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PRESENTED BY

Here's what you'll find in this issue:

Katie Keith built a $1.6M/year WordPress plugin empire in ~30 hours a week. Then AI came for her traffic.
5 vibe coding tools. Some of the latest apps for coding with AI.
Yesterday's build board winners, including three new product launches from indie hackers.
30-second growth tip: Switch from per-transaction pricing to a flat membership fee.

BlinkUX, a product design consultancy partnering with innovators like Google and NASA, is recruiting AI agent builders and users to shape next. Complete the eligibility form to join their panel, test cutting-edge tools before launch, share insights, earn gift cards, and help shape AI products used by people like you.

Katie Keith’s $1.6M/year WordPress empire hit an AI wall 🔄

Katie Keith cofounded Barn2 Media with her husband back in 2010 and switched it from web design to WordPress plugins in 2016. A decade later, she's at $10M in lifetime sales and $1.6M a year, runs the whole 15-person team in about 30 hours a week, and just hit her 10-year plugin anniversary. Pretty great setup.

Then, mid-2024, the ground started moving. Google's AI overviews ate into her organic traffic, and people increasingly just vibe code their own version of a simple utility plugin instead of buying one. Renewals are holding steady (66% of revenue), but new sales have been sliding. Basically, the discovery channel that built the business is drying up.

Her fix is diversification. She's going deeper on her biggest products to build real moats, and expanding into Shopify, where people find apps inside the App Store instead of Google. That sidesteps the AI search problem almost entirely. She also had Claude build her a custom analytics dashboard so she can actually see what's working.

In other words, this is a case study in how to adapt to AI disruption. With lessons we'll all need to learn sooner rather than later. Highly recommend!

Read the full article →

The 2026 SaaS growth loop for SaaS teams

Ads turn off. Authority doesn’t.

In 2026, buyers discover SaaS in two places:

Google
AI answers

If you’re not visible in both, you’re not even in the conversation. Your competitors already are.

dofollow.com helps B2B SaaS teams lock in organic demand with high-authority backlinks and AI-ready brand mentions.

What you’re actually paying for:

DR70–90+ backlinks from sites like Canva, HubSpot and Monday
Contextual brand mentions designed to surface in AI answers
A strategist embedded in your category
Live dashboard, reporting, and continuous link monitoring

This is how teams like Surfshark, Pitch and Experian compound growth while others keep buying clicks.

Build demand that compounds →

Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻‍💻

Hatch: Ditch ChatGPT. Use the most productive AI assistant ever made. Thoughtfully crafted by the founders of Indie Hackers.
Augment Code: Context-aware AI agent that navigates huge repos and writes fixes like a senior dev.
Continue: Create custom AI copilots in VS Code or JetBrains with one open-source plugin.
Amazon Q Developer: Build and refactor AWS apps faster with AI that understands your stack.
Cline: Plan, act, and execute tasks inside VS Code with an open-source dual-mode agent.

See all 30 tools in the directory →

Bite-sized growth tip 🍪

Switch from per-transaction pricing to a flat membership fee.

Emma Lawler and Philip Thomas, the co-founders of Moonlight, originally built their marketplace to match companies with senior developers by taking a cut of every transaction. But they had a major "leakage" problem. Companies were using Moonlight to vet developers, then quietly hiring them full-time off-platform to avoid the transaction fees.

So they leaned into the behavior and flipped the model. Instead of fighting the "sneaky" hires, they switched to a flat, recurring membership fee for access to the talent pool. Revenue became predictable, usage actually went up because the transaction penalty was gone, and they grew to $55K/month.

Read the full growth report →

The Build Board 🪧

Every day, indie hackers post updates about the products they're building. Here's what the community voted to the top yesterday!

	1. Valta: A spending limit an AI agent cannot break I'm 17, building from Lagos — just shipped hard spending limits for AI agents	▲ 17

	2. Calcrux: Free calculators for sellers, investors, and businesses I got tired of paywalls on basic business math. So I built Calcrux.	▲ 13

	3. AllInOneTools: Privacy-first free online tools for everyday tasks — no signup User Agent Finder – Instantly discover your browser's identity	▲ 7

Enjoy building in public? Post an update to your product page on Indie Hackers, and it will automatically be added to the daily leaderboard.

AI assistants are evolving. Hatch is the next generation. 🧠

AI models have evolved. ChatGPT has not.

We're still using the same old AI assistant products we were using in 2022, even though the models underneath them keep getting better.

It's time for the next generation of AI assistants.

Introducing Hatch, the most productive AI assistant ever made.

From the creators of Indie Hackers, Hatch was thoughtfully crafted to help you get real work done. From floating windows to tagging documents, we've reimagined every aspect of your daily AI assistant to help you operate at a higher level.

Try Hatch free. Use code INDIE30FREE for 100% off for 1 month.

Channing's Tweet Pick 🐦

Couldn't agree more. No one should be calling themself a "non-technical founder" anymore!

—Channing

We'd love your feedback! 🙃

Did you like today's stories? Did they suck? Which ones?

We're constantly changing things up to make this newsletter more useful, so let us know what you think by replying directly to this email. We read every reply!

Special thanks to Yushavel Calderon for the graphic design, and to James Fleischmann for contributing a post.

—Channing

Indie Hackers | 522 W Riverside Ave #6526, Spokane, WA, 99201

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🗞️ What's New: $1.6M/year WordPress empire, flat membership fees, are non-tech founders still a thing?