2026: Can Indie Developers Still Make Money?

The Graveyard

Before I show you the survivors, let's hang out with the bodies for a minute, because honestly the bodies taught me more.

Start with Pieter Levels, who's somehow both a graveyard and a survivor. He's shipped something like seventy-plus projects over his career, by his own public accounting at levels.io, and most of them made $0. Not most of the early ones. Most of them, full stop. What floored me is the difference between Pieter and the rest of us isn't that he avoids the graveyard. It's that he treats it as a place you walk through, not a place you get buried in. Each corpse taught him something, and he kept walking. I keep coming back to that reframe. It's worth more than any single product he ever shipped.

Then there's Sahil Lavingia. He built Gumroad into a real business and then wrote one of the most honest things an indie founder has ever published, "Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company." He had a company that made real money and he still framed it as a failure, because he'd aimed it at a billion dollars it would never reach. That one hit me, because it cuts both ways: the ceiling you set for yourself is the thing that decides whether your wins feel like losses. Aim at a number someone else told you to hit and even success will taste like defeat.

The Steam long tail is a graveyard on a population scale. Same VG Insights analysis as before: half of games land around that thousand-dollar lifetime mark, and below them sits a deep pit of titles that made almost nothing. The Only Up!-style clone wave was the cleanest illustration I've seen. One game blew up in 2023, and within weeks hundreds of near-identical clones shipped to chase the moment. Almost all of them made close to nothing, because by the time the clones arrived, the audience had moved on and the platforms had moved the algorithm. Chasing someone else's spike is how you arrive late to an empty room. I don't want that to be me.

And the Indie Hackers $0 majority again. Yeah, I'm repeating it on purpose because I needed to hear it twice. Walk through the forums at indiehackers.com and read the people who've been shipping for two years with nothing to show. Read them closely, because they are not lazy and they are not stupid. Most of them are building good things into a void. The graveyard isn't full of bad programmers. It's full of people who never built an audience before they built a product. That scared me straight.

Every corpse in that graveyard died the same quiet death: nobody showed up. Not because the code was bad. Because the distribution was never there. I'm keeping the graveyard close on purpose now. It's the only honest counterweight to the highlight reel, and the rule it taught me is simple: study the failures before you celebrate a win.

Products don't die in the build, in my experience. They die in the silence before and after it.

The Ones Who Made It

Okay, now the survivors, with their real numbers, hedged the way I think real numbers deserve.

Pieter Levels again, because I can't talk about this and skip him. Nomad List, Remote OK, Photo AI, a portfolio that publishes its revenue in public at levels.io. His origin is the "12 startups in 12 months" challenge, twelve shipped projects in a year, and it matters because of what it forced: volume, speed, tiny scope, solo, no funding. What I take from him isn't "be Pieter." It's that distribution and iteration volume beat a single perfect bet. One shot at glory is a lottery ticket. Fifty small shots is a portfolio. I'm trying to build like that.

Marc Lou is the antidote to the survivorship narrative for me. Before ShipFast, the boilerplate he sells at shipfa.st, there were years of flops, in his own words, project after project that went nowhere. He publishes his MRR charts on X and talks openly about the flatline years. What mattered for him wasn't a breakthrough idea. It was consistency through the flat part, plus a product aimed at buyers who already spend money, other developers. He sold shovels, not dreams, and he kept swinging until one connected. I love that image.

Tony Dinh is the quiet version of the same story, and maybe my favorite. He built TypingMind, the AI chat tool at typingmind.com, and has publicly shared numbers around half a million dollars a year, solo. But read his origin though. He started with small developer utilities, the kind of tiny tools that made almost nothing, and he kept shipping them anyway. The half-million-a-year tool wasn't his first idea. It was the one that finally had distribution behind it, after years of small, boring, useful releases built his reputation and his audience. That gives me so much hope.

Eric Barone is the extreme outlier and I have to treat him as one, and you should too. Stardew Valley, around four and a half years of solo work while he was a movie-theater usher, now more than 40 million copies sold, all at stardewvalley.net. I'm not planning on being Eric Barone. The odds are not in my favor and the years of no income would wreck most people, me included. But I'm stealing the one thing he did that's actually portable: he picked a niche he loved and served it with obsessive patience for years. Niche plus patience is a strategy. Beating 40 million copies is not.

Josh Wardle is the cleanest counterexample to "you need a business plan" I've ever seen. Wordle was a gift for his partner, free, no signup, no ads, and the New York Times reported acquiring it in the low seven figures. He didn't chase a market. He made one thing for one person and it happened to be the thing millions wanted. I can't replicate the lightning, and neither can you, but I can copy the shape: solve one small thing so well that people tell their friends.

Danny Postma is the sixth, and I'll keep him brief. He built HeadshotPro at headshotpro.com in public, documenting the process, and reportedly sold it in 2024. He didn't win on originality. He won on showing up in public, week after week, until the boring problem became a business. That consistency thing again.

Notice what all of them share, and notice what none of them share. None of them won because of a genius idea nobody else had. All of them won because of distribution, a narrow niche, speed, or sheer consistency. Usually several at once. The survivors aren't the smartest people in the room. They're the ones who kept putting product in front of people until something stuck. I keep repeating that to myself.

Here's the uncomfortable part I didn't want to hear. Every one of those levers is a skill you practice, not a gift you're born with. Distribution is talking to people consistently. Niche is narrowing until you can hold the whole problem in your head. Speed is shipping before you feel ready. Consistency is showing up after the excitement dies. None of it needs genius. All of it needs the boring thing done on the day it feels pointless. I'm still learning that last one.

The winners aren't the ones who aimed best, I've realized. They're the ones who shipped most.