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.
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.
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.
> Without LLMs, this would have never been feasible because of dev time and/or costs.
This implies that the ultimate payoff will be quite small, doesn't it? I would think that a "golden age" requires gold, so to speak. A lucrative software business should eventually return profits after costs in the long run.
To me, it doesn't sound like a golden age if the idea is just to break even on development.
Are we just talking about a hobby here, or about becoming a professional indie software developer? Those are two vastly different outcomes. If you can't quit your day job, I wouldn't call it a golden age.
In another comment you said, "it will be great for users / companies with these specific problems." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46360019 But this seems to be changing the subject. The article author is a software developer trying to make a living. A golden age for florists, for example, is not necessarily a golden age for indie software developers.
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.
In software, we often talk about tackling the hardest problems our industry has to offer. In marketing, what you just described is the hardest problem that industry has right now. Somebody who can come up with a viable solution will change the game completely, and not just in software. In music, books, movies, TV, videos, video games, etc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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...
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?
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.
I can empathize with the author. I'm trying to get my first software business off the ground, and one of my moats was well, having written software. For 20 years. I know that writing software is a small part of a software business, but it was a differentiator. I'm still better off than a vibe-coder, but I think about that.
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.
I guess a lot of gravediggers lost their job at the end of the black death and no-one should be too sad about that. But I feel that the world will definitely lose something if LLMs put all the Indie software developers out of business.
There are pro factors too. For example, the subscription culture pushed by those big platforms has trained user to pay to get. This is a vast improvement compare to decades ago where most user will just download, trial, expire and pirate.
> 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.
If I want a bespoke table crafted by a woodworker I need to pay material and labor costs and thus it ends up costing quite a lot more than grabbing one at IKEA.
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.
i have the same feeling too. i think distribution has become particularly harder for new products. there is no reliable channel that does not need constant effort (social media), and others like ads have become unviable for low ticket items. i dont know what the solution is.
Saying that just after Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, an indie game, won an unprecedented number of awards, including GOTY. Before that, it was Baldur's Gate 3, and between the two was Silksong, so successful that it broke Steam.
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.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 37.7 ms ] threadThe 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.
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 implies that the ultimate payoff will be quite small, doesn't it? I would think that a "golden age" requires gold, so to speak. A lucrative software business should eventually return profits after costs in the long run.
To me, it doesn't sound like a golden age if the idea is just to break even on development.
Are we just talking about a hobby here, or about becoming a professional indie software developer? Those are two vastly different outcomes. If you can't quit your day job, I wouldn't call it a golden age.
In another comment you said, "it will be great for users / companies with these specific problems." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46360019 But this seems to be changing the subject. The article author is a software developer trying to make a living. A golden age for florists, for example, is not necessarily a golden age for indie software developers.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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...
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 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.
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.
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.
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.