SaaS indie hackers are founders who build software products on their own or with a tiny team, without venture money, and often share their revenue in public. They're the people to follow if you want to build a profitable SaaS without raising. This list comes from the indie makers Khrystyna Oleksiienko of LeadWave follows, plus the ones other lists of indie hackers cite most. On November 13, 2026, we checked what each one runs today, what it makes, and whether they still post.
The short version: 16 indie hackers made the list. The biggest indie SaaS businesses here are Tally ($6M ARR, 10 people) and Papermark ($4M ARR, two founders). Pieter Levels and Marc Lou have the biggest audiences. Revenue is Stripe-verified on TrustMRR where it exists and labelled self-reported where it isn't.
SaaS indie hackers to follow in 2026
Indie hackers with the biggest SaaS businesses
Marie Martens: co-founder of Tally, the form builder at $6M ARR with 10 people
Iuliia Shnai: co-founder of Papermark, bootstrapped to $4M ARR by two founders
Pieter Levels: the best-known indie hacker: Photo AI, Nomads.com, Remote OK
Tibo Louis-Lucas: built and sold Tweet Hunter and Taplio, now runs a product studio
Jon Yongfook: solo founder of Bannerbear, an image and video API at $81K MRR
Danny Postma: founder of HeadshotPro, $10M+ in revenue since launch
Laura Roeder: co-founder of Paperbell, after selling MeetEdgar
Indie hackers building many small products in public
Marc Lou: ships small SaaS fast and publishes Stripe-verified revenue
Tony Dinh: solo founder of TypingMind, building in public
Simon Høiberg: runs a portfolio of bootstrapped SaaS from Switzerland
Pauline Clavelloux: built a portfolio of four SaaS products while working at IBM
Sai Krishna: solo founder of Superblog, a fast blogging platform
Indie hackers behind marketplaces and exits
Ilya Novohatskyi: founder of Microns, the marketplace for micro-startups
Jaisal Rathee: solo founder of Tiny Startups, a launch platform for small products
Arvid Kahl: sold two companies and writes about how
Sahil Lavingia: founder of Gumroad and author of The Minimalist Entrepreneur
Key numbers
Tiny teams, real revenue. Tally makes $6M a year with 10 people and Papermark $4M with two founders, both without outside funding.
Most revenue is self-reported. Only Marc Lou, Ilya Novohatskyi and Jaisal Rathee show Stripe-verified revenue on TrustMRR for their main product; the rest comes from the founders' own posts.
Selling is part of the game. 7 of the 16 have sold at least one product: Tibo Louis-Lucas, Jon Yongfook, Danny Postma, Laura Roeder, Pauline Clavelloux, Jaisal Rathee and Arvid Kahl.
Audiences are big. Pieter Levels has nearly a million followers on X, and nine of the 16 have more than 160,000.
Source: X profile counts via the public fxtwitter API, Nov 13, 2026.
Indie hackers with the biggest SaaS businesses
Marie Martens
Marie Martens and Filip Minev started Tally, a form builder, at a kitchen table in Ghent, Belgium in 2020. It grew with no ads and no funding to $6M in ARR by September 2026, with more than 2.5 million users and a team of 10. She posts Tally's milestones and lessons on product-led growth on X; read In 2026 we're optimizing for quality, not revenue, with Tally's revenue timeline from $0.
Follow: X · Tally blog
Iuliia Shnai
Iuliia Shnai's first startup raised a seed round, hired a team and shut down. She then shipped about ten products in a year with no hit before co-founding Papermark, an open-source alternative to DocSend, with Marc Seitz. Papermark announced $3M ARR in 28 months in August 2026, and she posted $4M ARR in November, with no outside funding. She posts daily on X: monthly metrics, growth experiments and building with AI.
Pieter Levels
Pieter Levels builds alone and posts the numbers. Photo AI made $105,000 a month in March 2026, by his own figures, alongside Nomads.com and Remote OK. With nearly a million followers on X, he's probably the best-known indie hacker, and he writes on X and levels.io about cheap, simple tech stacks and running everything without a team.
Tibo Louis-Lucas
Tibo Louis-Lucas went bankrupt in 2020, then built Tweet Hunter and Taplio and sold both to lemlist in 2022. His studio, TMAKER, now runs a string of AI products, including Revid.ai and Outrank, which he says together make more than $1M a month. He posts about SEO, distribution and launching fast; how he sold two products for $8M is a good start.
Jon Yongfook
Jon Yongfook launched a run of small startups, sold two of them, then went all-in on Bannerbear, an API for generating images and videos, which his X bio puts at $81K MRR. Bannerbear's open-startup page shares its growth story from $0 to $10K, $20K and $50K MRR. He posts on X about bootstrapping SaaS and building with AI agents.
Danny Postma
Danny Postma, a Dutch indie maker, built and sold Headlime and Landingfolio before launching HeadshotPro, AI headshots for teams, in 2023. Its site says it has passed $10M in revenue. He posts on X about AI products and running his business with AI agents from Bali.
Laura Roeder
Laura Roeder co-founded MeetEdgar, a social media scheduler, and sold it to SureSwift Capital in 2022. With her husband she now runs Paperbell, software for coaches, which she says is in the low millions of ARR with one full-time employee, no meetings and no investors. Hear her on how to beat a venture-backed competitor.
Indie hackers building many small products in public
Marc Lou
Marc Lou builds lots of small products and shows what each makes. His analytics tool DataFast is at $28,070 MRR and TrustMRR, his database of Stripe-verified startup revenue, at $11,992, both verified on TrustMRR itself; his ShipFast boilerplate has made $1.27M all-time. He says he made $1,032,000 in 2025. Read I've made $3M with my 36 startups.
Follow: X · Newsletter
Tony Dinh
Tony Dinh is the solo founder behind TypingMind, a front end for AI models, and DevUtils. He relaunched TypingMind on Product Hunt in June 2026 and posts his experiments on X and in his newsletter, lately running Claude Code as an autonomous agent and building games with AI.
Follow: X · Newsletter
Simon Høiberg
Simon Høiberg, a Danish engineer, built an audience on X and YouTube and then a portfolio of SaaS products: FeedHive for social media, Aidbase for AI support, LinkDrip and SignupGate. He posts about bootstrapping, AI tools and owning your stack instead of renting it, as in his post on founders' reliance on Vercel, Supabase and Clerk.
Pauline Clavelloux
Pauline Clavelloux built SaaS side projects while working at IBM: one failed, one she sold on Microns, one died with Twitter's API pricing. She now runs four, led by IACrea, and wrote in her newsletter that she reached €100K ARR in November 2024. Her newsletter covers launches, naming, pricing and distribution.
Follow: X · Newsletter · LinkedIn
Sai Krishna
Sai Krishna built mHotspot to a million users as a student, then turned his SEO experience into Superblog, a solo SaaS for fast, SEO-ready blogs. He builds it in public on X, posting about SEO, infrastructure costs and customer wins; his last published revenue was $2,300+ MRR in 2023.
Indie hackers behind marketplaces and exits
Ilya Novohatskyi
Ilya Novohatskyi, a Kyiv engineer laid off in the COVID cuts, launched Microns in 2021, a marketplace for buying and selling micro-startups. It has made $209,824 in Stripe-verified revenue on TrustMRR, and he reported $5,659 from it in August 2026. He posts the deals closed on Microns, with MRR, price and multiple, and monthly income reports.
Follow: X · Newsletter
Jaisal Rathee
Jaisal Rathee started building at 16 and says he has had ten small exits, including Startups.fyi. In 2024 he launched Tiny Startups, a launch platform for small products, which has made $183,553 in Stripe-verified revenue, solo and bootstrapped. He posts about launches, directories and backlink economics.
Follow: X · Newsletter
Arvid Kahl
Arvid Kahl sold FeedbackPanda and wrote Zero to Sold about it. In 2026 Audiohook bought his second company, Podscan, which processes more than 70,000 podcast episodes a day, and he now runs it there. He posts about bootstrapping and building in public, mostly on X.
Sahil Lavingia
Sahil Lavingia founded Gumroad, which has paid creators more than $1 billion, and runs it in public, down to annual meetings on YouTube. In 2026 he handed the CEO role to Ershad Kunnakkadan and became chairman. His book, The Minimalist Entrepreneur, is close to a manual for indie hackers.
Who SaaS indie hackers learn from
Not indie hackers themselves today, but the people whose podcasts, forums and interviews most of the founders above learned from.
Rob Walling
Rob Walling has helped bootstrapped SaaS founders for 16 years. His weekly podcast, Startups for the Rest of Us, is past 850 episodes, and MicroConf is the conference for bootstrapped SaaS.
Courtland Allen
Courtland Allen started Indie Hackers in 2016, sold it to Stripe and, with his brother Channing, made it independent again in 2023. Its forum and podcast archive are where many of the founders above first shared their numbers.
Follow: Indie Hackers · X
Pat Walls
Pat Walls started Starter Story in a Starbucks in about 2018: interviews with founders about how they make money. He grew it to multi-million annual revenue, bootstrapped, and sold it to HubSpot in February 2026.
Where SaaS indie hackers share their revenue
TrustMRR: Marc Lou's database of startups whose revenue comes straight from Stripe, so it can't be inflated. About 12,500 startups are listed.
Open-startup pages: Bannerbear and Papermark publish their growth and metrics on their own sites.
Indie Hackers and X: most of the founders above post milestones there first. See our best SaaS communities for the forums worth joining.
Microns and Acquire.com: when indie hackers sell, the listings show MRR and price.
FAQ
What is a SaaS indie hacker?
A founder who builds and runs a SaaS product alone or with a very small team, without venture capital, and grows it on customer revenue. Many share their revenue and lessons in public, which is called building in public.
Who is the most successful SaaS indie hacker?
By revenue on this list, Tally's founders, Marie Martens and Filip Minev, at $6M ARR, then Papermark's Iuliia Shnai and Marc Seitz at $4M ARR. Tibo Louis-Lucas says his portfolio of products makes more than $1M a month. Pieter Levels is the best known.
How much do SaaS indie hackers make?
From a few thousand dollars a month to millions a year. On this list, Tiny Startups made $3,772 in the last 30 days, Bannerbear $81K MRR and Tally about $500K a month, the last two by their founders' own figures.
How do I verify an indie hacker's revenue?
Check TrustMRR, which reads revenue straight from Stripe. Anything else, including screenshots on X, is self-reported.
Where can I learn to become a SaaS indie hacker?
Rob Walling's Startups for the Rest of Us podcast, the Indie Hackers forum and Starter Story's founder interviews; see also our bootstrapped SaaS companies.
How this list was built
We started from the indie makers in Khrystyna's Airtable list, and added the indie hackers that other lists cite most. On November 13, 2026, we checked each person's products, looked up their revenue on TrustMRR (which reads Stripe directly) and then in their own posts, and confirmed a recent public post. Revenue that isn't on TrustMRR is labelled self-reported. X follower counts come from the public fxtwitter API.
The list keeps founders who run a SaaS or software product today, bootstrapped, alone or with a small team, and who post publicly. We left out a few well-known names we couldn't confirm are still active.
About this list
Curated by Khrystyna Oleksiienko at LeadWave, which maintains a hand-researched database of SaaS and AI companies. See also our SaaS founders and CEOs to follow.
Selling to indie hackers?
Indie hackers buy tools, and they decide alone. LeadWave's list of SaaS companies lets you filter for small and bootstrapped SaaS companies and gives you the founder's verified email.
