Micro SaaS Categories

In this doc, we breakdown of the most common types of Micro SaaS products into categories that'll be useful in recognizing patterns across the Micro SaaS landscape.

Data Licensing

• provide access to proprietary data

• typically involve data aggregation, normalization, and enrichment

• examples
• financial market APIs
• scraping niche data at scale
• enriching company or profile info
• news aggregation

• product examples
• clearbit
• hunter.io

Machine Learning

• provide easy to use interfaces on top of pre-trained ML models

• examples
• lead scoring
• creating fake user-generated content (photos, profiles, etc)

• product examples
• algorithmia
• obviously.ai
• feedly

No-code Workflows

• focused workflows that extend popular platforms for power users

• individual zaps packaged as focused micro saas products

• examples
• Google Sheets to X
• Notion to X

• product examples
• sheet2site
• actiondesk
• tweet.photo
• super.so

Workflow Automation

• scraping, bots, headless chrome

• examples
• automating leadgen from linkedin
• social media automation

• product examples
• scrapingbee
• checkly
• microlink

Image & Media Processing Tasks

• provide transformations of common media formats

• examples
• custom image effects
• meme generation
• image / gif / video optimization

• product examples
• canva
• cloudinary
• veed
• imgflip

Data Transformations

• examples
• document conversions (docx ⇒ pdf, png ⇒ jpeg, etc)
• IP address to metadata lookup

• product examples
• convertio
• ipdata

Developer Tools

• open core products have enormous potential (OSSC)

• product examples
• codecov
• fastly
• logdna

User Experience

• take some existing platform, feature, data, or workflow and expose it with a much better UX

• product examples
• twitter search
• heroku, netlify, zeit (simplify AWS / GCP DX)

Pricepoint

• take some existing product or feature and offer it at a significantly cheaper price

• product examples
• backblaze / wasabi vs AWS S3 or GCS

Offline to Online

• take some existing offline service and offer it as an online service

• often able to offer the same experience with a better UX, improved efficiency, and cheaper

• this transition will continue seeing massive spikes due to COVID

• product examples
• clubhouse
• future.fit

Consumer Webapps

• misc UX-heavy utilities targeted at consumers