How dead is indie hacking now?

Is indie hacking actually dying, or are more people doing it?

Indie hacking is currently attracting more solo founders than ever, so participation itself is still growing.

Stripe Atlas gives us one of the cleanest recent measures. Solo founders accounted for 63% of the C corporations formed through Atlas in its latest quarterly analysis, the highest share Stripe had recorded. Stripe also says the number of solopreneurs earning more than $100,000 a year has increased by roughly a third since 2022.

That fits what we can see elsewhere. AI coding tools have lowered the technical barrier to launching software, payments and hosting are easier to set up, and a founder can now automate work that previously required several people. GitHub added more than 36 million developers during 2025 alone and passed 180 million developers globally. Nearly 80% of new GitHub developers used Copilot during their first week.

So if “dead” means people have stopped trying to build small independent software businesses, the answer is clearly no. There are more people capable of doing it, and more people are forming companies alone.

The problem appears later, when we ask how many of those projects actually become good businesses.

Why does indie hacking feel so much worse now?

Indie hacking feels worse now because the average solo founder has weakened while the best solo founders have pulled much further ahead.

Stripe found that median six-month revenue among solo-founded Atlas startups fell 23% year over year. Revenue for the top 10%, meanwhile, increased 19%.

The longer comparison is even more revealing. Four years earlier, a top-decile solo founder made roughly 34 times as much revenue as the median solo founder during the first six months. That gap later reached 61 times.

This explains a lot of the confusion around indie hacking these days. Someone following a few successful founders sees businesses reaching $50,000, $100,000 or even more in monthly revenue and concludes that the opportunity has never looked better. Someone spending time in launch communities sees hundreds of AI tools earning almost nothing and reaches the opposite conclusion.

Both groups are looking at real evidence.

We are seeing a more unequal market. Lower development costs have allowed many more people to enter, while attention, customer trust and good distribution remain scarce. More products are competing for roughly the same search results, social feeds, launch platforms and business budgets.

The middle is where indie hacking looks weakest right now.

Are solo founders struggling because all startups are struggling?

Solo founders appear to be under more pressure than the broader startup market, which has recently improved.

This comparison is useful because Stripe can observe both populations inside the same Atlas ecosystem. Among all Atlas startups incorporated in 2025, median revenue during the first six months rose 39% compared with the previous cohort. At the 90th percentile, revenue increased 52%.

More companies also reached $100,000 in revenue quickly. The number hitting that mark within six months increased 56%, and the average company reaching it did so in 108 days rather than 121.

Solo founders moved differently. Their median six-month revenue fell 23%, even while their top decile improved.

Atlas is not the whole startup market, and its founder mix changes over time. Still, the divergence is hard to dismiss. The general environment for starting and monetizing software has improved, yet the typical solo founder has not captured that improvement.

That points toward a competition problem more than a simple economic slowdown.

Recent Stripe Atlas measure	Broader startup cohort	Solo-founder cohort
Median early revenue	+39% YoY	-23% YoY
Top-end early revenue	90th percentile +52%	Top decile +19%
Solo company formation	—	Record-high share
What we learn	Young startups are monetizing faster	Solo outcomes are becoming much more uneven

How bad are the odds for a typical indie project today?

For a typical indie project today, the odds of reaching serious revenue are still ugly.

TrustMRR gives us a useful live view because it aggregates verified payment data rather than founder screenshots. Its current database contains roughly $1.57 billion of verified revenue across about 55 million transactions.

The distribution is extremely bottom-heavy. About 68% of the projects tracked have generated less than $1,000 in total verified revenue. Another 17% sit between $1,000 and $10,000. Only around 5% have crossed $100,000, and roughly 1% have passed $1 million.

TrustMRR is self-selected, projects have different ages, and many founders never connect their revenue at all, so these percentages are not universal survival rates. But the shape is still useful: even a database built around founders who care enough about revenue transparency to verify their numbers contains far more tiny projects than large businesses.

ChartMogul reaches a similar conclusion from professional SaaS data. Among software companies that eventually reach $1 million ARR, only 3.3% get there within one year. Around 13.4% manage it within three years and 25.1% within five.

That makes the viral “$1M ARR in six months” stories mathematically unusual. They happen, and lately some AI companies have reached those milestones incredibly quickly, but they are terrible benchmarks for the typical indie founder.

Verified revenue on TrustMRR	Share of tracked projects
$0–$1K	68.3%
$1K–$10K	16.7%
$10K–$100K	10.0%
$100K–$1M	4.0%
$1M+	1.0%

Are solo founders still building million-dollar businesses?

Yes. Solo founders are still building seven-figure annual revenue businesses right now, including businesses created well after the original indie-hacker boom.

Zigpoll is one of the clearest recent examples. Founder Jason Zigelbaum told Indie Hackers that he runs the company without a cofounder, funding or sales team. Zigpoll started this year at roughly $1.03 million ARR and reached around $125,000 MRR during the first half, equivalent to a $1.5 million annual run rate. Zigelbaum said revenue had increased about 44% over those six months.

Pieter Levels recently reported roughly $105,000 a month of revenue from Photo AI, with around $80,000 a month of profit. The profit number is especially interesting because it shows what extreme operating leverage can look like when a software business remains tiny organizationally.

Then there is Shift, which gives us a much less fashionable example. Jason McCreary has spent a decade building a tool that upgrades Laravel applications. In a recent Indie Hackers interview, he reported more than $50,000 MRR, around $100 a month of basic overhead, no employees and no investors. Shift has processed more than 175,000 upgrades.

These are founder-reported figures, not audited accounts. But the examples are recent, substantial and very different from one another. One sells customer-feedback software, one sells an AI photography product and one automates Laravel maintenance.

There is clearly no hard economic ceiling preventing a solo software founder from reaching $500,000, $1 million or even more in annual revenue today.

Business	Founder	Recently reported scale	Business type
Zigpoll	Jason Zigelbaum	~$125K MRR	Ecommerce/customer feedback SaaS
Photo AI	Pieter Levels	~$105K monthly revenue	Consumer AI
Shift	Jason McCreary	$50K+ MRR	Developer SaaS

Is small SaaS harder to grow today?

Small SaaS is harder to grow through new customer acquisition today than it was a few years ago.

ChartMogul's latest go-to-market research shows how sharp the change has been. For SaaS companies below $1 million ARR, new-business ARR growth has dropped 34 percentage points since early 2022. The median company in that group was recently seeing new-business ARR fall 24% year over year.

Even the strong companies slowed. Top performers below $1 million ARR went from 116% new-business growth to 59%.

This is close to the economic territory in which most serious indie SaaS businesses operate, so the slowdown is highly relevant. Founders can ship much faster now, but finding the next customer has become tougher.

We should also separate this from SaaS simply becoming a bad business. Existing customers can still make the economics attractive. ChartMogul has found SaaS companies relying more heavily on expansion revenue and reactivation as acquiring completely new customers gets harder.

For an indie founder, that shifts the priority. A product with customers who stay, upgrade and recommend it has become far more attractive than something that constantly needs another burst of cheap traffic.

Has AI made indie hacking easier or more crowded?

AI has made indie hacking dramatically easier to execute and much more crowded at the same time.

The reduction in production cost is real. GitHub recorded more than 36 million new developers in one year, nearly one billion commits and more than 230 new repositories created every minute. Its latest Octoverse research also found that close to 80% of new developers use Copilot within their first week.

Stack Overflow's latest completed survey found that 84% of developers use or plan to use AI tools. Whatever we think about code quality, that is already enough adoption to change the supply side of software creation.

A founder can now produce a landing page, database structure, billing integration, Chrome extension, mobile prototype or basic SaaS interface far faster than a few years ago. Nontechnical founders can also get much further before needing an engineer.

And then competition bites: the same tools are available to everyone else.

A decent interface is easy to reproduce. Common integrations are easy to add. A competitor can inspect an interesting product on Monday and have something superficially similar online by Friday. Having the ability to write software therefore creates less separation than it used to.

The durable parts of an indie business increasingly sit outside the raw code: customer relationships, proprietary data, integrations, domain knowledge, workflow depth, reputation, search authority, community and distribution.

AI has given founders tremendous leverage. It has also removed a lot of the protection that came from simply being able to build.

Are AI-native solo startups actually making more money?

AI-native solo startups are currently outperforming other solo startups by a wide margin in Stripe's data.

Stripe studied thousands of solo-founded companies with at least two years of revenue history and found that AI-native solo startups generated almost twice as much revenue as other solo startups by the two-year mark.

That result could easily have been caused by a few absurd AI winners dragging up the average, so Stripe checked the distribution. The gap appeared broadly from around the 50th to the 95th percentile. At the 99th percentile, AI-native and non-AI companies were much closer.

Top-decile solo founders were also about twice as likely as median solo founders to have built an AI-native company.

So the lazy “GPT wrappers are dead” take misses the point. Plenty of disposable AI products are being launched, but the better AI businesses are clearly producing real revenue. The advantage is broad enough that two or three viral exceptions cannot explain it.

AI therefore looks strongest when it changes what the product can actually do or dramatically improves the economics of solving a useful problem. Adding a chat box to a generic SaaS idea has become very easy. Building something people repeatedly pay for remains hard.

Is distribution now harder than building the product?

Distribution is now the harder part of indie hacking for most founders because software production has become cheap and abundant.

Stripe's top solo founders show what strong distribution looks like in practice. During their first month, top-decile solo founders sold into an average of 10 countries, compared with only three for median solo founders. By month 24, they were selling into an average of 40 non-US countries versus six for the median group.

Their revenue also looked radically more international. About 51% of revenue at top solo-founded startups came from international sales, compared with just 2% for median founders.

Those figures do not mean every founder needs to translate a product into 20 languages. Many of the founders Stripe classifies as international are based outside the United States and sell into the US. The deeper point is that their products find buyers well beyond the founder's immediate network.

We can see the same bottleneck in ChartMogul's data. Early-stage SaaS companies have suffered a major slowdown in new-business growth even while software has become much faster to create.

For years, indie-hacker advice spent huge amounts of time on frameworks, programming languages, databases and launch speed. Those choices still matter, but lately they rarely decide who wins.

Getting in front of the right customers repeatedly does.

Is Product Hunt still a good way to launch an indie project?

Product Hunt can still give an indie project a burst of attention, but relying on it as your main distribution channel now looks weak.

The crowding has become extreme. Hunted.Space, which tracks Product Hunt submissions, currently counts more than 136,000 launches this year. There were roughly 82,700 during all of last year and around 43,000 the year before that.

The percentage getting featured has moved in the opposite direction. Hunted.Space calculates a feature rate of about 17% two years ago, 6% last year and roughly 4% currently.

Several individual days this year have seen more than 1,000 products submitted. The busiest one recorded 1,323 launches, of which 83 were featured.

Those numbers come from a third-party Product Hunt tracker, and Product Hunt's curation rules have changed, so the feature-rate decline is not a measure of product quality. For a founder deciding where to spend launch energy, the takeaway is simpler: there is far more competition for limited front-page attention.

Product Hunt remains useful when a launch concentrates demand that already exists. It can bring users, backlinks, feedback and credibility. The weak strategy is expecting Product Hunt itself to manufacture a durable acquisition channel for an unknown product.

That distinction has become much more important lately.

Does build in public still work for indie hackers?

Build in public still helps indie hackers, but a large founder audience is clearly optional for building a large business.

TrustMRR's current verified dataset lets us test this rather than relying on famous founder accounts. Across nearly 5,000 founders with usable data, the correlation between X followers and revenue is only 0.26. That is positive, but weak enough that follower count explains surprisingly little of the difference between small and large businesses.

The database currently includes several companies with more than $1 million of verified revenue whose listed founders have fewer than 100 X followers.

TrustMRR also tracks founders whose audience and revenue both changed over time. Revenue grew faster than follower counts in roughly 75% of those cases.

That does not make audiences useless. An audience of 100,000 relevant buyers is enormously valuable. Pieter Levels can launch something into an existing distribution machine that most founders do not have. Jason McCreary also credits early exposure from Laravel creator Taylor Otwell with helping Shift get its first traction.

The useful distinction is between having attention and having useful attention. Ten thousand followers who also build indie products may provide encouragement, comments and launch-day upvotes. A few hundred people who actually control the budget for the problem you solve can be worth much more.

These days, distribution can come from search, integrations, marketplaces, direct sales, affiliates, a niche community, an existing product, a newsletter or word of mouth. “Build an audience” became popular because it was one visible way to distribute. It was never the only one.

Are boring B2B products better indie businesses than consumer apps?

Boring B2B currently has better economics for solo founders than broad consumer apps.

Stripe found that its top solo founders were nearly 30% more likely than median solo founders to build B2B products. The revenue difference was much larger than that modest preference might suggest.

By month 24, the median solo B2B founder was generating more than four times the revenue of the median solo B2C founder. Among top-decile founders, B2B companies generated almost twice as much as their B2C peers.

Stripe also checked whether fundraising explained the difference. B2B remained ahead when it looked only at bootstrapped startups.

Recent success stories fit the pattern. Zigpoll reached seven-figure ARR by helping ecommerce brands understand customers. Shift earns more than $50,000 a month solving Laravel upgrades. Neither product needs millions of users because each customer is connected to a business problem with clear economic value.

A consumer founder charging $10 a month needs 5,000 paying customers to reach $50,000 MRR. A B2B founder charging $500 needs 100. At $2,000 a month, the same revenue requires 25 customers.

Consumer products can still become much larger. Photo AI shows that a solo founder can make consumer software work at scale. But for someone trying to maximize the probability of building a profitable independent business, the current evidence favors narrow B2B problems.

Can a bootstrapped SaaS still reach $1 million ARR without VC?

A strong bootstrapped SaaS can still reach $1 million ARR without VC on a surprisingly competitive timeline.

ChartMogul and Dealroom compared more than 2,500 SaaS businesses and found that top-quartile bootstrapped companies reached $1 million ARR in roughly two years. That was only around four months slower than top-quartile VC-backed businesses.

The funding advantage becomes clearer later. Up to around $500,000 ARR, ChartMogul found relatively little difference between bootstrapped and venture-backed companies. Beyond that point, funded companies tend to pull away as they spend more aggressively on hiring, sales and marketing.

The median journey takes longer. Among companies that eventually cross $1 million ARR, ChartMogul says the usual path takes around two to five years. Only 3.3% manage it inside twelve months.

That baseline is useful because indie-hacker social media badly compresses our sense of time. A founder reaching $20,000 MRR after two years can feel slow next to a viral post about an AI startup reaching $1 million ARR in a few months. In the real SaaS distribution, $20,000 MRR after two years can represent excellent progress.

VC still changes how quickly a company can attack a giant market. For reaching a meaningful, profitable scale, the current data gives bootstrappers plenty of room.

Does launching lots of tiny projects still work?

Launching lots of tiny projects still makes sense for discovery, but successful indie businesses usually need years of compounding after one experiment works.

Pieter Levels is probably the most famous example of the high-volume launch strategy, and his own recently updated project archive is useful because it shows the failures too. He currently classifies only nine projects as long-term successes. Nineteen are explicitly marked as failures, another eleven made money without becoming durable successes, and dozens of others were experiments or projects without a profit goal.

Levels himself describes the archive as evidence of the “incredibly high failure rate” of his projects.

The lesson is easy to distort. His career supports launching quickly because experimentation helps find outliers. It gives much less support to endlessly abandoning working businesses so you can launch another weekend project.

TrustMRR's broader data backs up the importance of time. Across more than 6,000 businesses, startup age has a 0.48 correlation with total revenue. That is considerably stronger than the 0.26 relationship it currently finds between founder X followers and revenue.

Shift gives us the practical version of that result. Its first version took about 60 hours to build, but the business we see now comes after ten years of working inside the Laravel ecosystem, improving pricing, adding related products and earning customer trust.

So the useful indie-hacker loop is still fast experimentation followed by concentration. Once a project shows real pull, persistence becomes more valuable than another launch.

Can indie hackers still sell their businesses for real money?

Profitable indie SaaS businesses are still sellable today, and buyers are paying real money for recurring revenue.

Flippa's latest full-year marketplace data showed total transaction value increasing 36%, while six-figure-and-above transactions increased 30%. SaaS transaction volume jumped 73.5%.

The pricing data is more useful than the volume alone. SaaS companies sold on Flippa at an average of roughly 2.7 times annual profit, with the top quartile reaching about 5.8 times. Businesses selling for more than $1 million averaged around 2.9 times profit, with the top quartile at 5.4 times.

Those are marketplace figures, not universal SaaS multiples. Founder dependence, growth rates and revenue quality can move individual deals enormously.

Still, they show that an indie founder can create a meaningful financial asset without ever building a venture-scale startup. A SaaS business producing $300,000 of clean annual profit can plausibly be worth well into seven figures when the revenue is recurring, customers stay and the business can survive without the founder doing everything manually.

Buyers have become more selective around generic content and easily copied businesses. Flippa's own data shows capital moving toward assets with recurring revenue and stronger durability.

For indie hackers building for cash flow, that is a healthy market.

What actually works for indie hackers now?

The indie hackers winning now tend to combine a narrow painful problem, strong retention, a repeatable distribution channel and enough time for those advantages to compound.

Stripe's strongest solo founders provide a useful profile. They are more likely to build B2B products, much more likely to sell globally, and far better at keeping their earliest customers.

Retention may be the most revealing difference. Nearly 30% of first-month customers at top-decile solo startups returned during the following month, compared with only 8% for middle-decile startups. By the start of the second year, those original customers at top performers were spending 47% more than when they first joined.

That is a much better description of a healthy indie business than launch-day upvotes.

The same pattern shows up in the recent founder examples we reviewed. Zigpoll spent roughly two years struggling for traction before Jason Zigelbaum focused much harder on ecommerce. Shift stayed attached to one developer ecosystem for a decade. Photo AI benefits from Pieter Levels's existing distribution, but it also sits inside a portfolio built through years of repeated launches and audience building.

The current playbook therefore starts earlier than the product and continues much longer than launch day. We want a problem where customers already spend money, a way to reach those customers repeatedly, evidence that they stay once they try the product, and enough operational leverage that a small team can serve a much larger customer base.

AI makes the last part easier than ever.

The first three are where the real work has moved.

Older indie-hacker playbook	What works better now
Build something technically clever	Solve an expensive, specific problem
Launch and look for demand	Know where the buyers are before launch
Product Hunt as a major growth channel	Use channels that can keep producing customers
Build a big founder audience	Reach a smaller but relevant buyer audience
Default to cheap self-service SaaS	Price around the value of the problem
Add more features	Improve retention and workflow depth
Treat code as the moat	Build data, trust, distribution and integrations
Keep shipping new projects	Experiment quickly, then stay with the winner

So how dead is indie hacking now?

Indie hacking is alive, but the forgiving version people remember from its earlier boom has largely disappeared.

The evidence points in the same direction from several angles.

More founders are starting alone. The best solo companies are getting bigger. Recent founders still report businesses doing $50,000, $100,000 and more in monthly revenue. AI-native solo companies are outperforming conventional solo startups. Bootstrapped SaaS can still reach $1 million ARR without taking dramatically longer than funded competitors. There is also an active market for buying profitable software businesses.

At the same time, the average experience has become harsher. As seen above, Stripe's recent solo-founder data shows the gap between ordinary founders and top performers widening dramatically. Early-stage SaaS companies are struggling to add new customers. Product Hunt is flooded with launches. AI has made competent software much easier to produce, which means competent software by itself deserves very little attention.

That explains why indie hacking can look dead from inside the community while continuing to produce exceptional businesses.

The old advantage was largely technical. If you could build a decent web application quickly and cheaply, you belonged to a relatively small group of people capable of turning an idea into software.

Today, that group is enormous.

The scarce abilities have moved toward finding painful problems, understanding buyers, reaching them repeatedly, earning trust, keeping customers and staying in a good niche long enough for small advantages to build on one another.

This change has probably made indie hacking worse for the average person who wants to launch generic products and hope one catches fire. For founders who can solve a real problem and crack distribution, the economics can be better than ever because AI lets one person operate at a scale that previously required a team.

So “indie hacking is dead” goes too far.

Easy-mode indie hacking mostly is.