The State of SaaS Distribution 2026
Everyone lists the channels founders say they use. We audited how 127 SaaS companies with public revenue 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 105 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 | 54 | 100% | 17.4% |
| Founder audience | 50 | 12% | 14.5% |
| Editorial SEO | 31 | 97% | 9% |
| Marketplaces | 31 | 77% | 8.7% |
| Affiliates | 29 | 90% | 5.7% |
| Free tools | 19 | 95% | 5% |
| Word of mouth | 20 | 40% | 4.7% |
| Outbound outreach | 11 | 18% | 4.1% |
| AI-agent ecosystem | 15 | 73% | 3.5% |
| Partner programs | 11 | 55% | 2.6% |
| Viral spikes | 10 | 40% | 2.5% |
| Open source | 8 | 100% | 2.4% |
| Launch events | 12 | 25% | 2.3% |
| B2B2C institutions | 4 | 75% | 1.4% |
| Referrals | 5 | 80% | 1% |
Median Ahrefs Domain Rating across the tracked set is 27. And 5 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 for most entries. A few well-known companies that don't use TrustMRR carry a founder-stated figure instead — ranked on that number, but badged "founder-stated" and never shown as verified. 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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