1. Verdict
Why a ladder instead of one target
This idea is assessed at six MRR levels instead of one fixed number. Outcomes for monitoring tools are skewed. Most new ones earn a few hundred dollars a month, a few compound for a decade, and one or two become comfortable businesses. A single "$20k MRR" number hides the most useful information: how likely each level is, and what each level costs in time.
The anchor: there is no verified base rate
- No verified base rate exists for a new developer-tool or MSP-tool micro-SaaS reaching a given MRR within 24 months. The catalog research found that every common indie-SaaS statistic failed verification (see ../_research catalog, Part A).
- The consumer-app base rate used elsewhere in this portfolio (RevenueCat: 17.3% of new subscription apps reach $1k/month within 2 years, 4.6% reach $10k) is for mobile consumer apps. It isn't comparable, so it isn't used here.
What the odds are anchored on instead (see research/10):
- Healthchecks.io's growth curve (founder-reported): launched Jul 2015; first paying customer 31 Mar 2016;
$100 MRR in Oct 2016; **$700 MRR with ~90 paying customers in Aug 2018**; ~$1,600 MRR in May 2019 (catalog figure, not re-fetched in this run); $14,043 MRR from 652 paying customers in Jul 2024; $24,000 MRR from 1,120 paying accounts and 112,000 free accounts on 1 Sept 2026. - Backup Radar (acquirer's press release): founded 2015, nearly 1,000 MSP partners, 375,000+ backups monitored daily and 23,000+ client organizations when ScalePad bought it on 16 Nov 2021.
- Current prices: Healthchecks $0 / $5 / $20 / $80. Cronitor $2 per monitor plus $5 per user. Dead Man's Snitch $5 / $19 / $49. Better Stack 10 heartbeats free, then $20 per 10. Sentry $0.78 per extra cron monitor. Backup Radar $8 per client, 30-client minimum, $495 onboarding, 12-month term. Bocada Cloud from $0.75 per monitored resource, month to month.
Three things push the odds up for the recommended wedge:
- MSPs pay ~$89 a month in the recommended pricing, against ~$21 for a developer. $10k MRR needs ~112 MSPs, not ~470 developers.
- The pain is a liability. A backup that silently failed for a month is a lost client, or a lawsuit, for the MSP.
- The leader's 30-client minimum, onboarding fee and annual term leave the smallest MSPs without a fitting product.
Three things push them down:
- Distribution. MSP owners buy on peer trust, and a new solo vendor has none.
- Incumbents and bundles. Backup Radar (ScalePad, funded), Bocada (month-to-month, cheap), the backup vendors' own multi-tenant consoles, and RMM tools all cover part of the job.
- The slow ramp. Monitoring is a "set and forget" purchase. Customers arrive slowly and are won one at a time.
Odds at each MRR level (reached by month 24)
| MRR at month 24 | Base rate | As described (generic cron and heartbeat monitor for developers) | Laravel scheduled-task monitor only | Kubernetes CronJob monitor only | Data-pipeline job monitor only | Recommended (backups for small MSPs), ~15 hrs/week | Recommended, full-time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $1k | No verified base rate | 25% | 18% | 20% | 15% | 45% | 60% |
| $3k | No verified base rate | 10% | 7% | 9% | 7% | 28% | 42% |
| $5k | No verified base rate | 5% | 3% | 5% | 4% | 18% | 30% |
| $10k | No verified base rate | 2% | 1% | 2% | 2% | 9% | 17% |
| $20k | No verified base rate | <1% | <0.5% | <1% | <1% | 4% | 8% |
| $50k | No verified base rate | <0.5% | <0.5% | <0.5% | <0.5% | 1% | 2% |
The alternative columns assume full-time effort. At ~15 hrs/week, multiply them by about 0.7.
Recommended means the MSP backup-monitoring product set out in WHAT-TO-DO-AND-AVOID.md, with the 3 conditions met:
- you can reach 20 MSP owners or technicians in the first 3 weeks;
- you run the service with real reliability discipline;
- you hold a steady release and support cadence for 24 months.
If any one condition is missing, multiply the recommended odds by about 0.65.
These are judgment estimates anchored to the dated data points above, not computed statistics.
Notes on the alternatives:
- As described enters a market with a solo leader at $24k MRR, a ~1% free-to-paid rate, and free cron checks bundled inside Sentry, Better Stack and uptime tools. The code is easy to clone, so there's no lasting edge except years of uptime, which a newcomer doesn't have.
- Laravel only is the weakest option. Laravel Forge has built-in heartbeats, Laravel Nightwatch captures every scheduled task (free tier, then $20–300 a month), and Oh Dear sells scheduled-task monitoring to Laravel developers.
- Kubernetes only. Cronitor already ships a Kubernetes agent that tracks CronJobs with annotations and no code change. Platform teams can alert on CronJobs from their existing metrics stack. Buyers are engineers at larger companies with procurement.
- Data pipelines only. Airflow and dbt users buy from funded data-observability vendors. Longer sales, a different buyer, and a larger scope than "did it run".
How to read the ladder
- $1k–3k is a realistic outcome. It takes 12–34 small MSPs. Founder-led selling in MSP communities can deliver that in 6–12 months.
- $5k–10k needs a channel that works without you: content that ranks for backup-product searches, referrals between MSPs, or a vendor or PSA partner listing.
- $20k and above needs ~225 MSPs. That's about a quarter of what the category leader had after 6 years.
- The odds fall fastest between $3k and $10k. That's where founder-led selling runs out of hours.
Portfolio definitions (for comparison with other ideas)
| Tier | Definition | Recommended, ~15 hrs/week | Recommended, full-time | As described |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tier A (venture) | $1M ARR within 36 months, ≥70% gross margin, ≥50% month-12 logo retention | <0.5% | ~1% | <0.5% |
| Tier B (profitable business) | $20k+ MRR within 24 months, profitable, ≥80% gross margin, ≥70% month-3 retention | ~3% | ~7% | <1% |
Tier B sits just below the $20k rung. Margin isn't the issue (it's ~90–95%). Month-3 retention is at risk if early parsing creates false alarms. A tech who gets three wrong "backup failed" tickets in a week turns the tool off.
How this compares with the other ideas in this portfolio: similar to WaiverWorks and AccessCheck at $10k, and below StatusLens, TradeLedger and DocPress. Its advantages are the lowest build cost in the portfolio and ~90–95% margin. Its disadvantages are a buyer who trusts peers more than new vendors, and a category where the best-known solo success took 9 years.
Fundable in current form?
No. A generic cron monitor is a known lifestyle category, and its best example says so about itself. An MSP backup tool is a small, profitable business, not a venture. See 06-fundability.md. It doesn't need funding: the build is small and hosting costs are tiny.
One-paragraph verdict
Heartbeat monitoring is a proven, durable, boring business, and that's exactly the problem for a newcomer. The best example, Healthchecks.io, is excellent, cheap, open source, run by one person, and took 9 years to reach $14k MRR and 11 years to reach $24k. Cloning it is easy; earning the trust it has built is not. The version worth building changes the buyer, not the code. Small MSPs look after dozens of clients' backups, carry the blame when one silently fails, and are priced out of the leading tool by a 30-client minimum. Give them one screen of every client's backups built from the emails they already receive, tickets in their help desk, and a monthly report and restore-test log they can hand to clients and insurers. On those terms, $1k–3k MRR is a reasonable expectation, $5k–10k is possible with a channel that runs without you, and $20k is a stretch.