About

State of Indie Hacking is a record of small, independent software. People making money from products they own. Shipping that got cheap. Attention that got expensive. The homepage is the walk from a name in 2016 to the plot in front of us now. The other pages are the definitions, the arguments, and the lists that keep that walk from depending on memory.

The tone is the current state of a practice. It is not a book you work through, not a daily newspaper, and not an edition that expires when the year changes. Pages get updated when the record changes. They do not get a volume number.

Who it is for

Someone who wants the words to mean something specific. What indie hacking is, who counts, and how that differs from a venture startup. Someone who keeps seeing “dead,” “saturated,” and a revenue screenshot in the same afternoon and wants those claims separated. Someone who would rather read a source than a thread about the source.

It is a poor fit if you want a cohort, a prompt pack, or a promise about your month. Starting is described as what the record shows, not as a program.

How the numbers are handled

A founder-reported figure stays attached to the person, the date, and the mix. Pieter Levels’ ten-million line is revenue plus investment gains because that is what he wrote. Marc Lou’s 2025 total includes investing and payouts from X because that is what the letter contains. A TrustMRR print is Stripe-connected for that listing on that date, and it can move tomorrow.

This site does not average those into an industry salary. Benchmarks are separate datasets with populations. The glossary is there so MRR, ARR, and a Stripe balance do not get swapped for effect.

Drama that did not happen in a source does not get written in to make a page move. If a split was not published — how much of a headline was investing, how much of an MRR jump was agents — the page says the split was not published.

What it will not do

It will not sell a seat in a list. Who to follow, newsletters, podcasts, tools, communities, and courses state their pick rules. No affiliate markup, no paid placement.

It will not cover every launch. Stories are specific public arcs. A hub such as Pieter Levels, Marc Lou, Postiz, or Rob Hallam is a map onto those arcs and the primary posts, not a biography.

Who makes it

Kelvin, on X as @kelvinhtat. The footer has said that from the start. The editor’s job is the record: what changed, what a number includes, what a word used to mean. It is not a personal MRR diary, and the follow list does not include this byline.

Corrections belong where the source is public. If a date or a figure is wrong against the post it cites, the page should change. The changelog is the list of what the site itself published, not a feed of other people’s launches.

The bet under the pages is the same one the homepage ends on. A person can earn money from a product they own. The tactics around that bet keep getting copied until they are crowded. The record is which tactic just became the crowd, and which part was never the tactic at all.

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