Max Schmitt is a freelance web developer from Germany who started building Cakedesk, a simple invoicing app for Windows and Mac, at the end of 2021. He has kept it as a side project the whole time, shipping features around his client work rather than going full time. By the end of 2025 the product was in its fourth year, and Max published a yearly recap on his own blog laying out exactly how the business did.

The model is deliberately old-fashioned for software: a one-time license at 69 euros, with a free limited version and a perpetual paid version. There is no subscription. In 2024 Cakedesk sold roughly 170 copies. In 2025 that figure rose to 239 new licenses, a number Max is careful to define as new licenses only, not counting renewals or the new paid add-on for managing multiple companies. At list price that works out to somewhere around 16,000 euros in gross new-license revenue for the year.

The year was mostly about steady product work. Cakedesk shipped 12 releases in 2025, including discounts, delivery dates, direct email sending of invoices, custom PDF filename formats, multi-company "Spaces", and dark mode. Many of these came straight from user requests: the app received 44 new feature requests during the year and 13 were completed. Max also rebuilt the marketing website from scratch and added an experimental AI proposal generator on the web.

On distribution, Max is candid that he prefers building to marketing. He notes that one paid advertising channel that worked well in 2024 became much less effective in 2025, and that increasing organic traffic from Google roughly made up the difference. Sales were up while overall traffic stayed about flat, which suggests the product and site improvements helped conversion. The app is also listed on directories like AlternativeTo and Capterra, giving it a steady trickle of discovery.

Max frames Cakedesk honestly as a satisfying hobby business that does not yet make enough to become his main thing. He keeps it profitable by running lean as a solo founder, treating happy users as the best marketing, and refusing to over-commit to roadmaps. The recap reads less like a growth playbook and more like a portrait of patient, sustainable indie software: four years of small, compounding improvements and a slowly growing base of paying customers.