The State of SaaS Distribution 2026
Everyone lists the channels founders say they use. We audited how 102 revenue-verified SaaS companies actually get users — every channel claim tied to a receipt, classed by whether we detected it, a founder stated it, or a third party reported it. Here is what 90 full teardowns add up to.
Share of all attributed growth across every audited profile, by channel family. Not a survey — the weighted sum of receipt-backed channel mixes.
Every channel claim is tagged by how we know it. A claim can carry more than one tag, so these overlap — but the detected share is the one that matters: it is the part no founder had to be trusted for.
| Channel family | Apps | We detected | Growth share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Programmatic SEO | 44 | 100% | 15.6% |
| Founder audience | 36 | 17% | 12.8% |
| Marketplaces | 30 | 77% | 9.9% |
| Editorial SEO | 27 | 96% | 9% |
| Affiliates | 26 | 96% | 6% |
| Word of mouth | 19 | 42% | 5.3% |
| Outbound outreach | 10 | 20% | 4.1% |
| AI-agent ecosystem | 12 | 92% | 3.7% |
| Free tools | 13 | 92% | 3.5% |
| Partner programs | 11 | 55% | 3.1% |
| Open source | 8 | 100% | 2.8% |
| Launch events | 12 | 25% | 2.7% |
| Viral spikes | 8 | 50% | 2.5% |
| B2B2C institutions | 3 | 67% | 1.3% |
| Referrals | 5 | 80% | 1.2% |
Median Ahrefs Domain Rating across the tracked set is 22. And 4 of them ship 200+ programmatic pages on a domain rated under 10 — the pattern the teardowns keep exposing: a big content machine bet before any authority exists to rank it.
Revenue is Stripe/RevenueCat-verified via TrustMRR. Channels are audited per company from public signals — sitemaps, repos, ad-library tags, marketplace listings, affiliate pages — plus founder statements and third-party press, each linked to its source. Growth-share weights are our estimate from detected signal volume, not self-reported budgets. Browse the receipts on any profile in the directory. Corrections welcome — every profile links its evidence.
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