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ProvenStartups

Startup ideas with revenue receipts, reverse-engineered from founder interviews.

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Blog

Teardowns & playbooks

Written off the same transcripts the index is built from.

If you want the numbers first

What It Really Pays

The median, not the highlight reel. Every model in the index with its real monthly figure, the full spread, and how much each number is worth as evidence.

15 articles

App Revenue

What apps earn after the store takes its cut — build costs, revenue models, and the disclosed figures behind them.

6 articles

Blogs & Affiliate

Traffic only becomes income through a handful of mechanisms. Here is which one carries the money, and what the sites running it actually report.

5 articles

Store Economics

Shopify, Etsy, dropshipping — every fee counted, then compared against what the stores that disclose their numbers actually keep.

9 articles
If you build software

Vibe Coding

Prompting an AI until it works is now a real way to ship a product. Here is what the people doing it actually earn — and where it stops working.

10 articles

AI Coding Tools

Claude Code, Cursor, Lovable, Bolt, Replit. Ranked not by feature list but by how many shipped products with real revenue came out of each one.

14 articles

AI Agencies & Agents

What AI service businesses actually charge, deliver, and keep. The retainer numbers nobody puts in their pitch deck.

10 articles

SaaS Metrics

MRR, churn, CAC, LTV, burn — defined against real figures from one-person products, not enterprise benchmarks that do not apply to you.

21 articles

Solo & Bootstrapped

246 of the products indexed here are run by one person. This is the income distribution, including the part where most of them make very little.

8 articles

Build & Ship

Boilerplate, extensions, no-code builders. The scaffolding that got real products out the door, and the time it actually saved.

10 articles

Side Income

Digital products and side projects for people who can already build. Sorted by return on the hours, not by how good the pitch sounds.

15 articles

Launch & Growth

Pricing, SEO, Product Hunt, selling the thing. What worked for products with no marketing budget and no audience.

8 articles

Built With AI

Every indexed product grouped by the tool that built it, with its revenue figure and evidence grade attached.

18 articles
If you sell products

Startup Ideas

Business models that already print revenue, sorted by how hard they are to copy — not by how good they sound.

22 articles

Starting With Almost Nothing

What you can actually launch with no capital, no inventory, no audience, and a job you still have to keep.

20 articles

Digital Products

Zero marginal cost, zero shipping, infinite copies. Also infinite competition — which is the part nobody writes about.

16 articles

Physical Products

Handmade and sourced goods: real margins, real inventory risk, and the numbers sellers rarely publish.

13 articles

Print on Demand

Your design, someone else's printer, nobody's inventory. The margins are thin enough that the details decide it.

23 articles

Platform Guides

Etsy, Shopify, KDP, Printify — what each platform actually takes, and the setup steps that matter.

22 articles

Running the Shop

Naming, photos, listings, pricing, ads. The unglamorous work that separates a shop from a hobby.

22 articles

Revenue Reality

What these businesses really make after fees, and where the published numbers stop being trustworthy.

23 articles

Who It's For

Matched to the time, capital, and skills you actually have — including the honest answer when nothing fits.

23 articles

Risks & Rules

Saturation, bans, taxes, copyright. The reasons these businesses fail, stated before you spend money.

21 articles

Latest

2026-08-01
Apps That Make Money: What 96 Indexed Apps Actually Earn

Across the 96 consumer mobile apps in our index, 34 disclose a clean monthly revenue figure, and the median of that disclosing set is $60K/mo. The spread…

2026-08-01
Good Apps to Make Money: The Ones With Receipts, Not Rankings

Of the 96 consumer mobile apps in our index, 34 disclose a clean monthly revenue figure, and the median of that disclosing set is $60K/mo. The spread runs…

2026-08-01
How Do Free Mobile Apps Make Money? The Four Real Mechanisms

Free apps make money four ways — subscription paywalls, one-time in-app purchases, advertising, and affiliate or referral fees — and in our data the first…