Pivoting an internal tool into a 7-figure business

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Put It on Autopilot

Some of the sturdiest products come out of an agency, built to solve the agency's own problem before anyone thought to sell it.

Lukas Bohler is a software engineer by background. Before Gleap, he cofounded and ran BoehlerBrothers, a software agency in Dornbirn, Austria, building apps and products for clients for years. Gleap grew directly out of a problem the agency faced daily: clients reported bugs in long, vague emails that developers could not act on.

The team built an internal tool to fix that, and validated it almost by accident. When clients saw it, they kept asking if they could use it too. That was the signal that it was not just the agency's problem. They launched it publicly as BugBattle in 2020, and in 2021 rebranded to Gleap and spun it out of the agency as its own company, with Lukas as CEO alongside cofounders Isabella Salzmann as COO and Tobias Duelli as CTO.

Gleap has since evolved from a bug reporting tool into a full AI powered customer support and feedback platform. More than 4,500 software teams now use it, from indie founders to companies like Microsoft, Squarespace, UNICEF, and Papa John's, and the widget reaches roughly 250 million end users monthly. The company is bootstrapped, profitable, past 7 figure ARR, and growing 4 to 8% month over month, entirely organically.

Here is how an internal fix for a daily agency annoyance became a company operating at that scale.

The initial product was built as a side project inside BoehlerBrothers. There was no budget set aside for it and no money raised. The team simply carved out time between client projects.

Starting from an agency carried a real advantage: the engineering talent, the infrastructure, and the cash flow already existed, so agency revenue and unpaid hours essentially funded the first version. Grants from the Austrian startup ecosystem later helped bridge the gap once Gleap spun out as its own company.

The first version was deliberately narrow: an SDK developers could drop into their app that let end users report bugs with a shake gesture or a button tap, automatically capturing screenshots, console logs, network requests, and device data. Because the team was its own first customer, the feedback loop was fast and unforgiving. Their own developers used it daily on real client projects, so they knew within weeks what worked and what did not. Agency clients became the first beta testers, and their reactions confirmed the idea was worth pursuing.

They built on open source frameworks for the SDKs and standard cloud infrastructure, which let a small team ship native SDKs for iOS, Android, and the web far faster than would have been possible a decade earlier. It took roughly a year from the first internal version to the public launch as BugBattle. A handful of people built it, the agency funded it, and it was validated on real projects before a single stranger ever paid for it.

Gleap is a TypeScript and Node.js shop at its core:

The most distinctive part of the stack is the SDK layer. Because Gleap lives inside customers' apps, the team maintains seven native SDKs across JavaScript, iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter, Capacitor, C sharp, and Cordova, which means every feature has to be built and tested across all of them. Keeping seven codebases in feature parity with a small team, across platforms that each carry their own quirks around screenshots, console capture, and network logging, is one of the biggest ongoing engineering challenges the company faces.

The stack changed most dramatically when Gleap went AI first. Building Kai, their AI agent suite, meant layering an entirely new stack on top of the existing platform: LLM orchestration, RAG pipelines over customer knowledge bases and technical context, and Langfuse for LLM observability and evaluation, since AI now answers the majority of tier 1 support conversations autonomously and needs to be measured and traced the same way uptime would be. The hardest lesson from that shift: shipping an AI feature is roughly 20% prompting and 80% evaluation, guardrails, and context engineering.

At the core of the modern platform is Kai, Gleap's AI agent suite:

Around Kai sits everything a modern software team needs to talk to its users: live chat, in app bug reporting, a knowledge base, surveys, product tours, and a public roadmap, replacing a fragmented stack of tools like Intercom, Zendesk, Instabug, and Canny with one platform. Kai now resolves the majority of tier 1 support conversations for many customers before a human ever reads them.

Gleap runs as a classic B2B SaaS subscription business with a usage based AI layer on top. Plans range from $49 a month for solo developers up to $999 plus a month for enterprise customers with compliance needs like SOC 2, SSO, and BYOK, billed annually or monthly with a 14 day free trial and no credit card required. On top of the subscription, AI usage for Kai is billed by token consumption and model choice. The two part model is deliberate: the subscription covers the platform, and AI usage grows in step with the value customers derive.

They started charging almost from day one. Coming from an agency background, the team never had the luxury, or the temptation, of burning venture money on free users. Gleap had to pay for itself, so validating willingness to pay validated the idea in the same motion.

The pricing structure evolved significantly since launch. They started with cheap, per seat plans around $19 to $119 a month, then eventually moved to value based platform tiers with unlimited seats on higher plans. That shift mattered. Per seat pricing punished the exact behavior they wanted, whole teams actually living inside Gleap, while platform pricing plus AI usage aligns revenue with customer value instead.

Revenue expansion now comes from three directions:

Going AI first caused the biggest revenue inflection in the company's history. Launching Kai changed both deal size and the buyer conversation, moving the pitch from a nice to have feedback widget to a tool that cuts support workload in half, a budget line every SaaS company understands immediately.

The first users came from the existing network. As an agency, the team deployed the product on their own client projects, and those clients, plus other agencies in their network, became the first paying customers. That gave them something most launches lack: real production usage and testimonials from day one.

When they launched publicly as BugBattle, they ran the usual startup launch circuit, Product Hunt, beta lists, developer communities, which brought the first wave of strangers and, more importantly, taught them that US software teams, not local Austrian businesses, were the real market. Today around 75% of customers are in the US, operating from Austria.

Content and SEO have compounded the most. The team publishes consistently on topics buyers actively search, AI customer support, support automation, tool comparisons against Intercom and Zendesk, and over the years that has built an organic engine bringing in trial signups every day without paid spend. Review platforms like G2 do quiet, steady work alongside it. When a support lead shortlists tools, Gleap appears in the comparison set with social proof already attached.

The product itself is the most unusual channel of all. The Gleap widget sits inside customers' apps and reaches roughly 250 million end users a month. A meaningful share of new signups comes from people who encountered Gleap inside someone else's product, either as an end user or as a team member of a customer. Every deployment functions as a small billboard in front of exactly the right audience: people who build software. A self serve motion reinforces it, a 14 day free trial, no credit card, setup in under an hour, so curiosity converts without a sales call, alongside a startup program offering 50% off the first year that gets Gleap into companies early and grows alongside them.

The AI shift changed go to market strategy too. With Kai, the team stopped selling features and started selling an outcome: the majority of your tier 1 support handled before a human reads it. That message opened doors a bug reporting tool never could, including larger customers like Microsoft, Squarespace, and Papa John's, whose logos now sell themselves to the next prospect.

Lukas's growth advice centers on patience and recognizing what you already have. Paid ads stop the moment you stop paying. Content, reviews, and product led distribution keep working while you sleep. And do not underestimate your existing distribution. The agency network gave Gleap its first customers, and the widget itself became the best performing channel the company has. Most founders have an unfair distribution advantage sitting somewhere in their history. The trick is recognizing it.

His broader advice for indie hackers is direct and short:

The aim from here is to be the platform that supports self healing software development, letting every team put their software on a kind of autopilot and focus on what actually matters to their business, rather than losing resources to customer support and bug fixes.

You can follow along on LinkedIn, and check out Gleap directly.