Latest / The Indie Hacker Podcast with Fexingo: Solo Developers, SaaS Side Projects, and Independent Tech / How a Solo Dev Built a SaaS That Competes on Trust
Transcript
- Lucas: Pieter Levels has built what is essentially a privacy-first alternative to a Google product. No tracking, no cookies, no data selling. Just a seven-dollar-a-month subscription and a manifesto. Luna: And he's got over five thousand paying users. Which is wild, because he's competing against free. Google's product costs the user zero dollars. Lucas: Right. So the question is: how do you sell something when the dominant competitor is free? Levels' answer is that the user pays with their data when they use the free product. He's betting that a growing number of people would rather pay cash than pay with their privacy. Luna: And he's not just saying that — he's actually open-sourced the entire codebase. Anyone can verify that his servers don't log IPs, don't set cookies, don't do any of the stuff Google does. Lucas: That transparency is the entire marketing strategy. He doesn't run ads. He doesn't have a sales team. He just has a GitHub repo and a blog post titled 'Why I'm Building a Business That Doesn't Track You.' That post went viral on Hacker News, and that's basically where his first thousand customers came from. Luna: So the growth engine is attention from the privacy-aware developer community. But that's a niche — how does he sustain growth beyond that initial wave? Lucas: He doesn't need a massive user base. His costs are tiny — a couple of servers, his own time. At five thousand subscribers paying seven bucks a month, that's forty-two thousand dollars a month in revenue. For a solo developer living in Southeast Asia, that's more than enough. He's not trying to win the whole market. He's just trying to serve the people who care enough to pay. Luna: I think that's the part that a lot of indie hackers miss. They look at Google's scale and think they need to reach millions of users. Levels looked at the same thing and said, 'I just need ten thousand people who really, really care.' Lucas: Exactly. And he's intentional about not taking venture capital. If he had investors, they'd want hockey-stick growth. They'd push him to monetize user data, to bundle, to upsell. He's kept it a solo operation precisely so he can keep his promise to users: 'I will never sell your data because I have no one to answer to except you.' Luna: That promise is the moat. A bigger competitor could clone the features in a weekend, but they can't clone the brand trust that comes from genuinely refusing to monetize users. And because the code is open source, anyone can verify that trust. Lucas: So the lesson here isn't about technology. It's about positioning. Levels found a segment of users who are actively uncomfortable with the dominant free product, and he built a business that says 'we will not do the thing that makes you uncomfortable.' That's a very defensible position. Luna: It also helps that he's a known figure in the indie hacker community. His personal brand carries a lot of weight. Not everyone can pull that off. Lucas: True. But he built that brand by shipping consistently and being transparent. His blog, his Twitter, his GitHub — they all tell the same story. There's no gap between what he says and what his product does. That authenticity is rare. Luna: Speaking of authenticity, if today's conversation gave you something useful, we do have a way to support the show. It's buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Totally optional, but it helps keep this podcast ad-free. Lucas: Yeah, and we mean that. No sponsors, no tracking, no data mining. Just listeners who find value and want to chip in. Anyway, back to Levels — he recently published his revenue numbers for May. Luna: Forty-two thousand dollars, right? Consistent with the math we just did. Lucas: Pretty much. But what's interesting is the churn rate. He shared that monthly churn is around four percent. That's higher than the SaaS average of three to five percent, but given that his product is a nice to have rather than a must-have, it's actually quite good. Luna: Four percent monthly churn means he loses about forty percent of his subscribers annually. He has to replace almost half his user base every year just to stay flat. Lucas: Right. But his acquisition cost is zero. So he can afford to lose users and still be profitable. He's not spending money on ads to bring people in; they come through word of mouth and organic content. So his unit economics work even with relatively high churn. Luna: That's a key insight for solo devs: if you can get users without spending money on marketing, you can tolerate churn that would kill a venture-backed startup. The venture-backed startup needs to grow fast to justify its valuation, so high churn is a crisis. For the bootstrapper, it's just a leaky bucket that you patch over time. Lucas: Exactly. And Levels is patching it by adding features that increase switching costs. He recently launched a team plan, which makes it harder for a team to leave because they'd have to migrate everyone. He's also adding integrations with other tools, creating more lock-in. Luna: But those features are all privacy-respecting. He's not breaking his promise to users. He's just making the product stickier without compromising on the core value proposition. Lucas: Right. He said in a recent interview, 'I can add integrations without selling data. I just need to make the product better.' That's the right approach. Compete on quality, not on extraction. Luna: One thing I find interesting is that he doesn't have a mobile app yet. That seems like a gap, especially for a product that's meant to be used on the go. Lucas: He's said he's building a mobile web app instead of native apps. That way he doesn't have to deal with Apple and Google's app store rules, and he can push updates without review. It's a pragmatic trade-off. He's a solo developer; maintaining three platforms would be too much. Luna: So he's optimizing for his own capacity. That's something a lot of founders overlook. They try to do everything, burn out, and then the product suffers. Levels knows he can only do so much, so he picks the one platform that gives him the most leverage. Lucas: And that platform is the web. It's accessible on any device, and he can iterate fast. For a privacy-first product, the web also gives him more control over the data flow. No third-party SDKs, no background processes. It's simpler and more secure. Luna: I think the biggest takeaway for me is that you don't need to out-execute Google. You just need to out-trust them in a specific niche. Levels has proven that there's a viable business in being the ethical alternative, even against a free product. Lucas: And he did it without a team, without funding, and without a marketing budget. Just a clear vision, consistent execution, and a deep understanding of what his users actually want. That's the indie hacker dream, but it's also a replicable playbook. Luna: If someone wanted to follow that playbook, what would be the first step? Pick a Google product that people are uncomfortable with? Lucas: That's one approach. But it could also be a dominant free product in any category where data monetization is the real business model. Think of social networks, analytics tools, email services. Find the one where the trade-off between free and privacy is most painful for users, and then build a paid alternative that removes that pain. Luna: And then be transparent about everything. Open-source the code, publish your revenue, talk about your decisions. Turn transparency into your marketing. Lucas: Exactly. Levels didn't start with a big audience. He built it by being transparent. His first customers trusted him because he showed his work. That's a strategy anyone can replicate. Luna: Alright, I think we have a good case study here. Next episode, we'll look at a solo dev who took a different route — building a SaaS that relies on a physical hardware component. Lucas: That sounds fascinating. See you next time.