Which indie apps have lost the most revenue lately?

Which indie apps have lost the most revenue lately?

Aplano currently has the largest recent revenue drop we can clearly attach to a named indie software company, while HeadshotPro may have lost even more but no longer publishes enough revenue data to rank it properly.

The latest PulseMRR data puts workforce-management SaaS Aplano at roughly $249,000 MRR and down 44.5% over the comparison period. Working backward from that decline gives a previous level of roughly $449,000 MRR. That is an implied loss of about $200,000 in monthly recurring revenue.

The next cases are messier. HeadshotPro once reached roughly $300,000 in monthly sales, but founder Danny Postma now says Google's AI changes and direct competition from Gemini cut the company's projections “by a lot.” He also cut half the team after an unsuccessful pivot. Current revenue remains undisclosed, so we know HeadshotPro has come down substantially without knowing whether the lost monthly revenue is $50,000, $100,000 or considerably more.

Among founders who still publish usable numbers, Pieter Levels' Photo AI has moved from $105,000 per month in March to $83,000 currently. His public profile also shows Interior AI at $22,000 per month, versus roughly $38,000 to $40,000 in older public snapshots. Marc Lou's ShipFast and CodeFast are smaller businesses, but their declines are unusually clear: ShipFast has moved from $9,200 in March to about $3,300 over the latest 30 days, while CodeFast has gone from $8,300 to roughly $5,500.

These figures also show why percentages alone can mislead us. ShipFast has lost close to two-thirds of its March sales, yet Aplano's dollar decline is more than 30 times larger.

Indie app	Earlier revenue level	Latest useful level	Approximate decline
Aplano	~$449K MRR implied	~$249K MRR	~$200K/month, -44.5%
HeadshotPro	~$300K/month historical peak	Undisclosed	Large, impossible to rank precisely
Photo AI	$105K/month	$83K/month	~$22K/month, -21%
Interior AI	~$38K–$40K/month	$22K/month	~$16K–$18K/month, ~-42% to -45%
ShipFast	$9.2K/month	~$3.3K/30 days	~$5.9K, -64%
CodeFast	$8.3K/month	~$5.5K/30 days	~$2.8K, -34%

Is Aplano really losing around $200K of MRR?

Aplano's roughly $200,000 implied monthly MRR drop is well supported enough to put the company at the top of our named list, although we still cannot tell how permanent that decline will be.

TrustMRR currently shows Aplano at roughly $245,000 MRR and $8.9 million in verified lifetime revenue. PulseMRR's declining-high-MRR view puts it around $249,000 and down 44.5%. The small difference between those current readings does not change the conclusion: Aplano is still operating at roughly a quarter of a million dollars of recurring revenue after a very large drop.

A 44.5% fall from today's level implies that Aplano had been running at roughly $449,000 MRR. The gap is close to $200,000 a month. If that lower run rate persisted for a year, the difference would represent roughly $2.4 million of annualized recurring revenue.

We should be careful with the cause, though. Aplano sells employee scheduling, time tracking and workforce-management software. We found no founder statement tying the drop to a particular competitor, AI product or customer loss. Payment-provider changes, annual billing cycles or account restructuring can sometimes distort MRR data.

So the size of Aplano's decline is fairly clear. The diagnosis isn't.

Has HeadshotPro lost even more revenue than Aplano?

HeadshotPro could easily be one of the biggest indie-app revenue losers today, but anyone giving an exact current loss is guessing.

Danny Postma's AI headshot business is still widely described online as a $300,000-a-month company. That figure belongs to HeadshotPro's stronger early period rather than a verified current run rate.

Postma's recent comments are much more useful. He said Google's AI changes and Gemini entering the same use case cut HeadshotPro's revenue projections heavily. A pivot failed, half the team was let go, and the company was subsequently simplified and automated. He described revenue as stable at a “beautiful number” but did not reveal that number.

Traffic gives us another clue. Around the period associated with the old $300,000 benchmark, HeadshotPro was estimated at roughly 222,000 monthly visits. More recent estimates put the site closer to 110,000. Traffic and revenue never move perfectly together, but HeadshotPro would now need to make roughly twice as much money from every visitor to reproduce the old $300,000 month.

The direction is clear: HeadshotPro is smaller than the $300,000 figure still circulating in old case studies.

The size of the drop remains unknown. If HeadshotPro has stabilized at $200,000 per month, the loss would already be about $100,000. At $150,000, the decline would match $150,000. A current figure below roughly $100,000 would push HeadshotPro past Aplano's estimated decline.

We cannot choose between those scenarios from public data, so HeadshotPro belongs near the top of the investigation without pretending we know its exact rank.

How much revenue have Photo AI and Interior AI lost?

Photo AI and Interior AI together appear to be making roughly $38,000 to $40,000 less per month than the earlier public benchmarks we can compare with.

Photo AI gives us the cleaner calculation. Pieter Levels publicly reported $105,000 per month of revenue and roughly $80,000 per month of profit in March. Levels' current public profile now lists Photo AI at $83,000 per month. That puts the decline at about $22,000, or 21%.

Photo AI is still a large solo business. At $83,000 per month, its current revenue pace is just under $1 million a year. The product has fallen enough for the decline to be economically meaningful without coming close to disappearing.

Interior AI has moved more sharply. Older public profiles placed the product around $38,000 to $40,000 per month. Levels' current profile lists $22,000. We therefore get a decline of roughly $16,000 to $18,000 a month, or more than 40%.

Seeing both products fall at the same time is more revealing than either decline alone. Photo AI and Interior AI share the same founder, personal audience and ability to ship quickly. Both also sell specialist generative-image capabilities during a period when general-purpose AI products are getting dramatically better at images.

We cannot attribute every lost dollar to Gemini, ChatGPT or another general model. But two of the best-known independent AI-image businesses are well below their earlier revenue levels at the same time. That's harder to dismiss as a random weak month.

Are ShipFast and CodeFast actually collapsing?

ShipFast and CodeFast are falling hard in percentage terms, and Marc Lou himself says AI has hurt both products.

In March, Lou reported $9,200 of ShipFast sales and $8,300 from CodeFast. TrustMRR currently shows roughly $3,300 in last-30-day revenue for ShipFast and $5,500 for CodeFast. ShipFast is therefore down around 64% from that March comparison, while CodeFast is down roughly 34%.

These are monthly sales rather than recurring MRR. TrustMRR records no active subscription MRR for either product because ShipFast is primarily a one-time boilerplate purchase and CodeFast is primarily a one-time coding course.

That means sales react very quickly to demand shifts. ShipFast does not enter a new month with thousands of subscribers renewing automatically. Marc Lou needs another founder to decide that paying for the boilerplate is easier than assembling the same stack with AI-assisted coding. CodeFast faces a similar decision: customers can pay for a structured course or increasingly ask an AI coding assistant to guide them through the project itself.

Lou made the connection directly in his March revenue update, writing that AI had “killed” his coding course and boilerplate.

We should still avoid comparing today's sales with their biggest launch months. CodeFast once generated roughly $88,500 in a particularly strong month and ShipFast about $27,900. Claiming 90%-plus collapses from those peaks would make a good headline and a bad comparison. Lifetime products naturally spike around launches.

The more useful comparison is recent ordinary month against recent ordinary month, and even by that standard both products are clearly down.

Are AI apps losing customers faster than normal apps?

AI subscription apps currently make more money from each payer but lose those customers noticeably faster than non-AI apps.

RevenueCat's latest State of Subscription Apps study covers more than 115,000 apps, over $16 billion in tracked revenue and more than a billion transactions. It gives us a much stronger baseline than a handful of founder screenshots.

AI-powered apps generate 41% more realized first-year revenue per payer at the median: $30.16 versus $21.37 for non-AI apps. Their initial conversion is also stronger. Yet 12-month retention is worse across every subscription length RevenueCat measured.

For monthly plans, AI apps retain 6.1% of subscribers after a year versus 9.5% for non-AI apps. Annual plans retain 21.1% versus 30.7%. AI apps also have a higher median refund rate, 4.2% compared with 3.5%.

Photo and Video looks particularly crowded now. RevenueCat classifies 61.4% of subscription apps in that category as AI-powered, far above the 27.1% average across all categories.

That combination helps explain why AI products can reach impressive revenue quickly and then struggle to hold the peak. Customers are willing to try them and willing to pay. They simply do not stick around as reliably.

The numbers fit what we see in Photo AI, Interior AI and HeadshotPro much better than a theory that consumers have stopped paying for AI altogether. People are paying plenty. Keeping them is the harder part.

Are apps sold to indie hackers getting hit especially hard?

Products that sell coding shortcuts to indie hackers look especially exposed right now, and Marc Lou's own portfolio gives us one of the cleanest comparisons.

Lou owns all four businesses in the comparison, promotes them through largely the same personal audience and runs them with the same build-in-public distribution machine. Yet the products have moved in opposite directions.

In March, Lou reported $36,000 from TrustMRR, $21,000 from DataFast, $9,200 from ShipFast and $8,300 from CodeFast. TrustMRR now shows roughly $47,000 of last-30-day revenue for itself and about $28,000 for DataFast. Over the same comparison, ShipFast has fallen to roughly $3,300 and CodeFast to $5,500.

The audience clearly did not stop spending money with Marc Lou. More money is flowing toward his data products while less is flowing toward the products that help founders code faster.

The split is pretty stark. ShipFast sells prebuilt implementation. CodeFast teaches implementation. AI coding agents are becoming directly better at implementation. DataFast, meanwhile, tells a business which marketing channels are producing revenue. TrustMRR aggregates verified private-company revenue data. Coding models can help Lou build those products, but they do not instantly recreate the underlying live data.

As seen above, Lou has already said AI hurt ShipFast and CodeFast. The portfolio numbers make that statement more useful because we can see what happened to his other products at the same time.

Marc Lou product	March revenue	Current 30-day revenue	Change
TrustMRR	~$36K	~$47K	+~$11K
DataFast	~$21K	~$28K	+~$7K
ShipFast	~$9.2K	~$3.3K	-~$5.9K
CodeFast	~$8.3K	~$5.5K	-~$2.8K

Is the whole indie app market shrinking now?

The indie-app market is getting much harsher for average products even while the strongest apps are growing extremely fast.

RevenueCat measured median year-over-year MRR growth of 5.3% across its subscription-app dataset. That sounds fairly healthy until we look at the spread. The top 10% grew more than 306%, while apps near the bottom were shrinking sharply.

Stripe Atlas found an even more useful pattern among solo founders. For companies started through Atlas, median revenue during the first six months fell 23% year over year for the 2025 cohort. Revenue for the top 10% rose 19%.

The gap has become enormous. Four years earlier, a top-decile solo founder made about 34 times as much revenue as the median solo founder during those first six months. By 2025, the gap had widened to 61 times.

That matches what indie founders are feeling these days. Building a working app is easier, so far more people can enter the market. RevenueCat says the number of new subscription apps launched each month has risen from around 2,000 a few years ago to almost 15,000 today.

Demand has not multiplied sevenfold just because software supply did.

The result is a much more unequal indie market. Exceptional founders can use AI to ship more, test faster and operate larger businesses with tiny teams. Average products now compete against thousands more alternatives, including products that can be built in days.

So an indie founder can truthfully say “it's harder to make money now” while another founder is simultaneously having the best year of their career.

Are one-time-purchase indie apps more exposed than subscription SaaS?

One-time-purchase indie products can lose revenue much faster because every new month starts with far less guaranteed income.

ShipFast makes the difference easy to see. TrustMRR currently shows around $1.27 million in lifetime revenue for the product but no active recurring MRR. The business can be historically successful and still start the next month needing another large batch of buyers.

HeadshotPro has a similar issue because much of the business historically came from customers buying a headshot package when they needed one. A customer who obtained professional headshots last year may have no reason to buy again this year.

A recurring SaaS starts from a stronger position. Existing customers have to cancel before that revenue disappears. The model buys time.

It does not guarantee safety. Aplano's current decline shows that a recurring business can still lose a huge amount of revenue. In fact, losing $200,000 of real recurring MRR can be more serious than a one-time product falling $200,000 from an exceptional launch month.

The difference is speed. A coding boilerplate can feel an AI platform shift almost immediately because new buyers disappear. SaaS with deeply embedded workflows often declines more slowly because users must actively replace something they already use.

RevenueCat's retention numbers show where subscription products eventually run into trouble. Even with subscriptions, only 6.1% of median AI-app monthly subscribers remain after 12 months. Recurring billing can soften a demand shock, but customers still leave when the product stops giving them enough reason to stay.

Which indie-app revenue drops look permanent?

ShipFast, CodeFast and the specialist AI-image products show the clearest signs of structural pressure, while Aplano's much larger decline is still harder to explain.

ShipFast and CodeFast have three pieces of evidence pointing in the same direction. Revenue is down substantially, their founder explicitly says AI hurt them, and the products AI competes with most directly in Lou's portfolio are doing worse while his data businesses grow.

Photo AI and Interior AI show the same pressure from another angle. Both are still substantial businesses, but both have come down from earlier public revenue levels while general AI platforms have become far more capable at generating and editing images. RevenueCat independently finds that Photo and Video is now the most AI-saturated subscription category it tracks.

HeadshotPro gives us the strongest founder confirmation. Danny Postma directly connected Google's AI changes and Gemini to much weaker projections, cut half the team and eventually settled into running a leaner, more automated company. The current revenue number remains private, but the business reset is public.

Aplano deserves more caution. The dollar drop is larger than the named examples above, but we do not have comparable evidence telling us why. Calling Aplano's decline structural today would go beyond what the data supports.

App	What changed	Evidence of a lasting problem	Our read
Aplano	MRR down roughly 44.5%	Cause remains unclear	Huge decline, unclear permanence
HeadshotPro	Revenue outlook cut and team halved	Founder points directly to Google and Gemini	Strong structural pressure
Photo AI	$105K → $83K/month	Specialist AI-image competition has intensified	Likely structural pressure
Interior AI	~$38K–$40K → $22K/month	Similar exposure to general image models	Likely structural pressure
ShipFast	$9.2K → ~$3.3K/30 days	Founder says AI hurt the boilerplate	Strong structural pressure
CodeFast	$8.3K → ~$5.5K/30 days	Founder says AI hurt the coding course	Strong structural pressure

Why is it so hard to find the biggest indie-app revenue losers?

The true biggest indie-app revenue crashes are probably hidden because founders usually become less willing to share revenue after things go badly.

PulseMRR gives us direct evidence of this problem. Its current declining-high-MRR table includes an anonymous startup at $662,100 MRR and down 78.7%. Another anonymous company sits at $244,400 MRR and down 27.6%.

The first anonymous company almost certainly represents a much larger absolute loss than Aplano. If the displayed percentage and MRR are directly comparable, its previous level would have been measured in the millions of dollars per month. We cannot identify the company, so it cannot answer a question about which named indie apps are losing the most.

HeadshotPro creates the reverse problem. We know exactly which company declined and have unusually direct comments from its founder, yet we do not know the current revenue.

Photo AI is easier because Pieter Levels continues putting revenue numbers directly in his public profile. ShipFast and CodeFast are easier again because TrustMRR connects directly to payment providers.

This disclosure bias changes the leaderboard. Companies with transparent founders look disproportionately common because we can measure them. A private founder who quietly falls from $800,000 to $300,000 MRR may never appear in an article like this.

For that reason, we should describe Aplano as the biggest named, measurable decline we found rather than the biggest indie-app decline in existence.

So which indie apps have really lost the most revenue lately?

Aplano is currently the clearest named winner of the wrong leaderboard: its public revenue data implies roughly $200,000 of monthly recurring revenue has disappeared.

HeadshotPro could rival or exceed that loss, but Danny Postma has stopped publishing enough revenue detail for us to calculate it. We know the company has been hit hard enough by Google and Gemini for Postma to cut the team and rethink the business. We do not know the dollar amount.

Among the best-known solo-founder products with current public numbers, Photo AI is down roughly $22,000 per month from its March level and Interior AI appears down another $16,000 to $18,000 from earlier public benchmarks. ShipFast and CodeFast have lost less money in absolute terms but much more in percentage terms, with ShipFast now roughly two-thirds below its March monthly sales.

As pointed out above, Aplano's decline is also the one we understand least. The more interesting pattern comes from HeadshotPro, Photo AI, Interior AI, ShipFast and CodeFast because all five sit close to capabilities that large AI platforms are rapidly making cheaper or easier to reproduce.

The broader data backs up that pressure without showing an industry-wide collapse. RevenueCat finds that AI apps monetize users better but retain them worse, while nearly 15,000 new subscription apps are now entering the market each month. Stripe finds that median solo-founder revenue has fallen while top-decile revenue has risen.

Indie apps are still producing enormous winners. What has changed is how quickly a useful product can lose scarcity.

The revenue drops we can measure point to a pretty simple divide. Products built mainly around code, content or AI output that can now be recreated cheaply are losing their advantage faster. Apps with proprietary data, embedded workflows, strong distribution or something customers continuously need have a much better chance of keeping the revenue once they earn it.