Selling services on top of my SaaS doubled my revenue

I build a small Shopify app. Self-serve, no sales team.

For about a year, every few weeks a customer asked the same thing: "can you just set this up for us?" I always said no. Services don't scale, margins are bad, it kills your multiple... you know the story.

Then I said yes once, to see what happened.

Here's what it looks like now: 45 payments. Tickets from $70 to $12,150. That's roughly the same revenue as the app itself from my customer base.

Three things I got wrong:

• Services don't scale. True. So I don't do the work. Two freelancers do. I scope, price, and manage. A few hours of my time per mission. And the job is often the same (80% and 20% differ depending of the user context).
• It distracts from the product. Opposite. Every mission is a paid discovery call. I see exactly where people get stuck and what they hack together around the gaps. A good chunk of my roadmap now comes from missions.
• Low margin. Mine sits around 45%. Not SaaS margin. But it's cash this month instead of 30 months of MRR.

The part nobody mentions: this is the cheapest revenue you will ever make. The customer already trusts you, already installed the thing, already told you their problem. No CAC. Just a Stripe link.

How I run it:

• Fixed price, never hourly
• 50% deposit before anything starts
• Every mission ends with "what should the app do so you don't need us next time?"

Not saying every SaaS should do this. If you're VC-backed chasing a multiple, it probably muddies the story. If you're bootstrapped and profitable is the only exit that matters, it's money already sitting in your install base.

Anyone else running services on top of their SaaS? I want to keep improving my "saas services" model 😄

Author: Spare_Ganache_3442