Micro-SaaS
A micro-SaaS is a small, narrowly scoped software-as-a-service product that solves one specific problem for a specific audience, typically run by one person or a very small team on minimal overhead.
What Is a Micro-SaaS?
Micro-saas is a product category, not a person label, which is where it differs from indie-hacker and solopreneur. Someone can be an indie hacker or solopreneur without ever building a micro-saas, and a small funded team can run one without either label applying to them.
What makes a product a micro-saas: it does one job well rather than trying to be a platform, it's often built for a niche the founder already understands from the inside, customer acquisition cost stays low because the niche is specific enough to reach directly, and the revenue target is modest by design, a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a month rather than millions in ARR. Team size stays at one or two people, sometimes with a contractor for support, not because growth is capped on principle but because the product doesn't need more than that to run.
Typical shapes: a Chrome extension that automates one workflow, a Slack app that does one integration well, a single-purpose API wrapper, a niche analytics dashboard for one platform's sellers. The common thread is scope discipline, resisting the pull to add features for adjacent use cases that would turn a focused tool into a bloated one.
How it differs from venture-scale SaaS: a micro-saas isn't chasing a large addressable market or a big funding round, it's aiming for sustainable profit on low overhead. Success often gets described using the same bar as bootstrapped founders generally: reaching ramen-profitable, not reaching a unicorn valuation.
Examples
A founder builds a tool that generates changelogs from git commits for other indie developers. It never needs a sales team or a large market, a few hundred paying developers at $15/month covers the founder's living expenses.