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Not promising: four Mac red oceans (clipboard managers, auto-zoom screen recorders, menu bar managers, notch tools). Free open source has pushed prices down to 0, and one-time purchase revenue falls back to a few hundred to a few thousand dollars within two or three months of launch.
Closed Trackable (the other side) · saturated First spotted 2026-11-01 · last updated 2026-11-08
- Status
- Closed (free open source has taken the space; paid only gets the launch-month wave)
- Why this is written up
- All four categories follow the same pattern: a polished UI plus the founder's audience makes roughly $6,000 in the launch month, then it falls back to a few hundred to two or three thousand dollars within two or three months. Free open-source projects like Maccy, Capptivo, Thaw / Ice, and Boring Notch pushed the price floor to 0, and Raycast and the OS are building these features in too.
- Confidence
- High. Each of the four categories has a complete revenue curve or star count, and the conclusions agree. What would overturn it: a new general clipboard, screen recording, or menu bar tool entering the indie market and sustaining more than $5,000 for two months straight between 11 and December.
Evidence
Grouped by store. Each group starts with the charts that can be graphed (real curves, data dates below the chart), then the scanner's original notes and source links.
Indie product revenue (TrustMRR)2 evidence · 2 products with curves
Supaste supaste.com
TrustMRR · 30-day revenue $907 (-16%) · View product profile
2026-06 → 2026-11 (6 pts). Light bars = current month, not yet complete
Data 2026-09-29 → 2026-11-06 (39 days, 39 observations). Single-day swings are big, so look at the trend in the monthly breakdown above.
Screen Charm screencharm.com
TrustMRR · 30-day revenue $1,524 (-60%) · MRR $77 · 5 subscriptions · view product dossier
2025-11 → 2026-11 (13 pts). Light bars = current month, not yet complete
Data 2026-09-29 → 2026-11-06 (39 days, 39 observations). Single-day swings are big, so look at the trend in the monthly breakdown above.
- indie (11-02 core): Supaste (supaste.com, clipboard plus screenshot history, $15 / $29 one-time, founder with 25k followers on X): June $6,468 → July $4,884 → August $3,257 → September $1,430 → October $812; 11-02's 30-day revenue $843 (−37%); listed at $20,000 (asking $33,000 in early October).
- indie (11-02 core): Screen Charm (screencharm.com, auto-zoom screen recorder for Mac, $99 one-time) $2,177 over 30 days (−40.5%); monthly revenue has run between $2,695–6,407 since 2025-11, June was the peak from the PH launch, and August fell back to baseline; the cloud-sharing subscription added in April has only 5 subscribers, MRR $77. The founder has a full-time job; 10-31 publicly discloses a salary of $9,242 and side income of $2,335.
GitHub2 evidence · 3 products with curves
GitHub · created 2026-07-28 · 1,118 stars · 7 days +8
Give your demos the spotlight they deserve ( Mac/Windows/Linux ).
Data 2026-10-09 → 2026-11-08 (31 days, 30 observations). Points before 10-28 come from deeply / archive backfill, not every day has one
GitHub · created 2026-01-29 · 12,603 stars · 7 days +152
The open source menu bar manager
Data 2026-07-30 → 2026-11-08 (102 days, 16 observations). Points before 10-28 come from deeply / archive backfill, not every day has one
GitHub · created 2023-08-04 · 29,981 stars · 7 days +61
Powerful menu bar manager for macOS
Data 2026-08-03 → 2026-11-08 (98 days, 15 observations). Points before 10-28 come from deeply / archive backfill, not every day has one
- GitHub (11-02 core): SECHAK-AG/capptivo (free open-source screen recorder, three platforms) has 1,112 stars, +22 over 7 days; the report notes no commits after 10-13, and 31 issues have gone 40 days without a reply. Since 2026-05 on PH there have been 25 screen-recording launches, at least 5 of them open source (reported figures).
- GitHub (11-02 core): menu bar manager thaw-app/Thaw has 12,473 stars, jordanbaird/Ice has 29,930 stars, 42k stars combined, all free; Thaw has 28 GitHub Sponsors, and Homebrew shows 30 installs over 3,208 days (reported figures).
Mac App Store 1 pieces of evidence
- Mac App Store (11-02): the store spots are taken by established products. Clipboard manager Maccy (1527619437, $9.99,1,100 ratings) charts in 20 storefronts; menu bar app iBar Pro (6737150304,1,423 ratings) is #11 on the cn paid chart; Black Menu Bar (6822790853, $0.99), launched 10-21, is the best seller at #51 (in).
Product Hunt1 pieces of evidence
- PH (notch, 11-02 core): details in [005]. In October, 108 launches had notch or dynamic island in the name; only vertical products scored above 100.
Already doing it
Clipboard: Supaste, Maccy, Paste, and Raycast's built-in version; screen recording: Screen Studio, Screen Charm, Capptivo, Smooth Recorder, and seven or eight others; menu bar: Bartender, Thaw, Ice, iBar; notch tools are in [005].
In our product dossiers: Supaste, Screen Charm, Smooth Recorder
The hardest step
The problem isn't the product, it's distribution: there's no store search and no subscription, so post-PH traffic has to be built from scratch every time.
Who it's for
Not recommended for new entrants. The remaining gaps are vertical niches (designers archiving screenshots with color values, team screen-recording libraries), or the App Store version and enterprise distribution that Thaw doesn't cover, and those would each need a different way to charge.
Should every product builder know this?
Yes. Anyone building Mac tools needs to know this.
Change log
2026-11-08
PH (PT 11-06) Daily #4: EdgeBar (adjust volume and brightness by swiping the trackpad edge, 124 votes). Another Mac utility, same crowded category as the other Mac apps.
2026-11-03
PH (11-01, PT): Screen Studio was #1,401 of the day with 4.0 — the incumbent in the crowded auto-zoom screen recording space keeps iterating (Glass Loupe, transcript-based editing), which makes it harder for newcomers.
2026-11-02
Backfill check: Supaste 30 days $797 (10-31) → $843, still in the $800 range; Screen Charm 30 days $2,177 (the report used the founder's self-reported October $2,335); Thaw 12,451 → 12,473, Capptivo 1,110 → 1,112, both only slowly climbing. The conclusion stands.
2026-11-01
First logged (backfill: from the "Product Hunt Roundup v1" 4.2 item 1 and ph-dossiers/supaste.md, screen-charm.md, capptivo.md, thaw.md, Stringers §3.7, data as of 11-01).
Original: Scanner opportunity library #051 (updated daily, 06:00); this page was generated on the 2026-11-08 edition.