Best indie hacking newsletters

A useful indie hacking newsletter has an archive, a person or a community you can name, and subjects that are products and customers rather than funding announcements. That is the whole pick rule. Frequency and “growth tips” are not the rule. Nobody paid to be on this page. There are no affiliate links. If a letter starts charging, the price on their site wins over any number you remember from a roundup.

Roundup posts that rank twenty newsletters are often ads for the roundup. This page would rather send you to five archives. Who to follow is the same people, in a different shape.

Indie Hackers

indiehackers.com/newsletter. Courtland Allen’s site is where the word got a home in 2016. The letter points at interviews, milestones, and discussions from that community. It is the wide shot. A single founder’s month will be thinner and more specific. Read both if you want the scene and a shop.

The site has also carried ads and member features over the years. The newsletter is still the public front door. Do not confuse a sponsored slot inside a community product with a sponsor slot on this page. There is not one here.

The Bootstrapped Founder

Arvid Kahl writes and speaks from a sold SaaS, FeedbackPanda, and from books about audience and bootstrapping. The essays are arguments, not a stack of links. His 2023 piece on Levels’ “dead” line is the kind of archive that still answers a question three years later. If you want a weekly-feeling essay rather than a digest, start here. The podcast is the same person, listed on the podcasts page.

Tony Dinh

news.tonydinh.com. Monthly letters from the maker behind Black Magic and TypingMind. The value is the continuity: a number, a context, a month that is not only the good one. Treat every revenue line as his report. The letter is a primary source this site already cites, which is a better reason to subscribe than a stranger’s star rating.

Just Ship It

Marc Lou’s newsletter. Launch notes, month recaps, and the occasional letter that corrects the audience myth. The 2025 year letter is the one to read before you repeat “$1 million” as if it were software-only ARR. Investing and X payouts are inside that headline, and he says so. His hub is the portfolio around the letters.

My First Dollar

Rob Hallam on Beehiiv. Shorter, more tactical, often about getting seen on X. A September 2026 post walked through a small site and SuperX revenue in his telling. Read it as an operator’s notes on attention, which is his business, not as a general theory of SaaS. The course pre-sale is a separate product, covered in the story and on his page.

A blog instead of an inbox

levels.io is not a newsletter. It is the post archive for Pieter Levels, and it is more primary than most letters. The nomad revenue post, the vibe-coding extinction post, the cancelled-SaaS receipts, and the $10 million mix all live there. If you only “follow” him on X, you will get the line and miss the definition under it. The hub points at the posts that need the definition.

Starter Story, as interviews

Starter Story is an interview site with a membership around it, not a single founder diary. This record uses it when a founder says a specific thing on camera, as with Nevo David’s Postiz checkpoints. Use the interview. Do not treat the site’s own growth claims, or a paid tier, as a neutral benchmark. Price and packaging change. Check the page.

What not to expect

These letters will not tell you what to build this weekend. They will not agree. Lou’s speed and Kahl’s audience essays and Dinh’s monthly P&L are different crafts. None of them is a census of what a typical product earns. Benchmarks are a different page, with worse odds than a newsletter voice suggests.

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