A $16k MRR founder just said the quiet part out loud: infrastructure products have low churn. That's the whole reason I'm building one.
Saw a founder interview here this week (Nic, BlogToPin, $16k MRR after years of failed products) and one line stopped me cold. On why he chose his next product after his first success, he said: "my top priority was choosing an infrastructure niche — because those have inherently low churn."
I've been building an infrastructure product (a SaaS backend SDK) for a while, and I've never seen the why put so plainly by someone with the revenue to prove it. So I want to unpack it, because I think it's underrated by people choosing what to build.
Most indie products churn hard. Nic's own consumer-ish tool runs 10-15% — he said he has to add $2k MRR every month just to stand still. That's the treadmill most of us are on without naming it.
Infrastructure is different, and here's the mechanism, not just the claim:
The switching cost works for you, not against you. Once auth, billing, and your data model are wired into someone's product, ripping it out is a project, not a decision. The same lock-in that makes buyers nervous is what makes the revenue stick.
It's load-bearing, so it doesn't get "cleaned up" in a cost-cutting pass. People cancel the nice-to-have analytics tool. They don't cancel the thing their auth runs on.
It grows with the customer instead of churning them. When their usage goes up, your footprint goes up. Expansion revenue is built into the category.
The flip side I won't pretend away: infrastructure is brutally hard to start. The sales cycle is trust-gated, the bar for "correct" is unforgiving, and nobody switches their backend on a whim. Low churn is the reward for surviving a much harder zero-to-one. Nic earned the right to that low-churn product by failing through years of higher-churn ones first.
So the honest framing isn't "build infra, it's easy money." It's: infra trades a harder beginning for a more durable middle. If you can survive the start, the retention math is structurally on your side in a way consumer tools rarely
are.
For the people here who've built both: does this match your experience?
Is infrastructure churn actually lower for you — or does it just fail differently?
Genuine question: which infra niche are you picking? "Low churn structurally" holds in some categories (observability, CI) but breaks where switching cost is artificially low. Curious where you're aiming.