Monthly report for indie founders Issue 01 · October 2026

What to Build Now

What makes money for small internet businesses this month. Patterns from verified payment data, never stories about single companies.

The month at a glance

Two-minute read

Where the money and the momentum are

Each dot is a category. Right means customers pay more per month. Up means faster growth over the last 30 days. Dot size shows how many startups are in it.

Dashed lines mark the median across all startups: . Price axis is logarithmic.

Lean in

Tools for people who sell: marketing, sales and e-commerce
Analytics and fintech, close to money and growing fast
B2B pricing, or a business plan on top of a consumer product
A free trial instead of a free plan

Go carefully

Generic AI tools: crowded, and churn is high under $50/month
Mobile apps: same revenue, but at $7 per user and lower exit prices
Credits-only pricing, unless usage is frequent
Lifetime deals: cash once, flat growth after

Skip for now

Design tools and productivity apps: flat or shrinking
Developer tools: launches up 136%, revenue growth lagging
AI notetakers, dictation apps and vibe-coding builders

Three signals this month

Nine more sections in the full issue

Niche momentum across 19 categories, pricing benchmarks, how entry price separates the winners, what growth really tells you, what growing websites have in common, the channel mixes that earn, crowded vs open niches, exit multiples, and one experiment to run this month.

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About the data

How we made this

Revenue data: startups with at least $1,000 in verified revenue over the last 30 days, read directly from payment providers (Stripe, RevenueCat, Polar and others). Founders cannot edit it. Source: TrustMRR.
Privacy: we never report on single companies. Every number covers at least 10 startups.
Bias: founders choose to list their startups, so the data leans toward indie, bootstrapped and English-speaking products. A quarter of the startups are anonymous.
Growth: 30-day revenue growth is noisy for small startups, so we use medians, not averages.
Websites: every listed website we could load (), each classified by a language model against a fixed list of features, without access to revenue data.
Other sources: RevenueCat State of Subscription Apps 2026, ChartMogul AI churn report, Flippa H1 2026, Acquire.com multiples report, FE International, Product Hunt Q2 2026, Exploding Topics, and a sample of about 150 posts from r/SaaS, r/indiehackers, r/microsaas and r/Entrepreneur (September 2026).