Indie Hacking Articles

23 posts

• The Real Cost of Running AI in Production: How to Cut Your LLM Bills by 60 to 90 Percent 4/14/2026 Most developers ship their first AI feature, watch the bill explode, and assume that is just the cost of doing business. It is not. Model routing, prompt caching, and batch processing can cut your LLM spending by 60 to 90 percent without sacrificing quality. Here is how to actually do it.
• What Happens After You Vibe Code: Production Observability for Solo Developers 4/14/2026 Shipping fast with AI is the strategy everyone is talking about. But 51 percent of GitHub commits are now AI-assisted, and bug density in AI-generated code is measurably higher. When something breaks in production and you are the only developer, the cost is not just downtime. It is a week of momentum. Here is how to set up monitoring that catches problems before your users do.
• Developer-Led Growth in 2026: How to Get Your First 100 Paying Customers 4/9/2026 Most developers who build good products still struggle to get paying customers. The product is almost never the problem. Distribution almost always is. Here is what actually works for developer tools and technical SaaS in 2026.
• Why Your AI Agents Are Costing You 10x More Than They Should (And How to Fix It) 4/8/2026 Most developers using Claude Code or building AI agents have no real idea what their agents cost. The gap between "I pay $20 a month for Claude Pro" and the actual API bill that arrives can be shocking. Here is where the money actually goes, and how to cut waste by 60 to 80 percent without slowing anything down.
• The SaaSapocalypse Is Real: What Smart Developers Should Build Instead 4/8/2026 AI agents are collapsing the build-vs-buy decision that made SaaS valuable. In January 2026, roughly $2 trillion in SaaS market cap evaporated in 30 days. This is not a cycle. It is a structural shift. Here is an honest look at what is happening, which categories are done, and what developers should actually build in a world where agents replace interfaces.
• The Edge Computing Lie: Why Most Apps Do Not Need Edge Functions 4/6/2026 Edge functions are being sold as the default deployment target for modern apps. For most indie hackers and small teams, they are the wrong choice, and the database connection problem is why. Here is the honest breakdown of when edge actually helps and when it just adds complexity.
• AI Wrappers Are Dead: What Smart Developers Are Building Instead in 2026 4/3/2026 McKinsey reports only 3% of AI startups will survive the next two years. Google just warned that companies built around LLM wrappers have their check engine light on. The average AI wrapper has a 65% churn rate within 90 days. But developers who understand what comes after wrappers are building the most valuable software of the decade. The AI gold rush is not over. The easy money is.
• The Micro SaaS Playbook: How Developers Are Building Profitable Products in Weeks, Not Months 4/3/2026 The micro SaaS market is projected to grow from $15.7 billion to $59.6 billion by 2030. Solo developers are shipping in weekends what used to take months. But 70% of micro SaaS products generate under $1,000 a month. The difference is not the idea or the tech stack. It is the process. Here is the playbook for finding, building, and shipping a micro SaaS that actually makes money in 2026.
• The Developer Newsletter Playbook: How to Build a Newsletter That Actually Makes Money in 2026 4/2/2026 TLDR grew from a side project to 7 million subscribers and an estimated $5-10M in annual revenue with a team of four people. Bytes built a massive JavaScript-focused audience that funds an entire educational platform. Developer newsletters are quietly one of the most profitable media businesses you can run, and they compound over time in a way that social media never will. Here is how to start one, grow it, and turn it into real revenue.
• The One-Person Startup Just Hit a New Ceiling: What It Actually Takes to Scale Solo in 2026 4/1/2026 Sam Altman predicts the first one-person billion-dollar company. Dario Amodei gives it a 70-80% chance of happening this year. Meanwhile, solo founders like Pieter Levels are pulling $3-5M annually with zero employees. The one-person startup is not a lifestyle play anymore. It is a legitimate scaling model. Here is what actually separates the solo founders who scale from the ones who stall.
• Speed Is the Only Strategy: Why the Fastest Founders Win in 2026 4/1/2026 OpenAI ships major updates every 4-6 weeks. Anthropic drops features that rewrite the rules overnight. A solo founder built an AI platform and sold it for $80M in six months. The market rewards speed more than it has ever rewarded anything else. If you are spending months perfecting before you ship, you are playing a game that no longer exists.
• Open Source as a Growth Engine: How Developers Are Using GitHub to Build Profitable Businesses in 2026 3/31/2026 Open source is quietly becoming the best free marketing channel for bootstrapped founders. Your GitHub repo is a landing page, trust signal, and distribution engine rolled into one. Here is the playbook for turning open source contributions into paying customers, based on what is actually working in 2026.
• You're Probably Undercharging: A Practical Guide to SaaS Pricing for Indie Hackers 3/25/2026 Most indie hackers set their price once, pick something that feels safe, and never touch it again. That one decision quietly caps their revenue for months. Here is what I have learned about SaaS pricing from my own products and from watching dozens of founders get it wrong, including me.
• From Side Project to First Dollar: The Realistic Path Most Developers Never Take 3/25/2026 Most developers have three to five abandoned side projects sitting in private repos. Not because the ideas were bad, but because nobody ever treated them like products. Here is the gap between building something and making money from it, and how to close it without quitting your job or burning out.
• Building Is the Easy Part Now: Distribution Is the Only Moat Left for Indie Hackers 3/23/2026 AI made building fast and cheap. A chef built a media client in under a week. Developers ship production apps in 72-hour sprints. But almost nobody gets users. The best AI builder with no audience is worth less than a mediocre creator with 50,000 email subscribers. Distribution is the only moat left, and most indie hackers are still optimizing the wrong side of the equation.
• The Zero Employee Ops Team: How I Automated Every Non-Coding Task in My Solo SaaS 3/20/2026 Running a one-person SaaS means doing sales, support, marketing, billing, and ops on top of actually building the product. I spent months automating 90 percent of the non-coding work with AI agents and workflow tools. Here is the exact stack and every workflow I built.
• Stop Using Generic Link-in-Bio Tools. Your Portfolio Should Prove Your Work, Not Just List It. 3/4/2026 Linktree and its clones are fine for musicians and influencers. They are the wrong tool for anyone who builds software products. Here is what a maker portfolio actually needs to do -- and why most people have been doing it wrong.
• Why Founders Are Bad at X (And What to Do About It) 3/4/2026 Most founders know they should be more active on X. Almost none of them are. This is not a motivation problem. It is a systems problem -- and it has a fixable answer.
• XPilot Is Live. An AI Autopilot for Your X Presence. 3/3/2026 After pivoting from MarketingNow, XPilot is live today. An AI autopilot that handles your X presence so you can stay focused on building.
• The X Content Strategy for Founders: How to Grow from 0 to 10,000 Followers 2/25/2026 Most founders post on X without a real strategy and give up after weeks of silence. Here is the actual framework -- five content pillars, optimal posting frequency, and a 90-day timeline for what growth actually looks like.
• The Build in Public Playbook: Growing Your Personal Brand on X Without a Marketing Team 2/20/2026 Build in public has become one of those phrases that gets used so often it has almost stopped meaning anything. Here is what it actually means in practice, and how to do it in a way that builds a real audience instead of just performing one.
• Your First $1 MRR Beats Your First 1,000 Followers: Why Revenue Validation Matters More 2/10/2026 Most indie makers spend months building an audience before trying to make a single dollar. This is backwards. Here is why getting your first paying customer is more valuable than any follower milestone -- and how to do it this week.
• The Death of the Flex: Why Proof of Work Is the Only Metric That Matters in 2026 1/23/2026 The indie maker community is facing a credibility crisis. Screenshots can be faked, revenue claims go unverified, and audiences are starting to notice. Here is why verified proof of work is the only thing that will matter from here on.