Is the golden age of indie software over?

The majority of established ISVs are perfectly fine and have long adapted to new realities, be that the existence of AI coding tools, subscription licensing or what have you.

The fundamental - making something to solve users' pain points - is still there and it's now easier than ever to go from identifying a niche to shipping a solution.

In the last 3 months, I’ve built and launched a SaaS app to help my sister manage her florist business, and already have other paying customers. Without LLMs, this would have never been feasible because of dev time and/or costs.

So the simpler your app is, the less of the moat it has going forward.

Example: It was only a few years ago that I wanted a basic iOS app to remind me to do 100 pushups, 100 situps, etc. every day. I paid $5 for quite a crappy app that got the job done (it was comically slow somehow). I found the developer's twitter and he was one of those "I make money creating and selling 1000 apps" people.

Now making that kind of app is trivial with Claude Code without even launching Xcode. I've build at least five apps so far just for personal use.

So, on the other hand, another definition of "indie software" is on the cusp of explosion.

Coding is easy. Building a business is hard, whether indie or VC backed.

I rarely purchase paid advertising and rely mostly on word-of-mouth. That's worked out fairly well for me, but obviously that's not going to work for everyone. I can't speak about the effectiveness of Google Adwords, for example, like the article author.

I disagree with the author about one thing: "Mobile-based software is expected to be free or, at best, very cheap. So requires huge scale to make any decent return." I think App Store developers have to resist the race to the bottom. We can't make it up in volume like the BigCos. The biggest mistake of new indie devs—and I made this mistake myself years ago—is to price your apps too low. You need sustainable prices, and just ignore the people who complain that your price is too high. If they're complaining, that means they're interested! You might be able to pick up those customers eventually on Black Friday.

My personal "golden age" was 2024, my highest income ever. 2025 was decent but a down year, back down to around 2021 levels. I'm not quite sure why, perhaps the economy? But who knows.

If it meant building something decent, ranking on Google, and pushing a few ads, then yeah, that probably is over.But if it means a single person being able to explore ideas, iterate quickly, and build software closely tied to a real, lived problem, I’m not sure we’ve seen that era peak yet.

What seems to be shrinking is generic attention. What seems to be growing is the number of specific problems that are now cheap enough to try solving.

That probably hurts copycat SaaS. It might actually help people with strong taste and proximity to a niche.

I had a CS teacher in school who spend a lot of his free time on software for people who take part in Pidgeon racing competitions. He spent a whole decade on this because he was interested in it and it did even net him enough money eventually to pay part of his house off. That kind of thing to me is indie software and whether that is viable has nothing to do with LLMs or the web or what have you, because it's actually so indie nobody cares about it to begin with.

I even have comments enabled on my Reddit ads and I don't even get ASCII wangs.

Nobody says my product is bad (or good), there's just silence.

Although with the aggressive way the AI bros are scraping my site I can imagine where all these alleged clicks are coming from.

It's a bad time when you're paying $1 a click and you still see Reddit's own ads way above yours. It makes you feel like they run their own ads to jack up the price.

On the flip side, there's a story of an adventurous young couple who drove through the Democratic Republic of Congo [1]. They reported an incident where the road dipped and was submerged in water. Local men were standing around ready, for a fee, to chuck rocks in the water. The rocks piled up so the travelers' tires were able to grip the bottom and they were able to proceed on their journey. After they passed through, they observed in their rear view mirror the men now removing the rocks so the next driver would also have to pay.

I think wishing AI away to keep my moat is like wanting to remove those rocks. It's human to look out for #1 but it's a kind of tragedy of the commons.

[1] https://geoff.greer.fm/congo/

> But Google have done everything they can to raise bid prices and generally enshittify Adwords, so they can grab more and more of the value in every transaction.

Now days, a software that work as claimed and reasonably priced is already rated above-than-average quality.

The real problem here, is discovery.

The old tricks such as SEO and forum signature link etc are dead. If you need user, you need to stay with your user group, listen to what they want and make them happy. Then your user will talk about it elsewhere and that could generate traffic for you.

Online ADs on targeted platforms may also help. But all and all, it's no longer free and automatic.

When it comes to video games, I'd say we are in an indie software golden age and it is not over by any mean!

Outside of video games, I don't see particular trends. If anything, I see a gradual decline in quality from the tech giants, especially Microsoft, which should give opportunities to indie developers.

Granted it flies over the head of most people. They can't discern a well written website to a 15MB webpage with an 8K thumbnail.

Same applies to software. Margins, bevels, grouping, spacing, primary and secondary actions. Some see the difference. Some don't. You can't fake understanding of what you can't perceive exists.

You can't know what you don't know.

Most people would agree that for many criteria the more expensive one would be better than the mass-produced one, and yet we've long passed the age of "ask a local woodworker or do it yourself".

Maybe software is the same and shareware and indie software was just an outlier in the first place. spend a month building it, then make free copies and try to sell (labor costs) / (copies) because no one would pay just the labor costs.

But now where does FLOSS software come into the picture, competing with indie software on price (free), often quality (sometimes best in show), less of a bus factor (traditionally small indie teams) and repairability (the source code is there).

So yeah, maybe call me pessimistic or jaded or just an asshole, but there's a reason I have earned money writing software for about 25 years and never even thought about making and selling an indie product because I never felt it was feasible. Happy for all the people for whom it has worked so far.

So, I suppose it means SaaS-as-viable-income-maker. Which, well -- I suppose is fine if you can do that, no individual hate. But honestly -- funny enough -- it's pretty equivalent to me in terms of what is going on in hip-hop.

Rappers are making less money and also the art is improving back to a state that it once was in.

Seems like LLMs will actually help that as well.

I don't use canned native OR web apps much anymore. What I do is load Google Antigravity and ask for a flutter app with specified screens and functionality then run on mobile, desktop or web. What I get is equivalent of old indie software, except I do not depend on anyone to add the next feature I decide I need. What changed is not the software, but the business model - profit vs in house necessity. Hopefully indie game companies can benefit from same upscaling to develop their ideas into AAA feel titles which are beyond my personal AI assisted coding ability?

I think maybe this trend will continue and not specifically for indie developers, but for all software vendors. If AI becomes capable of producing genuinely highquality software, competition will intensify, and the industry will start to resemble the music industry. Alternatively, AI may continue to generate software that is not necessarily high quality but is largely indistinguishable from competing products; in that case, the market for lemons dynamic will apply. In either scenario, the value of software will decline...