Kaching Appz: No Office, No Employees, $100,000+ MRR at a 90% Margin on Shopify Apps

To escape freelancing, he chose a bundle of apps

Erikas Malisauskas built a successful career as a design freelancer and even ran his own agency. Even so, he turned toward product development in 2018, to get out from under client work. Several years of failure followed.

His first real hit came in 2021: a Shopify icon app. He grew it to $6,500 MRR (about ¥980,000), then sold it for $250,000 (about ¥37.5 million). He used that capital to build his next product, Kaching Bundle Quantity Breaks, now the flagship in the Kaching Appz lineup. Today, the Kaching Appz portfolio runs at $100,000+ MRR (about ¥15 million/month) at a 90% margin. No office, no employees, no outside agency. The whole operation runs on two people. Erikas and a development co-founder he’s worked with for over four years.

The numbers and the timeline

Divide $100,000 MRR by two, and per-person monthly revenue works out to $50,000 (about ¥7.5 million). Paired with a 90% margin, this business’s real structure is: almost no step in the chain generates cost outside of development and support.

The turning point: giving it away for free to climb the ranking

Kaching’s takeoff had nothing to do with ads or press. Erikas’s own explanation is blunt.

I spammed the app in dropshipping groups. Gave it away for free.

Manual outreach into Facebook dropshipping communities. Free distribution and hand-selling brought in 1,000 users in the first month, and that momentum converted into viral growth inside the Shopify App Store itself. From zero to 1,000, and now 15,000 monthly installs. That first month of hard pushing built the acquisition structure that everything since has run on.

Why did this tactic work? Look at what it was actually buying. The Shopify App Store is a closed marketplace where install counts and reviews determine ranking and search position. The early hand-selling was less an act of generating revenue than an act of buying ranking, an asset. Free distribution was an investment in position rather than a discount. Once you’re ranked near the top, stores start searching and installing you on their own from then on.

Today’s traffic breakdown reflects that outcome. Of the 15,000 monthly installs, roughly 50% come from word of mouth and branded search for “kaching,” 40% from organic general-keyword search, and the remaining 10% from affiliate partnerships and ads. Paid traffic is only a tenth of the total.

What worked: the choice was mostly made at the selection stage

Erikas boils his criteria for choosing a new app down to three: it can be built fast, the target market is large, and the only competitors have fewer than 30 reviews.

The third is the key. Fewer than 30 reviews means the incumbents in that category haven’t yet built the moat that is ranking. He’s picking spots with enough market size but a thin defensive position, places where hand-selling 1,000 units can put you at the front of the line. The early-stage tactics described above worked because the spot they were applied to had already been chosen for its winnability.

The other piece is how pricing is structured. Basic, at $14.99 (about ¥2,250), unlocks all features. There’s no tiering by feature, the tiers step up based on the merchant’s own results. A store generating an extra $1,000 (about ¥150,000) in sales moves to $29.00 (about ¥4,350). Larger accounts move to $59.99 (about ¥9,000). From the merchant’s side, the framing is a 34x return.

This design resists churn. With feature-gated pricing, paying for features you don’t use becomes the reason to cancel. With results-based pricing, whenever the bill goes up, the merchant’s own revenue has necessarily gone up too, making the moment of a price increase also the moment of validation. For solo developers who typically struggle to raise SaaS prices, replacing the reference point, from your own features to the customer’s own revenue, is a highly reproducible piece of design.

Then there’s the portfolio structure itself. Holding multiple apps instead of just one means a drop in ranking for any single app doesn’t take the whole business down. He’s also reaching beyond Shopify. A Webflow app is in development, and a separate business, screenshot editor PimpMySnap, is already running.

What didn’t work, and the risks

Between the 2018 pivot and the first hit in 2021, multiple products failed. Whatever number you look at, it’s standing on three years of misses. Erikas himself names avoiding excessive research in favor of shipping a fast MVP, and finding a genuinely committed co-founder rather than a contractor, as his lessons, which, read the other way, means there was a period stuck in research and a period where the wrong person was in the seat.

The structural risk is clear. Nearly all revenue depends on a single channel: the Shopify App Store. Review policy, fees, ranking algorithm changes, and the possibility of Shopify itself shipping equivalent features natively, any one of these hits directly. Branded search making up half of installs is the only buffer, and even that isn’t an asset outside the marketplace, since it’s still search happening inside the App Store.

The 90% margin also means, behind the scenes, two people are absorbing all of support. The policy of not adding headcount protects the margin, but it also makes the ceiling on response capacity the ceiling on the business.

What generalizes, and what doesn’t

What’s reproducible: choosing a market by visible signals of weak competition like review counts, concentrating free distribution and hand-selling early specifically to buy ranking, tying price to customer outcomes rather than features, and protecting margin by never carrying fixed headcount. None of these presuppose access to capital.

What’s harder to reproduce is the starting point. He could commit fully to the second product because the first sale had already put $250,000 in the bank. Reading this case as “hit six figures MRR straight out of the first app” gets the causality backward. The foundation of already knowing the Shopify ecosystem from the client side during his agency years, and a co-founder relationship that has held for over four years, also aren’t things that can be assembled quickly from outside. Whether the same approach reaches the $1,000,000 MRR target by 2026 remains, as of now, unverified.

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