Will support eat your week before MRR pays for it?
Multiply customers by support minutes per customer per month — that's your real support load. 100 customers needing 15 minutes each is ~6 hours every week, forever, before you build anything. On a nights-and-weekends budget (~16h/week total), that's a third of your capacity. Most solo founders price the product but never price the support.
That's 5.8 hours of support per week (25 h/month).
ModerateEats a real share of your build time. Deflect with docs, templates and scope cuts.
Reading the bands
- Light (<2h/week) — background noise. Self-serve onboarding and docs keep it here.
- Moderate (2–8h/week) — a real tax on build time. Deflect: docs, templates, scope cuts, fewer integrations.
- Heavy (>8h/week) — support IS the job now. This is the custom-agency trap: service work disguised as a product. Redesign onboarding or change the offer.
Is my SaaS too support-heavy to run solo?
Run the two calculators together. Price decides how many customers your target needs; support minutes decide how many one person can carry. An example, at 15 support minutes per customer a month and a $10,000 monthly revenue target:
- At $29 a month you need 345 customers, which is 19.9 hours of support a week: heavy. Support is the job.
- At $99 a month you need 102, which is 5.9 hours a week: moderate.
At 15 minutes each, one person carries about 139 customers before support passes 8 hours a week. If your target needs more than that, raise the price, cut the minutes with self-serve onboarding, or pick a different buyer. The longer versions: will my SaaS be support-heavy? and how many customers you need.
Support load is one of seven categories
The full WhittleOS check also scores ticket categories, deflectability, customization risk and the agency trap — alongside pain evidence, pricing power and distribution fit. See a real report.