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 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.

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.