The honest answer is: it depends on where you are. A product that went from £0 to £200 MRR in its first month has technically infinite growth. A product at £10,000 MRR growing 3% month-over-month is adding £300/month, which is more in absolute terms than most early-stage products manage. Percentages without context are meaningless.
But that's not a very useful answer, so here are some real benchmarks.
Early stage (£0 to £1,000 MRR)
At this stage, growth rate as a percentage is almost irrelevant. You're going from zero to something. The number to watch is absolute MRR, not the rate of change. Getting to £500 MRR proves people will pay. Getting to £1,000 MRR proves it wasn't a fluke.
Timelines vary wildly. Some products hit £1,000 MRR in two months. Others take a year. Both can be fine depending on the market, the pricing, and how much time you're putting in. If you're treating it as a side project with a few hours a week, six months to £1,000 MRR is solid progress.
The trap at this stage is obsessing over month-over-month percentages. Going from £50 to £100 is 100% growth. Going from £100 to £150 is 50% growth. It looks like growth is "slowing" when actually you just added the same number of customers. Ignore percentages until you're past £1,000 MRR.
Growth stage (£1,000 to £10,000 MRR)
This is where growth rate starts to mean something. Reasonable benchmarks for an indie SaaS:
5-10% monthly growth is solid. At 7% month-over-month, £1,000 MRR becomes roughly £2,250 in 12 months. Not explosive, but compounding steadily. Most successful indie products live in this range for a long time.
10-15% monthly growth is excellent. At 12% month-over-month, £1,000 MRR becomes roughly £3,900 in 12 months. This is the kind of growth that makes you think about going full-time. It's also hard to sustain for more than a few months at a time.
15%+ monthly growth is exceptional and almost certainly temporary. Enjoy it while it lasts, but don't plan your life around it continuing. Something is working unusually well (a viral post, a perfect product-market fit moment, a competitor shutting down) and it will normalise.
Flat (0-2%) is a warning sign if it persists for more than two or three months. It could mean churn is cancelling out new signups, or that you've saturated your current acquisition channel and need a new one.
Negative growth for more than two months in a row means something is wrong. Either churn has spiked, acquisition has dried up, or both. Investigate immediately.
Scaling stage (£10,000+ MRR)
Growth rates naturally slow as the base gets larger. Adding £1,000/month to a £10,000 MRR base is 10%. Adding £1,000/month to a £30,000 MRR base is 3.3%. The absolute number is the same. The percentage tells a different story.
At this stage, 3-7% monthly growth is good. 7-10% is very good. Anything above 10% sustained at this level is rare for a bootstrapped product and usually means you've found a major new acquisition channel or your pricing power just increased.
Many successful indie SaaS products settle into 2-5% monthly growth at this stage and stay there for years. That's not failure. At 3% monthly growth, £10,000 MRR becomes roughly £14,300 in 12 months. That's £4,300 in annual growth from a product you've already built. Compounding is quiet but powerful.
What the numbers look like over 12 months
Here's what different monthly growth rates do to a £1,000 MRR starting point over a year:
3% monthly: £1,000 → £1,430 (£430 added) 5% monthly: £1,000 → £1,800 (£800 added) 7% monthly: £1,000 → £2,250 (£1,250 added) 10% monthly: £1,000 → £3,140 (£2,140 added) 15% monthly: £1,000 → £5,350 (£4,350 added) 20% monthly: £1,000 → £8,920 (£7,920 added)
The gap between 5% and 15% looks small month to month. Over a year it's the difference between £1,800 and £5,350. Compounding makes small differences enormous over time. This is why even a 1-2% improvement in monthly growth rate is worth working on.
Now do the same maths starting from £5,000 MRR:
3% monthly: £5,000 → £7,130 5% monthly: £5,000 → £8,980 7% monthly: £5,000 → £11,260 10% monthly: £5,000 → £15,690
At 10% monthly from a £5,000 base, you're adding over £10,000 in MRR in a year. That starts to look like a real business.
Why early growth rates are misleading
A common pattern: a product launches, gets featured on Hacker News or Product Hunt, and grows 40% in a month. The founder projects that forward and calculates they'll be at £50,000 MRR in six months. Then growth drops to 5% the next month because the launch spike is over and organic growth takes over.
Early growth is almost always spiky. Launch bumps, press coverage, a viral tweet, a successful cold email campaign. These create step changes in MRR, not sustained growth rates. The real growth rate is what happens between the spikes.
If you average your growth rate over the first three months, you'll get an inflated number. Look at months 4-6 instead. That's closer to your baseline organic growth. Plan from there, not from the best month you ever had.
Churn eats growth
A 10% monthly growth rate with 8% monthly churn is not 10% net growth. It's 2%. And at high churn rates, you're on a treadmill where most of your new customers are replacing ones that left.
For indie SaaS, healthy monthly churn is roughly 3-5% for consumer products and 2-3% for B2B/prosumer. Anything above 7% monthly means your bucket has a serious hole and you should fix retention before worrying about acquisition.
The real metric to watch is net MRR growth: new MRR + expansion MRR - churned MRR - contraction MRR. That's your actual growth, not the gross number.
Growth rate for a portfolio
If you're running multiple SaaS projects, individual project growth rates matter less than portfolio growth. A portfolio where Project A is growing 8% and Project B is flat and Project C is declining 2% might still be growing 4% overall. That's fine. The portfolio approach means not every project needs to be a rocket ship.
What matters is: is total portfolio MRR going up? If yes, you're doing well. If one project is dragging the portfolio down and has been for months, that's a signal to either fix it, put it in maintenance mode, or shut it down and redirect the energy.
Tracking growth rates across multiple projects is one of the things Shipchart is built for. Portfolio MRR, per-project trends, month-over-month growth, and forecasting based on your actual growth rates and churn. You can see which projects are driving growth and which are stalling, all in one view. There's a free tier if you want to try it.
The short version
At £0-1,000 MRR, focus on absolute numbers, not percentages. At £1,000-10,000 MRR, 5-10% monthly is solid and 10-15% is excellent. Above £10,000 MRR, 3-7% is good and anything above that is great. Growth rates always slow as the base gets larger. Early spikes are not your real growth rate. And churn matters as much as acquisition. Watch net MRR growth, not gross.
The most important thing is the trend. Three months of consistent 5% growth is better than one month of 20% followed by two months of flat. Consistency compounds. Spikes don't.