What 22,000 New Websites Reveal About Early-Stage SaaS in 2026

We monitor new products across multiple channels simultaneously — product launch communities, developer platforms, domain activity, and open web signals. After indexing 22,381 sites, some clear patterns have emerged that are worth sharing.

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The Signal vs. Noise Problem

The most important thing to understand about early-stage SaaS discovery: most newly registered sites are not real products.

Of the 22,381 sites in our database, the overwhelming majority are some combination of:

• Placeholder pages ("coming soon" pages with no product behind them)
• Parked domains held by registrars or domain investors
• Cheap bulk registrations on .online, .xyz, .site TLDs
• Very early experiments that won't survive 90 days

Only 3.5% of sites (775 out of 22,381) show any payment signal — a Stripe integration, a pricing page, a buy button. That's the real signal floor.

This is why raw discovery volume is the easy part. The hard part — and the part MRRScout focuses on — is separating the 775 real products from the 21,606 noise entries. We do that through category classification, tech stack detection, payment signal scanning, and domain age weighting.

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What the Data Reveals: Key Findings

After analyzing the full dataset:

The 31–90 day post-launch window has the highest monetization rate (8.4%). Sites caught at 1–3 months old are in the sweet spot of "just launched with pricing." Brand-new domains (0–30 days) are mostly pre-launch at only 2.1%. This window is where the most actionable discoveries concentrate.

Education leads all categories at 18.9% monetization. Despite AI Tools being the largest category (3,938 sites), it monetizes at only 6.8%. The market expectation of free access has made charging harder in the AI space — buyers in education have no such expectation.

TLD choice correlates with product seriousness. Sites on .app, .io, .ai, and .dev skew heavily toward real products. Sites on .online and .xyz — which together account for over 32% of our database — have the lowest monetization rates by a wide margin.

Domain monitoring catches products before they appear anywhere else. A significant share of our database was first detected through domain activity — often days or weeks before the same product appeared on Product Hunt or Reddit. New .ai and .app registrations in particular are a reliable leading indicator of upcoming launches.

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When Multiple Signals Align

Individual signals are noisy. The pattern that predicts real products most reliably is signal stacking — when several indicators fire at once.

A high-confidence early product looks like this in our data:

• Domain registered 31–90 days ago (not brand new, not abandoned)
• TLD is .app, .io, .ai, or .co (intentional choice, not cheapest available)
• Payment signal detected — any pricing page, Stripe snippet, or buy button
• Category is Education, Productivity, Design Tools, or Developer Tools (baseline monetization rate above 8%)

In our dataset, sites matching all four criteria have a monetization rate roughly 4–6× higher than the average. That combination is what MRRScout's NicheScore is optimized to surface.

Sites matching one or two criteria are worth watching. Sites matching zero are in the noise tier.

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What We're Not Finding (Yet)

Our dataset skews toward products on startup-oriented TLDs. Traditional SaaS on .com domains, or products that launch without any public announcement, are underrepresented.

We're also in the early-data phase. All 22,381 sites were first indexed in early 2026. We don't yet have 6-month survival data, revenue progression, or longitudinal churn stats.

Those are coming. As the database grows, survival analysis — which categories and TLDs retain active products at 90/180/365 days — will be one of the most valuable signals we publish.

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What This Means for You

If you're an indie founder, investor, or product researcher:

• Payment signals on young domains are the strongest buy indicator — a 45-day-old site with a pricing page is in the highest-monetization cohort in our entire dataset
• Category baseline matters more than most people think — Education at 18.9% monetization is 3× better than AI Tools at 6.8%, regardless of how flashy the product looks
• Multiple aligned signals beat any single signal — the compounding effect is real and measurable

The full database is available to explore at mrrscout.com/discover. Filter by category, sort by recency, and see which products are showing the strongest combined signals this week.

Where does MRRScout's data come from? All statistics in our articles come from MRRScout's intelligence platform, which continuously monitors 24,000+ newly launched websites across Reddit, Product Hunt, Hacker News, BetaList, certificate transparency logs, and domain activity feeds. Sites are classified as monetized only when active payment infrastructure is detected — not based on self-reported MRR or founder claims. Data snapshots are timestamped in each article. Full database: mrrscout.com/discover.

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