"15K users, $200/mo revenue. How I finally stopped subsidizing free users on my weather app after 10 years." from Reddit r/saas, ranked #1. By No_Big_3829, 3 score, 0 comments. Data from Daily Trends.
15K users, $200/mo revenue. How I finally stopped subsidizing free users on my weather app after 10 years.
- Rank
- 1
- Subreddit
- r/saas
- Author
- No_Big_3829
- Score
- 3
- Comments
- 0
- Posted
- 3/22/2026, 11:37:03 PM
- Snapshot
- 3/23/2026, 12:00:00 AM
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I'm a solo dev from Argentina. I've been building a weather/severe weather app called Contingencias for over 10 years. It started because I wanted to protect my car from hailstorms — I learned to read weather radar, built algorithms to detect hail-prone clouds from GOES-16 satellite data, and turned it into an app. The problem: 15,000 users. Only 200 paying subscribers. Monthly plan was $0.99, annual was $5. That's roughly $200/mo — nowhere near enough to cover server costs for processing satellite imagery in real-time, let alone live off it. The realization: I looked at my analytics and noticed something obvious that I'd been ignoring: most of my free users only opened the app when a storm was coming. They'd check the radar, see if hail was heading their way, and close the app. That's it. The feature they actually cared about — the one that made them open the app — was the hail detection radar. And I was giving it away for free. Meanwhile,...