In my experience, the golden age of indie software is about to begin. LLMs and coding agents will make building vertical and niche software much more cost effective.
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.
This. Companies are chomping at the bits about developer productivity and how they can do 10x more. What is not clear even if they can fire 90% of their engineers (assuming the 10x productivity gain is real), how are they expecting that even a tiny sliver of that 90% cannot replicate the products - with AI? And if we are in such a world how are those companies' valuations justified any more?
Yup, I echo this sentiment. We're about to flourish.
It's never been cheaper and easier to build real value. It's also never been cheaper and easier to build real crap–but, the indie devs who care will build more value with higher velocity and independence. And good indie development will come with it an air of quality that the larger crap will struggle to compete with (at the edges). Not that they'll care, because the big players be making more money off the entrenched behemoths.
But as an indie dev, your incentive structures are far different and far more manageable.
Betteridge's law applies here – if the author truly believed the thesis, they would have declared it as a statement rather than a question.
There's such an opportunity for people to actually explore ideas whose prototyping cost would have been too high with both time/money to not be worth it earlier.
And even outside that perspective, there's a lot of broken corpo software now. The indie hackers are fighting back. See Helium by imputnet, for example. Ghostty by the revered Mitchell Hashimoto is another example of something I daily and is relatively indie.
Corpo-slop seems to be enshittifying at an exponential rate due to decision paralysis and general management talent decay.
I think this space is just about to get really interesting. Historically when a craft/skill becomes automated it pushes that craft/skill to explore all those nooks and crannies which the automation can not reach, build around and exploit all those nooks and crannies, giving them a say over form and function. We are just starting to see this happen in software with AI.
- at first LLMs apply a penalty to development: it requires to explore new toolings for AI assisted coding, then select and get used to one of them, that might well end up being a transient solution. e.g. Cursor, to be replaced soon by Claude Code?
- new uncertainty about which feature to develop: if I can develop it, then anyone else surely can reverse engineer it easily and replicate it? This is quite unnerving.
This, for sure. A whole lot of things that would be too tedious or naive or ineffective will get tried, and a whole lot more people will have access to try ideas, I think things should get really fun and wild for a while.
We are definitely in a period of transition. The question (for me) is whether Indie developers will be able to make a living in the new world of an Internet dominated by a few massive corporations and their AI tools.
>> it is getting harder for small software vendors
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...
This is classic engineer trying to build a business. Indie software is more of a business than it is software. Everyone wants to do the easy part(coding/tech), nobody wants to relentlessly service customers and do marketing/distribution.
Coding is easy. Building a business is hard, whether indie or VC backed.
It's basically a blog post to plug links to author's (presumably) struggling projects.
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. If anything, the golden age is now.
I think part of the disagreement is how “the golden age” is being defined.
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.
Exactly this... I think there will be a golden age of excel replacement SaaS solutions with highly customized UX and workflows for vertical use cases. But, at the same time a lot more competition. Regardless, it will be great for users / companies with these specific problems.
AI tools are shifting the story of indie app creation from needing the skill + time + interest to just needing the time + interest (spending the necessary time workshopping the process with AI).
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.
When I saw the headline, I genuinely could not picture what could possibly be meant by "A Golden Age Of Software In Which We Currently Reside."
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.
The signal-to-noise ratio is going crazy. How do you stand out when there are 10x as many people trying to make the same buck as you? There is so much garbage being created, it's insane.
Or from a users perspective: Why bother looking for software that fits your purpose, when you can just let the AI write one from scratch that does?
A lot of what makes software complicated is that it has to serve thousands of users with different requirements at once. With AI on the other side, that's not something a user has to worry about, they can just let the AI spawn a much smaller special purpose tool that solves exactly the problem they are having.
We might be entering the age of disposable software, where software isn't a product, but just something your AI system produces temporarily in the background for the task at hand.
For years the size of the market grew as more as more people came online. The competition also increased. But now it seems the competition is increasing while the market size is stagnating or even shrinking. By competition I mean everything competing for attention.
It's a shift towards what was known to be indie software as personal software and what used to be products of big corporations as indie software. It remains to be seen how big corporations will adjust with their bigger inertia.
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?
For me I care about the minutiae's of good software and AI slop produced software just has none of that. It takes experience to produce that and experience to understand how well something is crafted.
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.
I feel it's harder, I get clicks but no engagement.
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. So it's not because they are filling space where they don't have real ads available. It makes you feel like they run their own ads to jack up the price.
You have to distinguish between two different versions of "indie" software. What the author is describing, small business products really heavily reliant on marketing and traffic to me don't even fall under that label. That's not indie software, that's just software.
I had a CS teacher in school who spent 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 genuinely niche and serves an authentic community of people and enthusiasts that no company cares about anyway.
If you're in that kind of space and you don't care about attention next week desperately you don't need to be worried about some random technology because it's about people anyway, you're just the guy or girl who happens to be able to write software to help out.
As an indie software developer myself, I think that the most difficult part of the business is not writing the software but rather finding potential customers. That's why I have few worries about LLM slop. "If you build it, they will come" is a fantasy. Marketing will make or break you.
In my case, there are a couple of cliches that are actually true: it's a marathon, not a sprint, and it took me 5 years to become an "overnight success". Thus, the ability to code faster with AI is totally irrelevant to me. That's not going to help. There are a number of comments here claiming that LLMs are going to usher in a golden age of indie software, but I think that's just delusional. These people don't appear to know what it takes to establish an indie business.
I can't speak about the effectiveness of Google Adwords, like the article author did, because 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 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.
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.
I am really excited at indie software again!
It's never been cheaper and easier to build real value. It's also never been cheaper and easier to build real crap–but, the indie devs who care will build more value with higher velocity and independence. And good indie development will come with it an air of quality that the larger crap will struggle to compete with (at the edges). Not that they'll care, because the big players be making more money off the entrenched behemoths.
But as an indie dev, your incentive structures are far different and far more manageable.
Betteridge's law applies here – if the author truly believed the thesis, they would have declared it as a statement rather than a question.
There's such an opportunity for people to actually explore ideas whose prototyping cost would have been too high with both time/money to not be worth it earlier.
And even outside that perspective, there's a lot of broken corpo software now. The indie hackers are fighting back. See Helium by imputnet, for example. Ghostty by the revered Mitchell Hashimoto is another example of something I daily and is relatively indie.
Corpo-slop seems to be enshittifying at an exponential rate due to decision paralysis and general management talent decay.
If it took 12 months to build a SaaS for a florist nobody would build a SaaS for a florist.
In some cases yes, other wise why would they make billions of dollars?
- traffic is slightly but noticeably decreasing for the last year: https://public.nocodefunctions.com
- it pushes me to improve the design, the overall quality, explore new feature spaces: https://next.nocodefunctions.com
Also, I noticed:
- at first LLMs apply a penalty to development: it requires to explore new toolings for AI assisted coding, then select and get used to one of them, that might well end up being a transient solution. e.g. Cursor, to be replaced soon by Claude Code?
- new uncertainty about which feature to develop: if I can develop it, then anyone else surely can reverse engineer it easily and replicate it? This is quite unnerving.
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...
Coding is easy. Building a business is hard, whether indie or VC backed.
My business has been profitable for 20 straight years, so I can't be that terrible at it. ;0)
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. If anything, the golden age is now.
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.
If they can ever find the solutions that exist for their specific problem.
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.
The point is that at the time paying $5 was a good trade so I didn't have to dick around with software.
But now it's trivial to have an LLM build it to my spec, yet still barely dick around with the software side.
A lot of software is like this.
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.
A lot of what makes software complicated is that it has to serve thousands of users with different requirements at once. With AI on the other side, that's not something a user has to worry about, they can just let the AI spawn a much smaller special purpose tool that solves exactly the problem they are having.
We might be entering the age of disposable software, where software isn't a product, but just something your AI system produces temporarily in the background for the task at hand.
Because the software a person makes will actually be good, and the one the AI makes will be garbage.
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?
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.
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. So it's not because they are filling space where they don't have real ads available. It makes you feel like they run their own ads to jack up the price.
https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/08/11/what-i-learned-spe...
I had a CS teacher in school who spent 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 genuinely niche and serves an authentic community of people and enthusiasts that no company cares about anyway.
If you're in that kind of space and you don't care about attention next week desperately you don't need to be worried about some random technology because it's about people anyway, you're just the guy or girl who happens to be able to write software to help out.
Fascinating! Do you have a link, or at least a name?
In my case, there are a couple of cliches that are actually true: it's a marathon, not a sprint, and it took me 5 years to become an "overnight success". Thus, the ability to code faster with AI is totally irrelevant to me. That's not going to help. There are a number of comments here claiming that LLMs are going to usher in a golden age of indie software, but I think that's just delusional. These people don't appear to know what it takes to establish an indie business.
I can't speak about the effectiveness of Google Adwords, like the article author did, because 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 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.