Square Town for SaaS founders: $1 square, counted clicks, no subscription

You already pay monthly for eleven things. This is one dollar, once, and it tells you exactly how many people clicked.

Square Town (square.pov.town) is a favicon wall where a 1×1 square costs $1, one-time, and shows your product's favicon linked to your site. For a SaaS founder it is a tiny, permanent placement with a counted, UTM-tagged click-through and optional per-day analytics — no subscription, no account, no "featured" tier, and no design work beyond having a favicon.

TL;DR for SaaS founders. $1 buys one square, forever* (*until someone pays $2 to evict you). Clicks are counted and land on your site tagged utm_source=square.pov.town. Views, clicks and kisses show on your deed page; $5 one-time adds per-day charts. If you run more than one product, each gets its own square. Wall: square.pov.town. Prices: Pricing — $1 a square, one time, forever*.

The problem: every SaaS listing is either a subscription or a launch#

The channels a SaaS founder is offered mostly fall into two shapes. Subscriptions: a logo board or directory that charges monthly, forever, and quietly becomes a line item you forget to cancel. Launches: one loud day on a launch platform, then a decay curve you can set your watch by. Neither is a place your product simply is.

The comparison pages on this site go into the specific boards — Square Town vs SaaSBoard and Square Town vs The SaaS Wall — but the shape of the difference is the same everywhere: they sell rank or a recurring slot; Square Town sells a spot on a map, once.

What a $1 square gives you#

1. A permanent placement for one dollar. Your favicon in the cell you picked, live for everyone within a second of payment, no expiry and no renewal. The only way off the wall is eviction (someone pays double what you paid) — and for a $1 square, that's the cost of the game, not a business risk.
2. A click-through you can attribute. Every click goes through /go/:id, is counted, and reaches your site with utm_source=square.pov.town&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=square appended. It appears as its own referral row in your analytics next to the channels you pay real money for. You can compare cost per click against them; it will be an unfair comparison in Square Town's favour, since the cost is $1 total.
3. Views, clicks and kisses on a deed page. After buying you get a secret deed URL. It shows the square, how many people opened its card (views), how many clicked through, and how many kissed it. $5, one-time, unlocks per-day view and click charts on that deed. For a product you actually market, that's the one upsell on Square Town worth taking.
4. A tower that shows demand. Tilt the wall (ctrl+drag) and every favicon becomes a box whose height is its click count, tinted with the icon's colour. If your product is getting clicked, it's visibly taller than its neighbours. Public, unfakeable, and free.
5. A place for every product you run. Squares are $1 and 1×1, so a founder with a main product, a free tool, a side product and a docs site can put all four on the wall for $4, in adjacent cells, and see them as one block. Founders with a portfolio of small products should read Square Town for developers with many side projects — the maths is the same at twelve.
6. The Throne, if you want to make a point. The 4×4 gold tile in the dead centre is one square, one owner, intro price $100. Every eviction doubles it ($100 → $200 → $400 …). It's the only "premium placement" on Square Town, and it prices itself.

How to do it#

1. Confirm your favicon is good at 16px. It's your whole ad. Open your site in a tab; if the icon is a blurry logo with text in it, fix that first (Favicon design tips at 16px). No favicon at all means a clown emoji and a spot in the public Hall of Clowns.
2. Open square.pov.town, zoom in on the centre. Only the central 16×16 is live at launch; it grows by 8 cells in every direction each time the live area is 70 % full. The middle is where the eyes go.
3. Click an empty cell, paste your URL, pay $1. Stripe checkout, card. Square Town fetches the favicon via Google's favicon service; nothing to upload.
4. Save the deed URL. Secret link, only proof of ownership, no accounts. Store it with the rest of your company credentials — not just under the browser's "My deeds" button, which is localStorage.
5. Unlock analytics ($5, once). On the deed page. You now have per-day views and clicks for this square, forever.
6. Add square.pov.town to your referral tracking. The UTM tags are already on the outbound link; make sure your analytics tool doesn't strip them, and give it a week.
7. Repeat for each product you'd want a stranger to see, ideally in adjacent cells.

Tips#

• Pick a spot near the Throne for visibility. The wall opens centred, so the rings around the Throne get the most eyes and the most evictions. Read How to pick a good square before choosing.
• Kiss your icon every couple of months. An icon nobody has kissed for 90 days fades to grayscale. Kissing is free and public; put it next to your other quarterly chores.
• Keep the favicon current. Rebrand? The wall shows whatever your site serves. If the icon changes, press the recheck button on your square.
• Buy the analytics unlock if you're serious about the product. $5 once for daily charts on a channel you'll otherwise judge on gut feel is cheap. Skip it for the free tool nobody uses.
• Save the deed URL like a domain login. It's the only way to open the deed page, buy analytics, or prove the square is yours.
• Watch the boards. The side panel has leaderboards (most clicked, most kissed). Being on one is a small thing you can screenshot.

What it won't do#

• It won't move your search rankings. The wall is a WebGL canvas and clicks are 302 redirects; there is no backlink and no link equity. If you're buying "SEO placements", this isn't one.
• It won't guarantee traffic or signups. You get counted clicks; how many depends on the wall's audience and your icon. Nobody at Square Town quotes numbers.
• It won't protect your spot. Anyone can evict a $1 square for $2. The next evictor pays $4. Cheap squares are cheap to take.
• It won't send you an email when something happens. No accounts, so no notifications. Evictions show in the live feed and on the wall.
• It won't take a logo, a tagline or a size upgrade. Favicon and URL only. Every square is 1×1.

FAQ#

Is a $1 square worth it for a SaaS?#

At $1 one-time, the question is mostly whether you'll spend two minutes on it. You get a permanent placement, a counted UTM-tagged click-through, and free totals for views, clicks and kisses. If it produces one trial signup ever, it paid for itself several times.

Can I track Square Town traffic in Google Analytics or Plausible?#

Yes. Outbound clicks are 302-redirected to your URL with utm_source=square.pov.town&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=square added, so they show up as a referral/campaign row in any analytics tool that reads UTMs.

Is there a bigger placement than one square?#

Only the Throne: the 4×4 gold tile in the centre, one owner, intro price $100, doubling with every eviction. Everything else is 1×1 at $1. There are no featured slots or subscriptions.

Can I put several products on the wall?#

Yes — one square per URL, $1 each. Buy adjacent cells and they form a block. Each has its own deed and stats.

What does the $5 analytics unlock actually add?#

Per-day view and click charts on that square's deed page, forever. Without it you still see lifetime totals for views, clicks and kisses for free.

Does Square Town give my SaaS a backlink?#

No. Clicks are counted redirects through /go/:id and the wall is a canvas element, so there is no link equity or ranking benefit. The value is visibility, the click-through and the stats.

What if a competitor evicts me?#

They pay double what you paid; the eviction is announced in the live feed. You can evict them back for double what they paid ($4 for a square you bought at $1) — or take another cell for $1. The economics are covered in The economics of eviction.