Is SaaS really the worst business model to generate money fast?

The "output vs workflow" distinction in this thread is the best framing i've seen. But i'd add one more layer, even workflow tools struggle if you don't solve distribution first. I'm building a B2B payments product and the tech works, but finding the first merchants willing to try something new is the real challenge. Revenue speed isn't about the model, it's about how fast you can get in front of people who already feel the pain.

I don’t think SaaS is the slowest model , I think cold traffic SaaS is.

From what you shared, both products seem to solve real problems. The issue might not be the model, but where and how users are discovering you.

Paid traffic (especially early) is brutal without trust layers. People click, test the free version, and bounce because there’s no social validation around the product.

Before changing the model, I’d look at:
• Where your ideal users are already discussing this problem
• How they currently solve it
• What objections stop them from paying

For AdPipe especially, marketers constantly compare tools and discuss ad performance in communities. Being present in those conversations can convert better than cold ads.

Out of curiosity , have you tested community-driven acquisition before relying on paid traffic?

Super relatable post, Edgar. I’ve been down the SaaS road too, and honestly, for solo founders, the early months can feel brutal. People love the free version, try it, and bounce—paying is often the last thing on their mind.

From my experience, if you want fast revenue, one-time products, freelance consulting, or hybrid models usually outperform pure SaaS early on. SaaS shines in the long term, but yeah, 12–18 months to meaningful MRR sounds about right for a lot of solo founders.

Would love to hear if anyone has cracked real paying SaaS in the first 3 months—seems rare!

IDK about the facts but one must push through regardless of the outcome

SaaS may not the best model for "short-term" profit, but we should think as a consumer. Would you pay the full price up front or turn to subscribe, knowing you can always just cancel? The risk is significantly low as long as the price is right.

One thing nobody's mentioned yet: a chunk of what looks like "churn" isn't churn at all.

Failed payments. Expired cards. Soft declines. Customers who never chose to leave - their card just failed and nobody told them. For most SaaS it's 3-9% of MRR leaking silently. Looks like churn in your dashboard, but it's actually recoverable.

Once you hit that $1k MRR milestone, this is the first leak worth plugging. It's the easiest revenue to get back because the customer already said yes once.

Running exactly this experiment right now, so here's live data.

I spent the last two weeks building 7 one-time digital products on Gumroad instead of another SaaS. Templates, databases, prompt libraries. $12–$79 per product. Zero subscription management. Zero MRR graphs.

Honest result: also $0 so far. But the failure mode is completely different.

With SaaS, you fail because of product–market fit or the wrong pricing model (which is what your Pregnalyze story sounds like — the product worked, the monetization structure didn't).

With digital products, the product is fine but you fail because of cold-start distribution. There's no trial, no freemium funnel, no virality loop. You need external traffic from day one.

The core tradeoff I've found:

SaaS advantages:
— Built-in recurring revenue if you get PMF
— Customer feedback loop is richer
— Can iterate based on usage data

Digital product advantages:
— Sell before you build (validate with a landing page)
— No churn, no support load, no infrastructure
— Lower trust threshold (paying $29 once vs. $29/month forever)
— Faster to launch (days, not months)

The fastest path I've seen: sell the digital product first, then build the SaaS for the customers who want more.

Your AdPipe demo-to-conversion problem sounds like a pricing structure issue, not a model issue. What if you sold a "starter pack" of 50 AI-generated ad variants for a one-time fee, then offered the subscription for ongoing generation? The one-time purchase gets them in; the subscription retains them.

Anywho — curious to see how your experiment evolves. Will share Gumroad numbers here once I have something worth reporting.

No, SaaS is not worst model to earn money, this is the best way to become millionaire, if you can master it. In your case, its not a problem of SaaS model.

Ask yourself, WHY they will pay you?

I have visited both of your websites. And here is my observation:

Regarding the first product, there are a lot of free pregnancy risk calculator. Even some tools providing better options than your one totally for free. They have brand visibility, Google Ranking, still they are offering free option. So, why they would like to pay you for the same feature? when they even don't know you.

Regarding your second product:
I have visited your website (not used the tool), I believe your tool is far better than ChatGPT or Gemini ad copy right? In the comparison table of ChatGPT and AdPipe is very good and your tool has really strength. Users should pay you for ad copy. But you could't properly positioned your tool.

Users won' t pay for "Meta ad copy you can launch today". They know they can launch anytime with all free options.

You have to understand, actually when they would like to pay your tool. They will pay you if you can ensure ROI, more conversions through your ad copy.

Regarding your Google Ads, $50 is not enough to test Google Ads. Google have a learning phase of 14 days for any campaigns. So, initial $50 is nothing for Google (however it depends on your target market).

Hope you understand!

These are just my observations, best wishes for your SaaS products!

If you want to earn money or be successful in the SaaS niche, you don't need to focus on whether people will "like" or "need" the product. If you only look at need, people will simply enroll in free trials and then leave.

​Instead, you need to see if the product can make someone pay for it. Just look at luxury brands: do people actually need them? No, but they still pay a handsome amount of money for them.

You can't assume people will buy something just because it’s a great product; you have to determine whether they are willing to pay for it or not.

Success in SaaS depends on two factors: the business model itself and whether you have the foundational pieces in place. You need the right technology stack and an existing audience.
A SaaS I built a couple of years ago validated this. I built a platform for a real estate law firm to digitize their workflow. It handled client registration, vetting, contract management, and deadline reminders. Since they already had a client base, adoption was straightforward. The platform streamlined their process, saved them time, and boosted client engagement.
More recently, I've worked on two different approaches. One is a specialized SaaS for Amazon SP-API, promoted directly by Amazon; this one gets a helping hand from Amazon. The other is a web app for contextual lead analysis that I'm building independently. After years of building solutions for clients, I wanted to shift to building products that solve my own problems.

the output vs workflow framing in these comments is spot on. been through the same thing building AI video tools - if the free tier delivers a finished result, you already lost the subscription argument.

one thing that worked for me: make the free version good enough to prove value but cap it at a point where professionals hit a wall. for AI content generation specifically, the wall is consistency across batches. anyone can generate one good image or one good ad copy. doing it 50 times with brand consistency is the real paid feature.

also worth noting - the service hybrid path is genuinely faster to revenue. i was charging for done-for-you AI video production at $500-1k per video while the self-serve tool had zero paying users. the service revenue funded the product development. now building the open source version at openslop.ai so others can skip the $0 MRR phase entirely.

As a solo builder myself, I’m starting to think SaaS isn’t about building a product — it’s about building leverage.

If you don’t have leverage (audience, SEO, community, partnerships), SaaS becomes a very slow game.

Do you think your issue was pricing, positioning, or distribution?

the output vs workflow framing is sharp, but I'd push it one level deeper: subscriptions struggle when the value lands before the payment ask.

output tools — ad copy, a risk score, a generated image — deliver everything in the free trial. by the time the user is deciding whether to pay, they're already satisfied. you're asking them to prepay for next week's value based on this week's memory. weak ask even when the product genuinely works.

workflow tools solve this structurally. a CRM with 6 months of data, a monitoring tool with a history of alerts, a tracker you've built around — there's real cost to cancelling. subscriptions hold when users have something to lose.

for AdPipe: if the free demo outputs copy good enough to actually use in a campaign, you've out-competed yourself. the question isn't 'why won't they subscribe' — it's 'at what point in the flow did they decide they had enough?' the gate needs to move earlier.

the service hybrid is probably the faster first-revenue path regardless. charge per campaign, use AdPipe to deliver, let real client work prove the product. once you have testimonials and retention data, the self-serve subscription is an easier pitch.

adpipe sounds like a cool ai tool, I would like to have it on my toolsai cloud platform, see if you can get more traffic from there

SaaS is slow when the value delivered is diffuse or the pain threshold is low. Your Pregnalyze example is a perfect case: the free version fully resolved the anxiety. There was no residual problem left to sell around.

The faster monetization paths you mentioned — consulting hybrids, done-for-you services, LTDs — all share one thing: the payment moment feels proportional to the value delivered. Subscription friction is highest when users can't intuitively project what they'll get next month.

What I've seen work for early SaaS revenue: targeting a workflow where the cost of not using the tool is visible and recurring. Things like sales outputs, proposals, client deliverables — where skipping the tool has a direct professional consequence. That urgency justifies the subscription ask much faster than tools that improve productivity abstractly.

The 3-month revenue window is real but it tends to reward specificity over breadth. The more clearly you can say "this is for person X doing task Y", the faster payment decisions happen.

It depends heavily on your niche and distribution.
SaaS is slow to revenue but compounds, once you hit $1k MRR, churn is your main enemy, not acquisition.
I'm building a personal finance SaaS and the hardest part hasn't been the product, it's been getting the first 50 users who actually pay.
The model works, the distribution problem is real.

Honestly I think the issue isn't SaaS as a model — it's the gap between "people use it" and "people pay for it." Those are two completely different problems.

With Pregnalyze, the free version solved the whole problem. There was no remaining pain to monetize. That's not a SaaS problem, that's a value-gating problem. Same with AdPipe — if the demo gives enough output to be useful, why would someone subscribe?

I've had the most luck with what I'd call "workflow tools" rather than "output tools." If your product generates a one-time result (a score, an ad copy), people will use it once and bounce. But if it's something they need to come back to daily — tracking, monitoring, managing — subscriptions make sense because the value literally compounds over time.

To your question about fast revenue: I think the hybrid model is underrated. Charge for done-for-you services, use your own tool to deliver, and the tool itself becomes the productized service backend. Way faster to $5k/mo than pure self-serve SaaS.

I’ve been on the other side of this for years. built a SaaS over 7 years, invested over $1M of my own money. Learned a ton. Traction? Not much. Eventually had to shut it down. Built a few others that never really picked up either.

so I don’t think SaaS is dead. But I do think it’s slow. And crowded. And subscription fatigue is real. Every product wants $19–$49/month. After 5–6 tools, people start asking themselves: do I really need another recurring bill?

Looking at my own behavior, I sign up for lifetime deals way more often than monthly subscriptions. One-time payments feel lighter psychologically. There’s no ongoing tax on my brain.

Lately my approach has shifted:
Core product free, no signup required
Most features usable immediately
If someone creates an account, they get full access for 6–12 months
I watch usage, not just signups

If people are consistently using it without being forced, that’s signal. Then I can think about a one-time payment or something closer to a software license model. SaaS can work. But recurring revenue is not automatic. It’s earned slowly. And if you need fast money, services or hybrids are almost always quicker.

Curious how many of us are really building SaaS for revenue speed vs building it because we like the model.

Interesting question. I think the answer depends on what you mean by 'fast' money vs sustainable revenue. I've built 6 apps across different models and the patterns are pretty clear: One-time purchases (like my iOS apps Tiny Steps and NameDrill) generate immediate cash but plateau quickly. Subscription SaaS takes longer to ramp but compounds. The sweet spot I've found is freemium mobile apps with IAP - you get immediate revenue from power users while building a subscription base. My latest launch, FaunaDx (AI animal identification), went free on iOS last week and is already seeing both download volume and upgrade conversions. The key insight: don't pick the model first, pick the market. Some problems are worth paying for immediately (productivity tools), others need nurturing (lifestyle apps). What specific timeline are you optimizing for?