How Forbidden Byte Reached $1K MRR by Building a Niche View Recycling SaaS

Back in 2016, I just wanted to optimize my own lists of items in my games, so I built a product that recycles views. Fast-forward 10 years, I have a steady but modest monthly passive income from it, and several large studios are using it. Unity's built-in ScrollView choked. Literally 2-4 fps on mobile once you had 300+ items, because it instantiates every single item upfront. I looked at what existed on the Asset Store and nothing really solved this properly. Most solutions were half-baked or would break when you needed dynamic item sizes. I came from Android development where RecyclerView just works, so I thought, why can't we have the same thing in Unity? I started prototyping a view-recycling system that only renders what's visible on screen. Once I got it working in my own project, I realized other developers were clearly hitting the same wall. So I cleaned it up, added a few demo scenes, and put it on the Asset Store around 2016.

Worked, the free non-optimized version. I released a stripped-down ScrollView Adapter for free on the Asset Store that handles basic use cases. Developers try it, hit its limits, and then upgrade to OSA. It's a natural funnel because they already understand the API and just need more power. That single move brought in more users than anything else I did. Also, I made a couple of YouTube tutorial videos that drove real demand. Also, I created tons of demo scenes (around 20 currently) that show the most common use cases. Flopped, trying to promote OSA through forum posts and GameDev subreddits. I’d write detailed posts showing benchmarks and performance comparisons. Almost no traction. Developers don't go searching for ScrollView solutions until they actually have a performance problem. So all that upfront marketing effort was wasted. The free version works because it meets people at the exact moment they realize they need more.

The learning curve hits the hardest, and it shows in some reviews. By far, the number one complaint. OSA is not a drop-in replacement for Unity's ScrollView. You need to understand the recycling pattern and write some code to get things working. Multiple reviews say things like "took me 2-3 hours to rewire my brain" or "incredible with extreme learning curve." I've handled this in a few ways. First, I built the OSA wizard, which is a code generator that scaffolds a working implementation in about a minute. Second, I added 28 demo scenes covering basically every use case, chat systems, grids, tables, expandable items, drag and drop, you name it. Third, I set up a Discord community where I answer questions directly. And I wrote a full manual covering v6 through 7. The reality is that the complexity comes from the flexibility, and most users agree it's worth it once they get past the initial hump.

People assume Unity's UI system is good enough for production apps. It's really not, especially on mobile. The default ScrollView was designed for simple cases, maybe 20-50 items. Once you go beyond that, performance drops off a cliff because Unity creates a GameObject for every item and keeps them all in memory. Most developers don't even realize this is a problem until they test on a real device and see frame drops. The other misconception is that you can just write your own pooling solution in a weekend. I've been maintaining OSA for almost 10 years now. Supporting dynamic item sizes, content size fitters, nested scrollviews, grids, tables, multiple prefabs, looping, snapping... it adds up fast. The core recycling logic is maybe 20% of the work. The remaining 80% is edge cases that will eat you alive. Also, people are willing to pay big bucks for a solution that works. Do not underprice yourself.

I'm working on better support for Unity 6 and the new UI Toolkit, since that's where Unity is pushing developers. Also, planning a visual node-based setup tool so you can configure common scroll view patterns without writing code at all. And I want to add built-in support for async data loading from APIs, which is something a lot of developers keep asking for in the Discord. Also, building a chatbot in Discord that will automatically answer questions based on my docs and existing Discord history is a low-hanging fruit.

10k+ active users, 4.7-star rating, can't share revenue numbers -- they're not life-changing, but nice to have.

I'd been doing game development in Unity for a few years before OSA and had a background in competitive programming (Topcoder). That combination helped a lot because OSA is really an algorithms and data structures problem at its core. You need to efficiently manage object pooling, layout calculations, and viewport culling, all while keeping things smooth at 60fps. I also had experience with Android's RecyclerView, which gave me the mental model for how view recycling should work. So I wasn't starting from scratch, but building a production-quality asset was a whole different challenge. I also worked for Ubisoft as a gameplay programmer.

I didn't charge enough early on. I priced OSA low to compete and attract users, but that also attracted people who expected free support for a $20 purchase and left bad reviews if something didn't work instantly. Meanwhile, companies like Miniclip (8 Ball Pool, 1.3 billion downloads, $400M+ revenue) were using OSA in production and would have happily paid 5-10x more. I learned that pricing signals quality. When I raised the base price to $60, the quality of customers actually improved, support requests became more reasonable, and revenue went up. Recently, I upped it to $120 and am waiting for more data.