lara Acosta had built LinkedIn followings of 180K and 300K) or viral moments tied to distribution effort, not better tech.

The distribution data is humbler than the tweets suggest. Across 1,000+ products studied by SaaSRanger, 70% of indie SaaS earn under $1k MRR. Median is $500/month. The median profitable micro-SaaS reaches $4.2k MRR. The top 1% above $50k.

If your benchmark is the tweets, you'll quit too early. If your benchmark is the data, you'll know $4.2k MRR is already top-third performance.

Every Wednesday morning ICT, one entry deep-dive plus a numbers digest:

Free issues stay free. Paid tier (coming Month 3 if you keep reading) gets the quarterly reports plus a curated database of verified bootstrapped SaaS.

If a founder you know publishes verifiable revenue and isn't on our list yet, reply to this email. We'll vet and feature.

The first quarterly report ships end of June. Topic: 30 Bootstrapped Indie SaaS - 2026 Edition. If you want a copy at $9 (early-bird half-off) when it drops, just reply with "yes."

Thanks for reading. We're going to keep this honest or we'll stop publishing.

P.S. The 11 we cut are listed in full at methodology.indiereceipts.com with the verification trail. Transparency cuts both ways.