The TrustMRR alternative for makers who don't have MRR yet

TrustMRR's homepage asks a blunt question: "$1 or $1,000,000?" It is a database of verified startup revenue, a public leaderboard ranked by MRR, and a marketplace where you can list your startup for sale once the number is big enough to be interesting. It is a genuinely well-built product. It is also useless to most people building in public today, because it requires the one thing a huge share of makers do not have yet: revenue.

That gap is the whole reason this leaderboard exists. If you are looking for a TrustMRR alternative and your actual MRR is zero, a blank profile, or a number you would rather not connect a Stripe key to yet, you are the exact person the leaderboard on makers.page was built for. It ranks makers by daily streak instead of dollars, and it ties something real, your backlink, to keeping that streak alive.

Here is what TrustMRR and its clones actually do, why the model excludes most makers by design, and what I built instead.

What TrustMRR actually is (and who it is really for)

TrustMRR calls itself "the database of verified startup revenues." The mechanic is straightforward: you connect a payment provider, Stripe, RevenueCat, Superwall, Shopify, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle, Creem, Whop, Polar, or DodoPayment, via API key, and the site pulls your live MRR and displays it on a public profile. Founders show up on a sitewide leaderboard ranked by MRR or all-time revenue, with medal icons for the top three and a numeric global rank on every startup page ("Ranked #1,761 on TrustMRR"). There is a stats dashboard with revenue-by-country charts, a "high revenue, least followers" leaderboard, and a live feed of milestone posts like "Officially $100 MRR." Startups can also list themselves for sale, with an asking price and revenue multiple, which is where the "buy and sell SaaS startups" side of the product comes in.

It is not alone. Acquirely runs a near-identical model: an hourly-updated Stripe-verified MRR leaderboard with "Biggest Gainer" and "Rising Star" callouts, plus its own marketplace. StartuPage ranks both "Top Startups" and "Top Founders" by combined MRR across every venture a founder owns, lets you hide the exact number or show a range, and still counts private revenue toward your rank. It even ships a "Share Rank" social card built specifically so you can flex your position on X. Indie Hackers has long had a Products directory sortable by "Highest Revenue," self-reported rather than verified. VerifiedMRR markets itself directly against that kind of self-reported number, arguing verification is the whole point.

All of these products are fighting over the same sliver of the market: founders who already have revenue worth verifying. If your product made $0 last month, or you have not shipped yet, none of them have anything for you. You do not get a rank. You get a wall.

The floor problem every MRR leaderboard shares

This is not a criticism of TrustMRR specifically. It is a structural property of ranking by revenue: the leaderboard only means something once you have traction, so day-one founders are excluded by definition. You cannot compete on an MRR leaderboard with an idea, a landing page, or a product you shipped yesterday. You compete once someone has paid you, which for most makers is weeks or months into the process, if it happens at all.

That is not a small edge case. Most people who list a product on a directory like makers.page, post a build update, or check out a tool like this one are pre-revenue. They are the people an MRR leaderboard is structurally built to leave out, at exactly the point in the journey where a little public accountability would help the most.

Interestingly, the appetite for something other than a raw dollar figure already exists inside the same ecosystem. indieranks, an open-source leaderboard project, frames itself explicitly as going "beyond big MRR noise." Builtbyindies ranks makers by karma and activity instead of revenue. Neither replaces the underlying accountability mechanic makers actually want: a reason to show up today, visible to other people, that has nothing to do with whether you have made a sale yet.

Every other "TrustMRR alternative" is still an MRR leaderboard

Search "trustmrr alternative" today and you get a real list of results: G2 runs a "Top 10 TrustMRR Alternatives" roundup, GitHub hosts an open-source clone called OpenRevenue, Chartivo and Netrows both publish their own comparisons, and Reddit has multiple threads of founders building their own version over a weekend. There is clearly demand for something other than TrustMRR itself.

Read past the headlines and every single one of those alternatives makes the same swap: a different payment provider, a different UI, a different pricing model, but the same underlying rule. You still need verified revenue to appear. None of them touch the actual structural problem, which is that the leaderboard format itself excludes anyone pre-revenue, regardless of which specific MRR tracker is doing the ranking. Swapping TrustMRR for a GitHub-hosted clone with the same rules is not really an alternative. It is the same gate with a different coat of paint.

That is the gap this leaderboard fills. Not "another place to show your MRR," but a leaderboard that works for the stage before MRR exists at all.

What I built instead: a leaderboard ranked by streaks

The makers.page leaderboard ranks you by your daily check-in streak, not your revenue. The mechanic:

• Set your X handle on your dashboard and you are on the public leaderboard, even before you have submitted a product. There is no revenue gate, no payment provider to connect, no minimum anything.
• Hit "check in" once a day. Your streak counts up. Miss a day entirely (not "log in a little late," a full missed calendar day) and it resets to zero, though you get one grace day so a late check-in the next morning does not wipe out weeks of consistency.
• The leaderboard shows your rank, your X handle, your streak in a plain 🔥 12d format, and your product name and description once you have one live. Top spots get the same kind of visual treatment TrustMRR gives its medal ranks, a bordered badge that stands out from the pack.
• Open spots on the board show as literal open placeholders: "This spot is open. List your product and start a streak." You can see exactly how close you are to claiming a rank, the same competitive pull StartuPage engineered with its Share Rank cards, minus the requirement that you already be making money.

The floor for entry is zero. You do not need a product, a Stripe account, or a single dollar of revenue to show up at rank one on day one. You need to check in.

Why your backlink goes nofollow when your streak breaks

Here is where this stops being a cosmetic twist on the same idea and becomes a different mechanic entirely. Every approved product page on makers.page gets a dofollow backlink, which matters more than most founders realize for a brand-new domain with zero authority. On most directories, that link is permanent the moment you are approved. On makers.page, it is conditional.

If your streak is alive, your product page's backlink is dofollow. If your streak breaks, it flips to nofollow. That is the entire meaning behind the line under the homepage leaderboard: "Keep your streak, keep your backlink."

TrustMRR's leaderboard rank is a status symbol. It goes up or down, but nothing structural is attached to it beyond bragging rights. The makers.page streak has a real, functional stake tied to it: whether your listing is currently doing anything for your SEO. That is a sharper incentive than a badge, and it is one no revenue-based leaderboard can replicate, because MRR does not reset if you forget to check a box for two days. A habit can.

Why streaks work better than revenue for accountability

None of this is a novel psychological trick. Loss aversion is the same mechanism Duolingo built its entire retention strategy around. In Duolingo's own words, from their engineering blog: streaks "tap into 'loss aversion,' an internal bias in your brain that makes you particularly averse to losing something, like a learning streak." Their internal data backs it up hard: learners who hit a 7-day streak are 3.6x more likely to finish a full course than learners who never build one. Counterintuitively, they also found that adding flexibility, streak freezes that forgive an occasional missed day, increased long-term retention rather than undermining it, because a completely rigid rule makes people give up entirely the first time they slip.

This is the same principle Jerry Seinfeld described decades before streak features existed in software: mark an X on a wall calendar every day you write jokes, then "don't break the chain." The chain itself becomes the goal, which turns an abstract, hard-to-measure activity (writing well, building a good product) into something concrete you either did or didn't do today. Developers already have their own version of this in GitHub's contribution graph, a public grid of daily activity that functions as proof-of-work the same way an MRR badge functions as proof-of-revenue, except anyone can start filling it in immediately.

Makers already reach for this instinct without being told to. Search "build in public" accountability tools and you find ShipStreak, pitched as daily accountability and launch tracking for indie hackers, Codestreaks, built around a "build-in-public playbook," and GritSync, which positions itself explicitly against "loose public accountability tweets," arguing that a real tracked streak beats a vague #buildinpublic post. Even the SEO landscape backs this up: buildinpubliclog.com already pitches itself on "track your shipping streaks... flex your streak, not your follower count," a near word-for-word echo of the exact contrast this leaderboard is built around. The appetite for streak-based accountability among makers is not hypothetical. It is already a small, scattered category. It just was not attached to a directory with real SEO stakes until now.

Streak leaderboard vs MRR leaderboard vs wall of love

These three categories get conflated constantly, but they solve different problems:

Wall-of-love tools like Senja and Testimonial.to are not really competitors to a leaderboard at all. They collect and display testimonials, sometimes pulled from 30+ platforms, with zero ranking or competitive element between users. They answer "what do my customers say about me," not "how do I compare to everyone else building right now." A revenue leaderboard answers the second question, but only after you have revenue. A streak leaderboard answers it from day one.

How to keep a streak that means something, not a source of anxiety

It is worth being honest about a real risk here, because I have written before about how building in public burns founders out when a daily habit turns into a performance you cannot sustain. A daily check-in streak could become exactly that kind of pressure if you treat it as one more feed to perform for.

It is not designed to be that. The check-in itself takes a few seconds, it is not a content requirement, and it has nothing to do with posting frequency on X. You are not committing to writing a thread every day. You are marking that you showed up, whatever that meant for you today: shipped a feature, talked to a user, fixed a bug, or just kept the lights on. Treat the leaderboard rank as a byproduct of consistency you were already trying to build, not a new obligation stacked on top of shipping. If a day gets missed, the grace period exists precisely so one bad day does not spiral into "well, I already broke it, might as well stop."

The honest version of this feature is closer to a habit tracker with a public leaderboard attached than a performance metric. Use it that way and it stays useful for a year. Chase the rank number for its own sake and it becomes the same trap as chasing likes.

A few ways to keep it in the "useful habit" column instead of the "second job" column:

• Check in after the work, not instead of it. The click takes a second. If it starts happening before you have actually done anything that day, the habit has inverted.
• Let the grace day do its job. One missed day is not a crisis. The grace period exists so you do not treat a single bad day as permission to quit the whole habit.
• Do not let rank dictate your roadmap. A streak measures whether you showed up, not whether today's work was the right work. Do not let climbing the board pull you toward busywork just to have something to click "check in" on.
• Compare your streak to your own longest, not to whoever is at rank one. The board is public, but the useful comparison is you last month versus you this month.

How to get on the leaderboard

1. Set your X handle. Sign in and add your X username on the dashboard. This alone puts you on the public leaderboard with an open placeholder rank, before you have shipped anything.
2. Check in today. One click. Your streak starts at one.
3. Come back tomorrow. And the day after. That is the entire mechanic. There is no trick to climbing the board beyond showing up.
4. List your product when it's ready. Submit it for free and, once approved, your product name and description appear next to your rank, along with a dofollow backlink that stays dofollow as long as your streak does.
5. Connect the Marketing MCP when you want help with the rest. Once you are listed, the Marketing MCP can help draft the launch posts and content that go with the habit you are already building.

Frequently asked questions

Is this really a TrustMRR alternative if there's no revenue involved?

Yes, in the sense that matters to most makers: it is a public leaderboard you can compete on, tied to your product page, with real stakes attached to staying active. It just swaps the metric that gates entry. TrustMRR ranks the maybe 5% of makers with meaningful MRR. This ranks anyone willing to check in today.

Do I need a shipped product to be on the leaderboard?

No. Setting your X handle puts you on the board immediately. A shipped, approved product adds your product name, description, and a dofollow backlink to your entry, but it is not required to start a streak or claim a rank.

What happens if I miss a day?

You get one grace day. Miss a single day and check in the next morning, and your streak is unaffected. Let two full calendar days pass with no check-in and the streak resets to zero, though your longest streak is still tracked separately.

Does the leaderboard actually do anything for SEO, or is it just a badge?

It is functional, not just cosmetic. Approved product pages get a dofollow backlink. That link stays dofollow only while your streak is alive; a broken streak flips it to nofollow. Dofollow links matter disproportionately for a brand-new domain with no existing authority, so this is a real incentive, not a vanity number.

Can I see other makers' revenue like on TrustMRR?

No, and that is intentional. The board shows streak length, not financials. If you want a revenue-verified leaderboard for founders who already have MRR worth showing, TrustMRR, Acquirely, and StartuPage all do that well. This one is built for the stage before that, and for makers who would rather be judged on consistency than on a number that takes months to become interesting.

The honest summary

TrustMRR and its clones are well-built products for a narrow audience: founders with enough revenue to make a leaderboard rank worth showing off. Most people building in public today are not that founder yet, and a leaderboard that requires revenue to even appear on it has nothing to offer them at the moment they need accountability the most.

The makers.page leaderboard ranks you by something everyone starts at zero on equal footing with: whether you showed up today. It costs nothing to join, it takes a few seconds a day to maintain, and unlike a static badge, it has a real consequence attached, your product's dofollow backlink stays alive exactly as long as your streak does.

Set your X handle and start your streak on the dashboard, or list your product on makers.page for free if you have not yet.

Related reading:

• Why dofollow backlinks matter for indies
• Building in public without burning out
• First 100 users without a marketing budget