2026: Can Indie Developers Still Make Money?

The Question Everyone Asks

I keep getting this one in comments, in DMs, at meetups. Someone types it carefully, then watches me while I answer. Can you still make money as an indie developer? In 2026?

And honestly, the way people ask it breaks my heart a little. It's like they're asking if a favorite restaurant's still open. Like they've already decided the answer's no.

So here's my honest take, and it's two answers stacked on top of each other. Yeah, some of us can. Most of us won't. And here's the part nobody puts in the headline: I've realized it has almost nothing to do with the year, and almost everything to do with how you actually work day to day.

Because what you're really asking, what I'm asking myself too, isn't "can indie developers make money in 2026." It's softer and scarier than that. It's "can I, with my schedule, my scattered attention, and my pile of half-finished ideas, actually pull this off?" That version doesn't have a clean answer either, but at least it's one we can work with.

The short answer fits in a comment box. The long one's this post, so let's get into it.

I'll try to answer both for you. The first one I can answer with numbers I've been collecting. The second one I can only answer by turning it back on us: look at how we work, because that's the thing that decides it. Everything below comes from me watching people who've actually done it, and obsessing over every way it falls apart.

Everyone asking "can indies make money" is really asking "can I."

What the Numbers Actually Look Like

Let's do numbers first, feelings second. I've learned feelings are cheap, and numbers aren't.

The single figure that messed me up: by VG Insights' analysis, the median game on Steam earns somewhere around a thousand dollars over its entire lifetime. Not a month. A lifetime. Half of every game that ships on the platform we all daydream about earns roughly a grand total, ever, before Steam's cut and taxes and refunds get anywhere near it. You can read the underlying data yourself at vginsights.com, and I'm warning you, it's the kind of page that quietly rewires your ambition.

I did the math and it gets even uglier. A thousand dollars over the hundreds of hours a game takes to build works out to a dollar or two an hour, if it pays at all. That's not some stat from a report. That's what the median actually means once you divide it by the time you poured in. The median indie game pays worse than a minimum-wage summer job. That one stung me.

And most indie apps? They're worse. Not slightly worse. Catastrophically worse. The overwhelming majority of indie apps earn close to nothing, and the app store graveyards are full of beautifully coded tools that never found a single person who cared. The code was good. The distribution just didn't exist. I think about that a lot.

The Indie Hackers community, whose whole thing is people sharing their revenue dashboards, runs surveys of its members year after year, and the pattern holds: a large share of makers report $0. Not a small, embarrassed corner. A large share. These are folks who ship, who post, who try. Even on the platform built for showing off revenue, most of the dashboards say zero. The community's own data lives at indiehackers.com if you want to stare at it yourself like I did.

And here's what I had to remind myself: every revenue number you see on social media is a survivor. The people who made nothing don't post their zeroes, or they post once and disappear. So the feed you're scrolling isn't a sample of indie developers. It's a sample of indie developers who are still alive enough to post. You're looking at winners through a window that was pre-sorted to show you only winners. I fall for this too.

The wild part, and this gives me hope, is most of those $0 makers aren't quitting. They're still posting, still shipping, still convinced the next one's the one. You can read that two ways. Either they're deluded, or they've found something in the building itself that the revenue question doesn't capture. I think it's mostly the second one, and I think it matters, because that something is what keeps you going long enough to build the skill that ever sees a dollar. I feel that in myself.

And revenue is not profit. God, this is the part I keep forgetting until tax season. Payment processors take a cut, and the cut's bigger than the sticker price. Lemon Squeezy advertises 5% plus 50 cents per sale, but once you factor in international cards and subscriptions, the effective rate quietly creeps toward 7%. The takeaway is always the same: it's your mental math, not the fee, that's usually wrong. Then taxes show up. Then refunds. Then that quiet moment where you realize a thousand dollars of revenue is not a thousand dollars of money. I've had that moment.

Here's the thing I think the question gets wrong before it even starts. It treats 2026 as the variable, like the year is a faucet that got turned down. It isn't. The money was never evenly distributed in any year. Some indie dev made a living in 2010, in 2015, in 2020, and some will in 2026, and the number who fail has always been bigger than the number who don't. The year changes the tools and the noise. It doesn't change the shape of the game. That actually calmed me down.

None of this means you should quit before you start. I don't want you to read it that way. It just means the average hides everything, and the average is bad.

Revenue is the number other people see. Profit is the one you eat. I keep re-learning that.