SaaS product examples, from household names to one-person products

SaaS product examples you already use: Slack for team messaging, Zoom for video meetings, Canva for design and QuickBooks Online for bookkeeping. These are horizontal products, doing one kind of work for almost any business. Vertical SaaS does many kinds of work for one industry: Toast for restaurants, Clio for law firms, Mindbody for fitness studios. Below are 18 examples of both, what makes each of them SaaS, and where the small, one-person versions fit.

Horizontal SaaS examples: one kind of work for any business

A horizontal product serves a kind of work that nearly every business has, so it can sell to a bakery and a bank alike. That breadth is why the best-known SaaS names are horizontal, and why these markets are the most crowded.

Vertical SaaS examples: every job for one industry

A vertical product picks an industry and handles the jobs that industry repeats: booking, billing, scheduling staff, keeping records. It sells to fewer businesses, but it knows their work closely enough that a general tool feels clumsy next to it.

What makes each of these SaaS

Three things put a product on this list rather than on a list of software. It runs on the vendor's servers, so the customer does not host or maintain it, even when there is an app to install. It is paid for on a schedule, monthly or yearly, instead of bought once. And the vendor keeps updating it, so the customer is paying for a service that keeps working, not for a copy of a program. The guide to what SaaS is covers the definition and the trade-offs for the person building one.

Where the small versions fit

A one-person SaaS rarely competes with the rows above. It takes one job from one industry and does it better, cheaper or more simply than the suite that bundles it. That is the same split our own Discovery search uses: its catalog of 29 markets is divided into the 4 groups below.

The 10 vertical markets in that catalog include the industries in the second table: restaurants, fitness, property management and home services. A small product in one of them does not need to replace the suite. It needs one job the suite handles badly for a specific kind of customer, such as a tutor who does not need a school's system or a trainer who teaches alone.

Horizontal, vertical or one-person: how they differ to build

The three kinds are not only different sizes. They find buyers differently, face different competition and create different support, which matters more to the person building one than the category does.

The row that decides it for one person is the second one. A horizontal product has to be found among many, so it lives or dies on marketing. A vertical product is found through the industry's own places, which a small team can reach but cannot easily out-shout. A one-person product is found where its narrow buyer already gathers, and that is what makes it the realistic place to start.

One-person SaaS products with public revenue

The examples above are companies with large teams. For products run by one person, the SaaS companies guide lists 15 of them, each linked to a dated public page that shows its revenue, including some with no active subscriptions. It is the more useful list if you want to build one, because it shows how small the working versions often are.

Find your own example

Start from an industry you understand, not from a product you admire:

• List the jobs that repeat. Every week the business books, bills, reminds, reports or chases something. Each repeated job is a possible product.
• Find the one handled badly. Look for the job people still do in a spreadsheet next to their expensive suite, and read what they say about it in public.
• Check the buyer before the build. Ask the narrow buyer to pay for the result before you write the software that produces it.

If you do not know which industry to start from, the founder read begins with your time, skills and the kind of work you want to support, and points to directions that fit them.