TL;DR
- A template business is a one-time transaction, not recurring revenue. The growth curve is flatter than SaaS by construction, not by underperformance.
- Margins are excellent: no per-user infrastructure, acquisition through search rather than ads, product cost is founder time.
- Raising money forces growth past the market's actual size. The market for developer templates is deep but narrow.
- The template shops that raise usually pivot to a hosted SaaS layer within a year. Not because the templates failed, but because they couldn't justify the round.
- Raise only if the template is a wedge into services or a platform, and you can name which one in a single sentence.
The shape mismatch
SaaS compounds. Someone signs up, pays every month, and the curve steepens as churn drops. That is the shape investors underwrite.
A template business does not do that. Someone pays $79, downloads a .zip, and you may never hear from them again. Growth comes from search visibility, brand trust, and catalog size. All three are real levers. None of them produce a curve that looks like a seed deck.
This is not a worse business. It is a differently shaped one, and your capital structure should follow the shape rather than fight it.
Why the margins are so good
Infrastructure cost is a rounding error. A template is source code in a Git repo, a marketing page, and a file behind a payment webhook. Our licensing runs on Stripe Checkout granting download access on webhook, so server cost per sale is fractions of a cent. Compare that to SaaS, where every signup costs you compute indefinitely.
Acquisition cost trends toward zero. Developer buyers ignore social ads. They respond to search results and to other developers vouching for you. That means content, docs, and a public presence: one-time costs that keep paying out. Our best pages went up in 2024 and still drive most of the organic traffic that converts.
Product cost is your own time. If you already write React Native, turning a well-architected app into a template is packaging, docs, and a demo video. Expensive if your time is expensive. Not the kind of cost that needs outside capital.
The illustrative model
Treat this as a shape, not as reported numbers.
| Bootstrapped year 1 | Seed-funded year 1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Templates shipped | 3 to 5 | 5 to 8 |
| Team size | 1 to 2 | 4 to 6 |
| Average price | $79 to $149 | $99 to $249 |
| Sales to break even | Hundreds | Thousands |
| Runway if you miss | Indefinite | 12 to 18 months |
| Pressure to pivot to SaaS | Low | High |
| Optionality on selling | High | Low |
The left column runs from a spare room. The right column needs a template roughly every six weeks plus category-leading share from close to day one. Not impossible. Just a much harder game for a similar payoff, since there is no obvious acquirer paying a venture multiple for a template shop.
When raising actually makes sense
Two shapes work, and both mean the template is acquisition rather than product.
Templates as a lead magnet for services. Sell at $99, upsell implementation contracts an order of magnitude larger. The template is a customer acquisition cost you get paid to bear. A small round helps you staff the services team. You are now running an agency with a marketing engine.
Templates as onboarding for a platform. Sell or give away the template, charge for the managed backend, deploy pipeline, or observability layer around it. That is a real SaaS underneath. If you have signal the SaaS is what people want, raising to accelerate is defensible.
If you can't say in one sentence which of these you become in year three, don't take the check. The failure mode is predictable: you discover you built a cashflow business dressed as a startup, then force a pivot that alienates the buyers who trusted the original product.
The five-condition test
All five, not one:
- Repeatable inbound channel producing qualified leads at a cost you can measure, where money accelerates the channel rather than replacing it.
- Average contract value above roughly $2,000. You're selling to teams, not solo devs.
- A credible second revenue stream that exists as a real product, with at least one paying customer already on it.
- You genuinely want to run a team of ten-plus in two years. This is a lifestyle preference. Most founders don't find out they hate it until too late.
- You can name companies that acquired a template business recently at a multiple an investor would accept. Short list.
Pass all five and you aren't running a template business anymore. You're running services or a platform with templates as the lead product. Fund it accordingly.
The middle path
Between pure bootstrap and an institutional seed sits revenue-based financing, small angel checks from developers already in your audience, or a modest friends-and-family round that funds a designer or second engineer without importing growth-at-all-costs expectations.
The requirement is that the money comes from people who understand this is a cashflow business. Be explicit in writing, before anything moves, about what the business is, what exit is expected (probably none), and what the return profile is (dividends, not multiples).
What we did
We bootstrapped Applighter to seven React Native templates with no investor calls. Ship one, sell it, reinvest into the next. Every template runs the same Supabase auth/RLS/storage architecture, the same NativeWind styling, the same Expo toolchain, which is only possible when nobody has to negotiate the roadmap.
We've been asked repeatedly to host backends or run deployments for buyers. The answer is no. A hosted layer doubles the surface area we maintain, and our buyers are indie devs who specifically don't want to be locked into someone else's infrastructure.
FAQ
Can you make a living at this? Yes, if you ship a real product and price above impulse-buy. The $79 to $500 range with a full backend and docs sustains a solo founder at a few hundred sales a year.
Is $79 too cheap? Depends on the buyer. Solo devs anchor around $99; agencies pay several times that for the same product positioned for them. Most shops leave money on the table with a single price point instead of tiering.
How long to profitability? First template in three months plus a working content presence puts six to twelve months in range. The unlock is templates two and three. One template is a product; three is a catalog.
Biggest reason these fail? Under-scoping. No real backend, no docs, no demo, and it won't sell at a price that supports the business regardless of traffic.
Bottom line
Ship one good template. Sell it. Ship the next. Do that for three years and you'll have a catalog worth more than most seed rounds, plus the option to raise later if a real venture-scale opportunity shows up inside the business. Raising first forecloses that option, because the moment the check clears the shape is decided.
One question settles it: are you excited about running a team of fifteen two years from now? If no, don't raise.
Have you shipped a paid template or a small dev tool? Curious what your price point is and whether tiering moved the needle. Drop it in the comments.
