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Three years ago I started a proof of concept electron app to design and print labels on thermal printers. That app has grown into mid-6-figures revenue from mostly “one-time license” sales. I do offer monthly subscription pricing with an expiring license and after a year my MRR has hit $3k. My competition is windows only and closed-source, largely backed by private equity.

I live in a small town in Minnesota so I don’t need to make much money to be comfortable, raising a family. I’m in my late 30s and have done mostly iOS and Node IIOT consulting the last 10 years. That’s what was paying the bills until my electron app started making “real” money.

On the technical side. I get emails every day saying how much a user loves my app. It’s really rewarding. Every year I get one angry email or App Store review saying that there are much better design/desktop-publishing apps out there. These reviews are usually written by technically savvy people that don’t quite get how stupid-complicated label printing can get. Like, don’t expect to design your company logo in my app. But surely, you can drag in your company logo and my app will dither your image for a 200 DPI zebra printer.

My app is basically a no-code image processing pipeline that effortlessly hooks up spreadsheet data, generates barcodes, resizes and fences text, dithers images, dynamically changes colors, and then talks directly to a thermal printer without using a driver.

And you can use it for free for 14 days to see if it works. It’s a single download. Yeah, it’s electron, yeah it uses some memory. But you can share the design files between Mac and windows and it doesn’t require internet for use.

I don’t know. I think it’s a pretty good solution.