SaaStore

You built the thing. It works. Someone finally wants to pay for it - and then:

"Is this secure? Do you have SOC 2?"

So you go look it up, and every article you find is written for a company with a compliance budget. SOC 2 Type II: months of work, five figures minimum. ISO 27001: worse. The tooling vendors will sell you a subscription to get audit-ready - a subscription to prepare for a thing you still can't afford.

Nobody is writing for you. And the silence gets read as an answer: no proof, no deal.

I've watched builders respond to this in three ways. Two are mistakes.

Mistake 1: pretending

Adding "SOC 2" or "enterprise-grade security" to the footer because it sounds right.

Don't. Compliance claims are the one category of marketing where getting caught doesn't cost you a customer - it costs you the category. And remember why they're asking: because someone already overclaimed to them once.

Mistake 2: going quiet

Deciding you'll deal with trust "once there's revenue," and shipping a page that says nothing about safety at all.

This one is more common and more expensive, because it's invisible. You don't get a rejection email. You get a conversion rate you can't explain.

What actually works

Trust isn't a certificate. It's a short list of questions the buyer is silently asking, and you can answer every one without an auditor.

"Who are you?" Verify your identity somewhere the buyer can see it. Real name, real company, confirmed by someone other than you. The strongest signal a small seller can send is simply not being anonymous - it means there is a person to email, and a person with something to lose. Most abandoned apps were abandoned by people nobody could name.

"Has anyone outside your head looked at this?" Get an independent security scan and publish the result. Not a self-assessment - a third party running the checks: TLS and certificates, DNS hygiene, security headers, exposed secrets or tokens, known-vulnerability fingerprints. A scan will not prove your app is flawless, and you should never say it does. What it proves is that someone external looked, and that you were willing to be looked at. That willingness is the entire signal, and it is the one thing a careless builder will never volunteer for.

"Does the product do what the page says?" Have a human check your listing against the actual build. It sounds trivial. It is the single most common failure in indie software - the landing page describes a roadmap, not a product. A buyer who signs up and finds three of five features missing doesn't complain. They churn, and they tell people.

"Are you still here?" Ship a changelog and date the entries. An app with a commit last week and an app with a commit last year are two entirely different purchases, and right now your buyer has no way to tell them apart.

"What happens to my data?" One honest page: what you collect, where it lives, who else touches it, how someone deletes it. You do not need a lawyer to write a true sentence about your own database.

None of those five need a budget. All five are things a buyer can check. That's the whole trick - proof is anything the buyer can verify without trusting you. A certificate is just an expensive version of that, and expensive doesn't make it better.

Why this got harder, fast

The AI-built app wave broke the old shortcut.

It used to be that shipping a polished, working product was itself a costly signal: it proved you were serious, because serious was the only route there. Now a weekend gets you polished and working - and buyers know it. The polish stopped meaning anything.

Meanwhile, security researchers keep publishing counts of AI-generated apps shipping with exposed user data. Buyers read those headlines. So when someone hesitates over your app, they usually aren't hesitating over you. They're hesitating over a category, and you happen to be standing in it.

Which cuts both ways. If the category is under suspicion, then being the builder who can show the checks isn't a nice-to-have - it's the whole differentiator. And it's cheap right now, because almost nobody bothers.

Where this leaves you

Most of the places that list indie software are notice boards. Anyone submits, anything appears, nothing is checked. Which means being listed proves nothing about you - and a buyer who's been burned by one has learned to discount every listing on it. Including yours.

That gap is why we built SaaStore, and I'll be specific about what it does, because vagueness here would be its own kind of overclaim.

Every listing on SaaStore is reviewed end-to-end by a human before it goes live. Beyond that, an app can earn up to five trust signals shown on its page: an independent security scan (Unpwned - around 40 automated checks, returning a letter grade, a score, and findings sorted by severity), a UI/UX audit (SiteWise), a buyer persona-fit audit (Tookii), a phone-verified seller, and our hands-on manual review.

The security scan is a free opt-in during the upload wizard. No setup, no hosting work on your side. And to be straight about it: a listing without the badge hasn't been scanned - it just means the seller didn't opt in. We show what was checked and we stay quiet about what wasn't, because a badge that appears on everything is worth exactly nothing.

Listing is free today, and we take no commission - buyers pay you directly on your own site.

So if the question that's blocking you is "how do I prove this is safe when I can't afford an audit": opt into the scan, verify your identity, and let the badge do the arguing. That's about an afternoon's work and it costs nothing.

List your app on SaaStore →

And if you'd rather do all of it yourself - do. The five questions above are the whole list. The point was never the badge. The point is that "trust me" is not an answer, and you have better ones available than you think.

AI tools, no-code builders, and solo founders are shipping more software than ever. Some of it is genuinely great. But for buyers, discovery has become noisy and risky - a product can look polished on the outside, and you still have no idea if it's secure, maintained, or backed by a real person.

That's the gap we built SaaStore to close. It's a curated marketplace for indie SaaS - every listing is hand-reviewed and independently security-scanned before it goes live, so buyers get real trust signals instead of just a landing page and a hope.

For sellers, it's a distribution channel - we get your app in front of buyers who are already looking, without you having to build marketing or sales infrastructure from scratch.

We're still early - would genuinely love feedback from this community. What would make you trust an unknown software product enough to actually try it or pay for it?