SoleOS vs a spreadsheet
Honest framing first: the spreadsheet is the tool we actually compete with. It costs nothing, bends to any metric you invent, keeps your data entirely in your hands, and never has a pricing page. If you run one or two products, a spreadsheet is probably the right choice— and there’s a free template below, no email required.
Where the sheet wins
- $0 and total control. Any formula, any metric, any layout. No vendor, no subscription, no data leaving your Drive.
- 1–2 products. Fifteen minutes a month keeps it accurate. A paid dashboard is overkill.
- Metrics we don’t compute. Custom unit economics, expense tracking, LTV models — a sheet does anything; our metrics dictionary is deliberately finite.
Where the sheet dies
The sheet doesn’t update itself. From our competitive research (July 2026), manually reconciling Stripe or RevenueCat exports plus analytics and Search Console runs about 1–3 hours per product per month — and the numbers are stale the day after you do it:
| Portfolio size | Monthly upkeep (manual) | SoleOS |
|---|---|---|
| 2 products | 2–6 h/month | syncs daily on its own |
| 5 products | 5–15 h/month | syncs daily on its own |
| 10 products | 10–30 h/month | syncs daily on its own |
In practice the failure mode isn’t the hours — it’s that the ritual gets skipped the first busy week, then the sheet is three weeks stale, then it’s abandoned. And a sheet never taps you on the shoulder: no signup feed, no churn alert, no “this project just went flat.” From $19/month, SoleOS is the version of the sheet that fills itself in and speaks up.
The free template
If the sheet is right for you today, use a good one: download the portfolio-tracker CSV (no email wall — import into Google Sheets via File → Import). One row per project per month: MRR, signups, churn, visitors, search clicks, downloads, and an honest “hours spent” column so you know your real maintenance cost. Add two formulas and it starts answering questions: month-over-month MRR change per project (=(C14-C2)/C2style), and revenue concentration (top project’s MRR ÷ total). Review it monthly; put a date on the calendar or it won’t happen.
Two external templates we also rate: Visible’s SaaS metrics sheet and Andrew Chen’s churn/cohort spreadsheet — both free, both single-product oriented, both good. And once your sheet has a month of numbers, run them through the free concentration calculator to see your portfolio’s real shape.
The honest decision rule
Count your products. One or two: take the template, set a monthly review date, spend the $19. Three or more: your portfolio changes faster than any manual ritual can track, and the decision you’re actually paying for — which project deserves attention this week — needs fresh numbers. See it with fake data first on the live demo, or compare us against Baremetrics if you’re a one-product shop after depth instead.