Are any indie hackers still making a lot of money?

Last updated: August 29, 2026

Why is current indie hacker revenue so hard to verify?

Current indie hacker revenue is surprisingly hard to verify because old MRR screenshots keep circulating long after founders stop updating the numbers.

A lot of the numbers people associate with famous indie projects are real, but they are no longer current enough to answer what is happening now. A founder may have posted $50,000 MRR two years ago, stopped sharing revenue, and still appear today in articles titled “top indie hackers making $50K per month.”

HeadshotPro shows the problem well. Numbers as high as roughly $300,000 per month are still repeated online, yet Danny Postma stopped publicly updating the product’s revenue. A recent investigation by OperatorBook could not trace that figure to a fresh founder disclosure. We therefore cannot confidently put HeadshotPro into a current revenue ranking.

Photo AI has better evidence because Pieter Levels has personally disclosed roughly $105,000 in monthly revenue and about $80,000 in monthly profit. The figure is still useful, especially because Photo AI remains active, but the disclosure falls outside the three-month window we are using here.

So we applied a simple freshness rule: the number had to be disclosed, reconfirmed or discussed by the founder recently enough to tell us something about the business today. That removes several famous names, but it also surfaces projects that get far less attention despite currently making serious money.

What counts as “a lot of money” for an indie hacker project today?

For an indie hacker project today, $10,000 MRR is already serious money, while $50,000 MRR puts a tiny software business into a very different league.

At $10,000 MRR, a project is running at $120,000 per year. A solo founder with modest hosting costs can already build a real income around that. At $30,000 MRR, the annualized figure reaches $360,000. At $50,000, it becomes $600,000.

The more interesting threshold starts around $83,000 MRR because that translates into roughly $1 million ARR. Very few small founder-led products ever get there.

We therefore use $10K MRR as the point where an indie project is clearly making significant money, $50K MRR as an unusually large indie business, and roughly $1M ARR as the top tier.

Which indie hacker projects are actually making the most money right now?

The freshest public numbers put Zipchat, Zigpoll, Postiz, Gleap, Faceless.video and Pckgr among the strongest indie-sized businesses we can verify right now.

Zipchat is running at roughly $2 million ARR, equivalent to about $167,000 per month. Zigpoll is around $125,000 MRR. Postiz recently reached roughly $1.3 million ARR, or around $113,000 MRR. Gleap, Faceless.video and Pckgr have each crossed the $1 million ARR line.

Then there is a meaningful second group. Shift is above $50,000 MRR. Slides With Friends is above $40,000. Post Bridge is around $35,000. Launch Fast reached roughly $30,000, while RightBlogger is around $29,000.

Further down, we still found plenty of projects making what would have counted as exceptional indie-hacker money a few years ago: Lancer in the low-$20,000s, BlogToPin and NinjaPear around $15,000, and products including SavvyCal, Klipy, AppAlchemy and Floga at or above roughly $10,000 MRR.

Most of these figures come from recent founder interviews published by Indie Hackers, supplemented by first-party case studies where the founder has stopped publishing regular build-in-public updates. They remain self-reported rather than audited financial statements, which is normal for private businesses of this size.

Project	What it sells	Recent revenue	Team profile
Zipchat	AI sales agent for e-commerce	~$2M ARR	Small bootstrapped team
Zigpoll	Customer surveys	~$125K MRR	Solo founder
Postiz	Social media management	~$1.3M ARR	Small bootstrapped team
Gleap	Customer support software	$1M+ ARR	Bootstrapped team
Faceless.video	Automated short-form video	$1M+ ARR	Founder + contractors
Pckgr	Microsoft Intune packaging	$1M+ ARR	Small bootstrapped team
Shift	Laravel upgrade automation	$50K+ MRR	Solo founder
Slides With Friends	Interactive presentations	$40K+ MRR	Small team
Post Bridge	Social scheduling	~$35K MRR	Solo founder
Launch Fast	Amazon seller research	~$30K MRR	Founder-led
RightBlogger	Blogging software	~$29K MRR	Founder-led
Lancer	Tools for Upwork freelancers	~$20K–$25K MRR	Small team
BlogToPin	Pinterest automation	~$15K MRR	Solo founder
NinjaPear	B2B company intelligence	~$15K/month	Solo founder
SavvyCal	Scheduling software	$10K+ MRR	Very small team
Klipy	AI sales CRM	$10K+ MRR	Three-person team
AppAlchemy	Mobile app builder	$10K+ MRR	Solo founder
Floga	Yoga app	~$10K MRR	Founder-led

Can a solo founder still build a $1 million ARR SaaS today?

Yes. Zigpoll currently shows that a solo founder can run a software business well past $1 million ARR without building a conventional startup team.

Founder Jason Zigelbaum recently said Zigpoll had started the year around $1.03 million ARR and then reached approximately $125,000 MRR. That puts its current annualized revenue near $1.5 million, a roughly 44% increase from the earlier run rate.

The organizational setup is almost as interesting as the revenue. Zigelbaum remains the only full-time person running the company. There is no large sales operation, no venture-funded hiring machine and no traditional executive team behind the number.

Faceless.video stretches the definition slightly because founder Jacob Seeger works with contractors, but the company is still extremely lean. A recent Runpod case study put the product above $1 million ARR and 2.5 million creator signups while describing an operation built around Seeger and roughly seven contractors rather than a normal software-company headcount.

Shift provides another useful benchmark slightly lower down. Jason McCreary runs the Laravel automation business himself and has pushed it beyond $50,000 MRR.

Those examples do not make million-dollar solo SaaS common. They do show that headcount is no longer the hard ceiling people once assumed it was. Software infrastructure, AI tooling, contractors and automated customer acquisition now allow one person to operate a business at a revenue level that previously would have implied a small company.

Are the biggest indie hacker winners mostly AI apps now?

No. AI is producing some fast-growing indie businesses these days, but the current revenue leaders are much more mixed than the hype around AI coding would suggest.

Zipchat uses AI to sell products through e-commerce conversations. Faceless.video automates video production. Klipy uses AI inside a sales CRM. Launch Fast uses AI in product research. Gleap increasingly sells AI-powered customer support.

At the same time, some of the strongest businesses have very ordinary software at their core. Zigpoll sells surveys. Shift upgrades Laravel applications. Pckgr packages software for Microsoft Intune administrators. Post Bridge schedules social posts. SavvyCal schedules meetings.

The pattern becomes clearer when we group the products by what customers are actually buying. AI works particularly well when it attacks a specific paid workflow. Generic access to an AI model appears far less often among the high-revenue projects we found.

Business type	Recent examples	What customers are paying for
AI-native workflow	Zipchat, Faceless.video, Klipy	More sales, faster content creation, less CRM work
Existing SaaS improved with AI	Gleap, Launch Fast	Better support and faster research
Conventional niche SaaS	Zigpoll, Pckgr, Shift	A painful recurring task already tied to a budget
Creator/productivity software	Post Bridge, RightBlogger, SavvyCal	Distribution, publishing and scheduling

Which indie projects are growing fastest right now?

Launch Fast, Zigpoll, Postiz and Lancer stand out lately because their current revenue comes with unusually steep growth rather than years of flat earnings.

Launch Fast has the clearest short-term curve. Hasaam Bhatti said the first version took about 48 hours to build. The product then moved from roughly $10,000 MRR after its first month to around $17,000–$18,000 after two months, roughly $21,800 around the third month and about $30,000 by the time of his recent interview.

That progression is more useful than the final $30,000 number by itself. Revenue kept moving after the launch spike, which tells us buyers continued paying once the initial community attention wore off.

Lancer followed a similar path. Ivan Nedelkovski launched a product for Upwork freelancers, reached roughly $10,000 MRR within about two months and then pushed into the low-$20,000s.

Postiz is larger and older, but its acceleration is more dramatic in absolute terms. Public updates show the business moving from only a few thousand dollars in MRR during an earlier phase to around $61,000 and then into seven-figure ARR territory. Even with the usual caution around founder-reported numbers, that is a completely different business from the one Postiz was a year earlier.

Zigpoll has also kept growing despite already being large for an indie project. Moving from around $1.03 million ARR to an annualized $1.5 million in roughly half a year means the business added close to half a million dollars of annualized revenue while still being run by one person.

Are boring B2B tools still beating broad consumer apps?

Yes. Some of the best indie businesses currently make money from narrow, boring problems that most consumers will never hear about.

Pckgr is a good example. It handles application packaging for companies using Microsoft Intune, an IT administration problem with almost no consumer visibility. The company has still crossed $1 million ARR.

Shift automates Laravel upgrades. BlogToPin automates Pinterest publishing. Zigpoll helps online stores collect customer feedback. None needs hundreds of millions of users. Each sits inside a workflow where the customer can quickly understand the financial value of saving time or avoiding manual work.

Even several AI businesses follow the same logic. Zipchat is built around e-commerce conversion rather than a general chatbot. Klipy automates sales administration rather than offering a broad AI assistant. Launch Fast helps Amazon sellers decide what to sell.

We found far fewer fresh examples of broad consumer indie apps reaching these revenue levels. Faceless.video is one of the exceptions, although even there the buyer is usually a creator trying to produce content at scale, so the product still connects to an economic job.

For someone looking at what works now, “small market” can be misleading. A narrow group of businesses willing to pay $100, $500 or several thousand dollars per year often gives an indie founder a much cleaner path to serious revenue than millions of low-intent consumers.

Does distribution matter more than coding for indie hackers now?

For many of the strongest indie projects we found, access to the right buyers explains more of the outcome than anything unusual about the code.

RightBlogger makes this especially obvious. Ryan Robinson had spent more than a decade building an audience before turning that audience into software customers. His blog reaches roughly 500,000 readers per month, and his YouTube channel has more than 80,000 subscribers. RightBlogger reached about $2,000 MRR almost immediately and eventually climbed to roughly $29,000.

Launch Fast used a completely different route. Hasaam Bhatti did not begin with a giant personal audience. He was already inside a paid Amazon seller community containing exactly the kind of people who might buy his tool. He secured access to those users while the product was still being built.

Shift benefited from the Laravel ecosystem. Jason McCreary received early exposure from Laravel creator Taylor Otwell, then reinforced that advantage through conference talks, podcasts, courses and years of participation in the community.

Postiz turned open source into its distribution channel. The self-hosted product attracts developers and companies that discover it through GitHub, while a portion of those users eventually pay Postiz to host the product for them.

These businesses took very different routes, yet all four had a way to reach the customer that competitors could not instantly copy. These days, building another competent SaaS product is getting easier. Reaching thousands of the right buyers remains much harder.

Are Shopify, Laravel and other platform ecosystems still good places to build?

Yes. Platform ecosystems are still producing large indie businesses, although founders are taking a very real dependency risk when they build too close to the platform itself.

Several current winners sit directly beside larger ecosystems. Zigpoll grew around Shopify stores. Shift sells Laravel upgrades. Pckgr serves Microsoft Intune administrators. BlogToPin depends on Pinterest usage. Lancer sells to Upwork freelancers. Launch Fast serves Amazon sellers.

The attraction is easy to understand. Shopify, Microsoft, Pinterest, Upwork and Amazon have already gathered the customer base. A founder can focus on one painful part of that existing workflow instead of creating a new category from scratch.

The danger shows up when the platform decides to absorb the product. Ruslan Leteyski previously built Checkout X to roughly $8 million ARR before a Shopify checkout change destroyed the business. He later started Zipchat, which still sells to e-commerce companies but does not depend on owning Shopify's checkout flow.

A smaller recent example came from Emanuele Di Pietro. His unofficial mobile app for OpenAI Codex reportedly reached roughly $9,000 per month, then lost much of that opportunity after OpenAI launched a competing experience.

The useful distinction is how replaceable the product becomes if the platform ships the obvious missing feature. Shift has survived for years because Laravel upgrades remain a deep and recurring technical job. A thin interface around a platform API has far less protection.

Is SEO still working for indie SaaS?

SEO still works for indie SaaS today, but two profitable companies recently gave us unusually clear evidence that relying on Google alone has become riskier.

Slides With Friends grew past $40,000 MRR partly by publishing bottom-of-funnel content for people actively searching for interactive presentation tools. Founder Cecilia Razak recently said AI-driven search changes have weakened that acquisition channel and pushed the company to look for new sources of traffic.

Barn2 gives us an even bigger case. The bootstrapped WordPress and WooCommerce software company makes roughly $1.6 million per year across its portfolio. Founder Katie Keith says organic search historically generated a large share of sales, yet traffic coming through conventional Google results has become less productive as AI Overviews and assistants answer more questions directly.

Barn2's overall revenue has stayed relatively resilient because existing customers renew. New sales have been harder.

That distinction is useful. SEO can still produce excellent economics when a company ranks for high-intent commercial searches, especially if the resulting customers renew for years. What looks increasingly fragile is a business where every new customer depends on Google continuing to send the same amount of free traffic.

This helps explain why open source, communities, marketplaces, integrations and existing audiences show up so often among the newer high-revenue projects.

Can an open-source indie project really make $1 million ARR?

Yes. Postiz has now become a strong example of an open-source indie project turning free software into a seven-figure hosted business.

Nevo David built Postiz as an open-source social media management platform. People can run the software themselves for free, while the company charges customers who would rather use the hosted version.

In a recent Indie Hackers interview, David put Postiz at roughly $1.3 million ARR after about two years.

The free product effectively acts as a distribution network. Developers discover Postiz, inspect the code, self-host it, share it and contribute to it. Some eventually decide that maintaining the infrastructure themselves is more trouble than the subscription price.

Postiz has also accumulated a large GitHub audience, which gives the project reach that a normal small SaaS company would usually have to earn through content or paid acquisition.

Open source will not automatically produce paying users. Postiz works because hosting, maintenance and convenience have enough value that a meaningful percentage of people prefer to pay even though the software itself is available for free.

Can one-time-payment products still become big indie businesses?

Yes. One-time products can still produce five-figure months, although recurring SaaS currently dominates the very top of the indie revenue range.

Sergiu Chiriac's AI Directories portfolio is a useful example. In a recent record month, the portfolio generated around $15,700, with roughly $9,500 coming from AI Directories. A large share of the money comes from one-time purchases rather than conventional SaaS subscriptions.

Erik Aronesty has built something even stranger. He buys or revives abandoned web properties and domains where demand already exists, then operates a portfolio of roughly 30 small projects. Indie Hackers recently put the combined revenue around $15,000 per month.

These are good businesses. They also show why MRR can sometimes hide part of the indie economy. A founder selling templates, directories, licenses, lifetime deals or small digital products may make substantial cash without producing a clean recurring-revenue chart.

Still, the largest fresh figures we found belong overwhelmingly to subscriptions. Every customer acquired by a SaaS product can keep contributing revenue in future months, so the founder starts each month with part of the previous month's revenue already in place.

How profitable are these high-revenue indie projects?

Some high-revenue indie projects are extremely profitable today, although we have far fewer fresh profit disclosures than revenue disclosures.

Shift gives us the clearest recent example. Jason McCreary says the product regularly makes more than $50,000 MRR while basic software overhead is only around $100 per month. Payment fees, taxes and occasional contractor costs obviously sit outside that figure, but the gap between revenue and infrastructure cost is enormous.

Zigpoll should also have unusually strong revenue per employee simply because there is one full-time employee: the founder. At around $1.5 million in annualized revenue, even substantial software and contractor expenses would leave a very different cost structure from a normal SaaS company with sales, engineering and customer-success departments.

Gleap provides a small-team example. Its founders say the company has crossed seven-figure ARR, remains bootstrapped and is profitable while still growing.

AI-heavy products can look different. Faceless.video, for example, depends on compute-intensive video generation and uses several contractors, so we should not assume the same margin profile as Shift.

The recent numbers still point to one of the main attractions of indie software: a tiny team can reach revenue per person that would look unusual even inside successful public SaaS companies.

Are the newest indie winners really brand-new ideas?

Usually not. Many of the strongest indie businesses now look new on the surface but come from founders who spent years accumulating an audience, domain knowledge or distribution before launching them.

Shift has been around for roughly a decade. RightBlogger grew from Ryan Robinson's long-running blogging audience. Pckgr came out of experience with enterprise Microsoft administration. Zigpoll needed time to find the e-commerce segment that ultimately drove the business.

Even the projects with explosive early growth often have a long prehistory behind the founder.

Launch Fast was built in about 48 hours, but Hasaam Bhatti already understood Amazon sellers and had access to a community of them. Lancer reached $10,000 MRR quickly, but Ivan Nedelkovski came from an agency background and already knew the freelancer workflow. NinjaPear is a new company, while founder Steven Goh previously built Proxycurl in the adjacent B2B data world.

Faceless.video also grew quickly after launch, yet Jacob Seeger had already spent years learning online marketing and testing other products.

AI coding has made the implementation phase dramatically shorter. The accumulated knowledge behind many of the winners still took years.

Which famous indie hacker projects are big but too stale to rank?

Tally, Photo AI, ShipFast, CodeFast and HeadshotPro are all important indie-hacker businesses, but we do not have fresh enough public revenue evidence to mix them into a ranking focused on the last three months.

Tally is the biggest obvious omission. Marie Martens and Filip Minev previously disclosed that the form builder had crossed $5 million ARR. That makes Tally larger than almost every business discussed here, but its last major revenue update predates our research window.

Photo AI is similar. Pieter Levels has publicly reported approximately $105,000 in monthly revenue and around $80,000 in monthly profit. We still consider that highly relevant evidence about what a solo AI product can become, although it is not a fresh enough number for this ranking.

Marc Lou's last detailed portfolio disclosure put ShipFast and CodeFast around $20,000 per month each and DataFast around $15,800 MRR. Again, good businesses, older numbers.

HeadshotPro is the one we would treat most cautiously. The business is clearly substantial, but the very large revenue figures repeated online are no longer backed by a current founder update.

Project	Last solid public figure we found	Why we leave it out of the current ranking
Tally	$5M ARR	Revenue milestone is older than our three-month window
Photo AI	~$105K monthly revenue	Founder figure is older than our three-month window
ShipFast	~$20K/month	Last detailed portfolio update is older
CodeFast	~$20K/month	Last detailed portfolio update is older
DataFast	~$15.8K MRR	Last detailed portfolio update is older
HeadshotPro	Current revenue unclear	No fresh founder confirmation for widely repeated figures

So which indie hacker projects are making a lot of money now?

Yes. Indie hacker projects are still making a lot of money today, with a small group now operating around or above $1 million in annual revenue and a much larger group sitting between $10,000 and $50,000 MRR.

Zipchat currently sits around a $2 million annual run rate. Zigpoll is around $1.5 million annualized. Postiz has reached roughly $1.3 million ARR. Gleap, Faceless.video and Pckgr have also crossed seven figures.

Below them, we found a surprisingly healthy layer of founder-led businesses producing $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 or $50,000 every month. These are not hypothetical AI experiments. Customers are already paying meaningful amounts for social scheduling, Laravel upgrades, Amazon seller research, sales software, Pinterest automation, blogging tools and interactive presentations.

What has changed is where the advantage sits.

Building software has become dramatically easier. A competent founder can now ship in days what once took a team months. That has raised the number of competitors at the same time.

The projects breaking away from the pack usually arrive with something harder to reproduce: a community, a niche audience, years inside a specific market, a marketplace position, an open-source user base, or direct access to customers with an expensive problem.

That is the clearest takeaway from the last three months. Indie hacking is still producing unusually profitable small businesses, including a few that would have looked almost absurdly large by old micro-SaaS standards. The scarce part now is getting people to care enough to pay.