Baremetrics: an open-dashboard SaaS grown to $1.6M ARR and sold for $4M

Baremetrics is a subscription analytics product: connect your Stripe account and it shows MRR, churn, lifetime value and the rest of the SaaS metrics. Josh Pigford started it in 2013 and made it one of the first "open startups", publishing the company's own dashboard for anyone to see. That makes it a rare SaaS case where the revenue history is a matter of public record rather than a founder's recollection. It grew to about $1.6 million in annual recurring revenue and was sold in December 2020 for $4 million, a deal Pigford described in detail on the company blog.

The property

A B2B SaaS with a narrow, well-defined customer: companies billing subscriptions through Stripe (later Braintree, Recurly and others) who wanted metrics without building a reporting stack. The marketing was content and the open dashboard itself; the blog's honest posts about churn, pricing changes and failed features were read by exactly the founders who were potential customers.

The revenue mix

• SaaS subscriptions, priced by the customer's MRR in tiers, billed monthly through Stripe. This was effectively the whole business; the open dashboard showed it climbing from a few thousand dollars a month in 2014 to the low six figures by 2020.
• Affiliate and partner revenue from an affiliate programme and integrations with payment providers added a small line, and the same content that acquired customers linked to partner tools.

There were no ads and no products beyond the software, which is the normal shape for a SaaS property: the pricing page is the monetization.

Why it worked, and what the sale taught

The open dashboard was both marketing and discipline: publishing churn every month forced the team to fix it, and the transparency attracted customers who trusted a company that showed its numbers. Pigford also wrote candidly about the hard parts, including a period of high churn and layoffs, and about why he sold: after seven years, a $4 million sale at roughly 2.5x ARR was a reasonable outcome for a bootstrapped product with a small team, and the multiple reflects that SaaS trades on revenue, not on the profit multiples content sites get.

What to take from it

A SaaS earns per customer per month, and the metrics that matter are MRR, churn and lifetime value rather than RPM. The SaaS subscriptions guide and the billing platforms cover the tooling; the selling the site guide covers what a buyer pays. Baremetrics is a benchmark for both: seven years, $1.6M ARR, $4M exit, all in public.