Is Bali still a good idea for indie hackers?

Why are indie hackers questioning Bali when it keeps getting busier?

Bali is currently busier than ever, and that popularity is exactly what has made the indie-hacker decision less obvious.

The latest monthly release from Bali’s statistics agency, BPS, counted 605,013 direct foreign arrivals in a single month, up 4.63% from the previous month. That follows 6.95 million direct foreign arrivals in 2025, itself a 9.72% increase from the year before.

Once domestic visitors are included, Bali’s provincial government counted 16.3 million tourist visits during 2025. Bali has roughly 4.5 million residents, so the island received close to four tourist visits for every person living there.

That scale has changed places such as Canggu. The cafés, coworking spaces, gyms, restaurants and international community that attracted remote founders have become much better. Getting around has become much worse.

Badung’s local government now openly describes Canggu congestion as an acute infrastructure problem. It recently started building a 4.7-kilometer alternative route linking Canggu and Berawa toward Umalas, Seminyak and western Denpasar, while the transport department has been holding dedicated meetings with police about Canggu traffic.

So the old Bali pitch has aged. Cheap villas and empty roads are harder to find around the places where indie hackers actually congregate. In exchange, founders now get a much more developed place to live and work.

The question today is whether that trade is still worth making.

What still makes Bali good for indie hackers today?

Bali is still one of the easiest places in Asia for an indie hacker to arrive alone and quickly build a good life around an online business.

The work infrastructure is far more professional these days. BWork Canggu offers 24/7 coworking, focus rooms with wired internet, meeting rooms, lockers, showers, podcast facilities, a pool and yoga. Tropical Nomad combines coworking with furnished accommodation. Similar businesses have appeared in Uluwatu, Pererenan and other areas.

The social side is equally important. In many cities, a solo founder has to actively search for people who understand SaaS, SEO, AI tools, bootstrapping or running a small internet company. Around Canggu, those people are unusually easy to find.

Then there is everything around the workday. Surfing before work, good gyms, inexpensive services, cafés designed around laptops, restaurants open all day and an international population make it easy to create a comfortable routine without spending much time on basic logistics.

For a founder whose customers and company are already abroad, Bali solves a very specific problem well: where can they spend most of the year working online without making everyday life boring or difficult?

That remains a strong reason to move there.

Can indie hackers legally work remotely from Bali now?

Yes. Indonesia currently has a visa specifically designed for people living in the country while working for a company abroad, which makes Bali much cleaner legally than it used to be for remote workers.

Indonesia’s E33G remote-worker visa allows a foreigner to stay for one year and does not require an Indonesian sponsor. The immigration authority explicitly describes it as a visa for someone living in Indonesia while carrying out duties for a company established outside Indonesia.

The requirements are quite specific. Applicants need evidence of at least US$60,000 in annual salary or income, a work agreement with a company established outside Indonesia and recent bank statements showing at least US$2,000. The government fee for the one-year permit is IDR 7 million.

For an established indie hacker with a foreign company and properly documented income, that is a much cleaner setup than repeatedly stretching tourist or business-visit visas.

There is one catch for founders: the official requirement refers to a work agreement with a foreign company. A founder who owns a company and pays themselves a normal salary can potentially fit that structure much more naturally than someone who lives entirely from irregular dividends, freelance invoices or savings.

That distinction makes the E33G excellent for some indie hackers and surprisingly awkward for others.

What if an indie hacker makes less than US$60,000 a year?

Bali becomes much less convenient for early-stage indie hackers because the dedicated remote-worker visa currently expects roughly US$5,000 a month in documented annual income.

That excludes plenty of people who fit the traditional indie-hacker profile.

Someone might have US$50,000 saved and want a cheap year to build a product from zero. Another founder might have US$2,000 in MRR and enough runway to keep going for two years. Neither situation automatically satisfies the E33G income requirement.

Indonesia still offers visit visas for tourism and business visits, but those categories serve different purposes. They are less convincing as the foundation for a long-term plan to live in Bali and work every day.

Thailand offers an interesting contrast. Its current Destination Thailand Visa explicitly includes digital nomads, remote workers and freelancers. It requires financial evidence of at least THB 500,000, rather than a US$60,000 annual-income threshold, and allows stays of up to 180 days per entry under a five-year multiple-entry visa.

That makes Bali’s visa situation better than it was historically while leaving a strange gap at the bottom of the market.

A founder already making serious money can now live in Bali quite cleanly. Someone moving there precisely because their startup makes almost nothing has fewer obvious options.

Is setting up a small SaaS company in Bali actually realistic?

For most indie hackers, creating the actual SaaS company in Indonesia still makes little sense because the foreign-company rules operate at a completely different scale from a bootstrapped software business.

A foreign-owned Indonesian limited company normally uses the PT PMA structure. Under the current Ministry of Investment rules, a foreign-investment project generally needs planned investment exceeding IDR 10 billion, excluding land and buildings, for each relevant five-digit business classification and project location.

The minimum issued and paid-up capital for a PT PMA is now IDR 2.5 billion per company unless another rule applies.

That threshold was reduced under the newer regulations, but IDR 2.5 billion remains huge for the type of company an indie hacker might start with a laptop, a domain name and US$200 of software subscriptions.

The investor-visa route reinforces the same point. Immigration currently requires an E28A applicant to prove ownership of at least IDR 10 billion of shares in the sponsoring company. A director or commissioner holding less than that is told to use the appropriate work-visa category instead.

Indonesia has built these rules around foreign investment large enough to matter locally. A one-person SaaS doing US$8,000 MRR does not fit that idea particularly well.

Current requirement	Indonesian foreign-owned company
General planned investment	More than IDR 10B per relevant business classification/project location
Minimum issued/paid-up PT PMA capital	IDR 2.5B
Shares required for E28A investor visa	IDR 10B
Typical bootstrapped SaaS capital need	Usually tiny by comparison

Would an Indonesian company make a global SaaS harder to run?

Yes. An Indonesian company can currently make payments noticeably harder for a global SaaS founder, and Stripe alone is enough to show the problem.

Stripe still lists Indonesia as a Preview market. Its current support documentation says Indonesian Stripe accounts can accept Indonesian bank-transfer payments in IDR, while other payment methods remain unsupported.

More importantly for SaaS founders, Stripe says Indonesian accounts cannot process cross-border or international transactions. Stripe itself suggests opening an account in another supported country when international payments are required.

Imagine selling a US$29 subscription to customers in California, London, Toronto and Sydney. International card processing is basic infrastructure for that business. A payment account designed around domestic Indonesian bank transfers solves the wrong problem.

Indonesia’s headline corporate income-tax rate is also currently 22%, although smaller businesses can receive different treatment depending on their circumstances.

None of that makes an Indonesian company unusable. A business focused on Indonesian customers may have good reasons to establish locally.

A bootstrapped SaaS selling worldwide usually has the opposite profile. It needs easy international payments, multicurrency banking and a company structure that does not require billions of rupiah in capital.

For that founder, incorporating abroad is usually the more natural starting point.

Can you keep a foreign company and live in Bali long term?

You can keep a foreign company while living in Bali, but staying long enough can bring both the founder and the company into the Indonesian tax conversation.

For the founder personally, the well-known threshold is 183 days. Under Indonesian rules, someone can become tax resident by being present for more than 183 days in a twelve-month period. Residence and an intention to reside in Indonesia can also matter, so counting days is not the whole test.

Indonesian tax residents are generally taxed on worldwide income, subject to tax treaties and some special rules for qualifying foreign workers. Current personal income-tax rates rise progressively to 35% on taxable income above IDR 5 billion.

The foreign company creates another issue that solo founders sometimes miss.

Indonesia can treat a company as tax resident when its place of management is in Indonesia. The tax rules specifically look at facts such as where the company is controlled, where strategic decisions are made and where its managers live. A foreign company can also create an Indonesian permanent establishment in certain situations.

For a large US company with one employee temporarily sitting in Bali, those tests may lead to one answer. A one-person company where the shareholder, director, salesperson and only decision-maker all live permanently in Bali deserves much more attention.

Tax treaties can change the outcome considerably, so there is no universal rule saying that spending 184 days in Bali suddenly makes every Delaware company Indonesian.

Still, the “my company is foreign, therefore Indonesia cannot tax anything” approach is too casual for someone planning to settle there.

If the business is making meaningful money, we would check this before the move rather than after the first Indonesian tax year.

Is Bali still cheap enough for bootstrapped founders?

Bali is still affordable for foreign founders, but central Canggu is currently much closer to a premium remote-work destination than the ultra-cheap backpacker base people remember from old blog posts.

Current published prices make that fairly clear.

BWork charges IDR 3.85 million for a one-month unlimited coworking membership in Canggu. Tropical Nomad currently lists Canggu coliving packages with dedicated coworking access from IDR 15.5 million to IDR 21.6 million per month.

Those are packaged, foreigner-oriented prices. Long leases outside the hottest neighborhoods can be considerably cheaper, so they should not be mistaken for the minimum cost of living in Bali.

They are useful for another reason: they show what someone can now spend for an extremely easy setup. A new arrival can pay one provider, get a furnished room and a proper desk, and start working almost immediately.

For an indie hacker making US$10,000 or US$20,000 a month, Bali can still feel inexpensive because services, food, sport and daily life remain much cheaper than in many Western technology hubs.

For a founder surviving on savings, the comparison looks different. Vietnam, parts of Thailand and less fashionable parts of Indonesia can beat Canggu easily on raw burn rate.

So we would no longer pick Bali because it is the cheapest place to bootstrap. We would pick it when the convenience, community and lifestyle justify spending a little more.

Is Canggu still the best place in Bali for indie hackers?

Canggu is still the easiest place in Bali to meet other indie hackers, but choosing the wrong part of Canggu can now make everyday life unnecessarily painful.

Traffic has become serious enough that the Badung government is spending more than IDR 2.9 trillion on major road projects aimed partly at congested tourism areas. Its transport department recently held another dedicated coordination meeting with police about congestion around Canggu.

More recently, the Badung regent described traffic in Canggu and Tibubeneng as acute and said blocked mobility risks hurting the area itself. The government is pushing a 4.7-kilometer alternative route through Canggu, Berawa and surrounding neighborhoods.

That is stronger evidence than another tourist complaining on Reddit that Canggu traffic is bad. The local government is redesigning infrastructure around the problem.

At the same time, Canggu still has the densest founder infrastructure we found in Bali. The largest startup and tech community holds events there, BWork operates there, Tropical Nomad is there and a large part of the island’s remote-worker social life remains concentrated around Canggu, Berawa and nearby Pererenan.

These days, the smart Canggu strategy is to shrink your daily radius. Living five minutes from your coworking space, gym and regular restaurants can matter more than getting a nicer villa several kilometers away.

Founders who care less about constant networking now have credible alternatives. Uluwatu has developed its own coworking scene. Sanur is calmer and better connected to healthcare and family infrastructure. Ubud has a large international remote-work community with a very different atmosphere.

Bali base	Best fit	Main downside
Canggu / Berawa	Maximum founder and remote-worker density	Traffic, crowds, higher prices
Pererenan	Near Canggu with a slightly calmer feel	Rapidly becoming busier too
Uluwatu	Surf, lifestyle, growing coworking scene	More spread out
Sanur	Calm daily life, families, healthcare	Smaller indie-hacker scene
Ubud	International community, nature, slower pace	Far from the beach and southern Bali hubs

Is Bali’s founder community actually useful?

Yes. Bali currently has a real tech and SaaS community, although founders should not confuse that community with a deep startup economy.

The Bali Start-ups and Tech Community now has about 2,680 members on Meetup and 54 recorded past events. Its latest listed programming includes AI sessions and a Canggu startup networking night that drew 82 attendees.

The group even runs a separate community for post-revenue SaaS founders. That is a pretty good clue about who is actually there. Bali has enough people running real online businesses to support smaller groups beyond generic “digital nomad” networking.

Still, the underlying startup ecosystem is small.

StartupBlink currently ranks the Denpasar ecosystem, which includes Bali, #607 globally and #5 in Indonesia. It identifies only 29 ranked startups there. Jakarta sits at #33 globally with more than 1,000 startups in the same database.

So Bali works best when we want peers rather than an entire technology economy around us.

A bootstrapped founder may only need ten other good founders, a designer, a developer and someone who understands paid acquisition. Bali can provide that surprisingly well.

A startup looking for hundreds of engineers, enterprise customers, growth-stage investors and specialist executives will hit the limits much faster.

That is why Bali can feel like a major indie-hacker hub while barely registering in global startup rankings. Indie hackers and venture-backed startups need different things from a city.

Can you run a serious online business from Bali every day?

Yes. Bali’s internet and coworking infrastructure is now good enough for normal SaaS development, calls, content, design and online sales, especially in the main remote-work neighborhoods.

Professional spaces have moved well beyond café Wi-Fi. BWork, for example, currently advertises 24/7 coworking, dedicated focus rooms and LAN connections for calls and studio work. Several operators offer private offices and meeting rooms as well.

Connectivity still deserves some redundancy. Bali has experienced occasional major power and infrastructure disruptions, including an island-wide electricity failure affecting around 1.8 million PLN customers in 2025. The network was restored the same day, but anyone running a business where one missed call or deployment matters should have mobile data and backup power.

The practical problem these days is more likely to be physical mobility than internet access.

If your villa, workspace and gym sit several congested roads apart, a technically excellent setup can still waste hours every week. If everything is close together, running a SaaS from Bali can feel completely ordinary.

We would worry much more about visa structure, taxes and location choice than whether Bali has enough Wi-Fi to run a software company.

Is Bali practical if your customers are in Europe or the US?

Bali works well for Asia, reasonably well for Europe and badly for founders who need to spend the whole US workday on live calls.

Bali uses UTC+8. That gives founders useful overlap with Singapore, Hong Kong, China and much of Australia. Europe is several hours behind, which can actually create a pleasant schedule: build during the Bali morning and early afternoon, then take European calls later in the day.

The United States is harder. New York is roughly half a day behind Bali, depending on daylight saving, and the US West Coast is farther again. A founder who personally does US sales calls throughout the American afternoon can end up working deep into the Bali night.

The business model matters more here than the customer’s country.

An asynchronous SaaS with self-serve onboarding can have 80% of its customers in America and work perfectly from Bali. A founder-led enterprise SaaS with fifteen US demos every week may hate the same location.

Physical connectivity is much better. In the latest monthly BPS transport data, 650,838 international passengers departed Bali in one month, up almost 5% from the previous month. Ngurah Rai connects directly with major Asian, Australian and Middle Eastern hubs, making Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Australia and onward long-haul travel relatively straightforward.

For an internet business designed around asynchronous work, Bali’s location remains very usable. For a business built around live US business hours, the timezone can outweigh most of the lifestyle benefits.

Are Bali authorities getting stricter with foreign founders?

Yes. Bali has lately become noticeably more serious about foreign immigration and business enforcement, so old advice about simply operating in a grey area looks increasingly outdated.

The freshest example is immigration’s Dharma Dewata enforcement program. In its latest Canggu operation, immigration officers directly inspected foreign nationals in the area and detained five people for further examination.

The broader campaign is much bigger than one evening. Immigration says its first enforcement phase secured 62 problematic foreigners across areas including Canggu, Ubud, Tabanan, Singaraja and Nusa Penida. A second phase secured another 66, with stay-permit misuse, overstays and public-order or reporting violations among the main issues.

Business rules are tightening too.

Bali has now blocked new foreign-investment applications through the OSS licensing system in 18 low- and medium-low-risk business categories. The restricted activities include cafés, some accommodation, real estate, vehicle rental, clothing retail, fitness centers and management consulting.

The provincial government says foreign investors had been using easier licensing categories to enter businesses normally occupied by local small companies.

Software is not among those 18 restricted categories, which is an important distinction for indie hackers. Nobody should read the policy as Bali banning foreign technology founders.

The direction is still clear. Authorities currently want foreigners to use visas and business structures that match what they are actually doing.

For someone quietly running a foreign SaaS under the correct remote-work status, that should be manageable. For someone building a Bali business around visa workarounds, nominee arrangements or licenses intended for something else, the risk has gone up.

Is Bali a better indie-hacker base than Bangkok or Singapore?

Bali can still beat Bangkok and Singapore for a lifestyle-focused indie hacker, while Bangkok currently has the easier remote-worker visa and Singapore has the much stronger business ecosystem.

StartupBlink’s latest rankings show just how different these places are. Singapore City ranks #10 globally, Jakarta #33, Bangkok #76 and Denpasar #607.

Singapore is the obvious choice among the three when the founder cares about investors, regional headquarters, banking, enterprise customers and a deep technology network. For a bootstrapped founder with no need for any of those things, much of that advantage can go unused.

Bangkok competes with Bali more directly. It has a much larger city economy, excellent hospitals, stronger public infrastructure, a large technology scene and the current DTV, which was explicitly created for digital nomads, remote workers and freelancers. Its five-year validity and 180-day stays make it unusually attractive.

Bali still has a different kind of density. A much larger percentage of the foreigners around Canggu deliberately chose the area because they can work from anywhere. That produces an unusual concentration of small founders, remote workers, creators and online-business people around everyday life.

So the better choice depends on what the founder is missing.

Base	Where it currently wins	Where it loses
Bali	Founder social life, surf, nature, remote-work lifestyle	Traffic, weaker corporate setup, stricter E33G income test
Bangkok	City convenience, healthcare, infrastructure, DTV flexibility	Less of the island/community lifestyle
Singapore	Company setup, capital, banking, enterprise network	Cost and less appeal as a low-burn lifestyle base

So, is Bali still a good idea for indie hackers?

Yes for living, mostly no for incorporating. Bali is still a very good base for the right indie hacker today, but the founder who benefits most has changed.

The strongest Bali profile now is someone who already has a foreign company, meaningful recurring revenue and customers who do not require constant live US-hours collaboration.

That founder gets a lot from Bali. Professional coworking is everywhere around the main hubs. There are enough SaaS and tech founders to build a useful network. International connectivity is strong. Daily life can still be inexpensive relative to Western tech cities, and sport, food and social life are unusually easy to combine with remote work.

The legal side has also improved. There is finally a dedicated remote-worker visa instead of relying entirely on categories designed for visitors.

But Bali has become a weaker proposition for the stereotypical broke indie hacker moving abroad to build from zero. As seen above, the E33G asks for US$60,000 in annual income. Canggu is more expensive and much more congested than it used to be. Enforcement around visas and foreign businesses has recently become more visible.

We are even more negative on incorporating the company locally.

The current PT PMA capital and investment rules are oversized for a tiny bootstrapped SaaS. Stripe Indonesia still does not support international transactions. A long-term Bali resident also has to think seriously about Indonesian personal tax residence and, in some cases, where their foreign company is actually managed.

Trying to force the company itself into Indonesia therefore creates problems that Bali does not need to solve.

Our preferred setup would usually be a foreign company chosen for the actual business, a proper Indonesian visa chosen for the founder, and tax advice once Bali becomes a real long-term home.

With that structure, Bali still deserves its reputation. It has lost some of the cheap, improvised, anything-goes appeal that made it famous among early digital nomads, while gaining much better coworking, community and everyday infrastructure.

For an indie hacker already making money, we would still seriously consider living there.

For setting up the company itself, we would usually look somewhere else.