PRESENTED BY

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

From five days of lockdown coding to 500,000 downloads and nearly $5k MRR.
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: Collect payment before you pay for usage to bootstrap cash flow.

Want your product seen by 280,000 founders and businesses? Sponsor an issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter. Choose between 2 affordable tiers that can fit almost any budget.

This founder's five-day hobby became a $5k app 🏋️

During lockdown, Shaun Donnelly built a simple iOS workout tracker because exercise was his excuse to leave the house. he shipped it five days later… and six years on, Personal Best has more than 500,000 downloads, about 50,000 monthly active users, App Store features, a WWDC 2026 keynote cameo, and nearly $5k MRR.

Shaun still contracts part-time to keep the lights on. But that constraint has shaped a business with unusually low overhead: Personal Best runs almost entirely on-device, so marginal costs stay close to zero as it grows.

Lots of aspiring entrepreneurs have to hold onto their full-time jobs while hacking on the side, and this interview is a great case study in how to make that work. Enjoy!

Read the full article →

Your Carrier Logs Every Call 📱

Your carrier has a log of every call, text, and data session you've had. They've been holding it for years.

Who you called. When. How long. Where you were. For founders, that call log is a map of your investor conversations, your co-founder discussions, your client calls, and your legal consultations — all visible to a carrier that sells behavioral data to the highest bidder.

Carriers retain call metadata for years by default. The 2024 AT&T breach exposed call logs for 109 million Americans not because the attacker was sophisticated, but because the data existed and had value. Your carrier's business model involves monetizing the profile they build from your data.

Cape deletes call and text metadata in 24 hours. One price. No hidden costs.

Learn More Here

Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻‍💻

Hatch: Ditch ChatGPT. Use the most productive AI assistant ever made. Thoughtfully crafted by the founders of Indie Hackers.
Cursor: AI code editor that predicts your next edit and understands your project context.
Continue: Create custom AI copilots in VS Code or JetBrains with one open-source plugin.
v0: Type a prompt — v0 drafts production-ready React, Vue, or Svelte components.
Devin Desktop: The AI-powered IDE you love, now with an integrated Agent Command Center.

See all 30 tools in the directory →

Bite-sized growth tip 🍪

Collect payment before you pay for usage in order to bootstrap cash flow.

David Hauser and Siamak Taghaddos built Grasshopper, a virtual phone system for entrepreneurs, without outside funding. They simply charged customers' cards the moment they signed up.

The phone-service bills did not show up until weeks later. So Grasshopper had cash in hand before it had to pay to serve those customers, and used that gap to fund the infrastructure as it grew. The company eventually topped $2.5 million in monthly revenue and sold to Citrix.

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. AI Arch Generator: Your next space starts with an idea. AI architecture, interior design, and virtual staging.	▲ 7

	2. QuickRadar: Crypto alerts & arbitrage radar in Telegram Launching QuickRadar — build your own crypto alerts on Telegram for free.	▲ 4

	3. FinderBack: Back & Forward navigation in Finder’s right-click menu I built FinderBack to fix one tiny macOS Finder annoyance.	▲ 3

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 🐦

I don't care that you've probably heard this advice before. It's good enough to deserve repetition.

—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

You're subscribed to the Indie Hackers Newsletter. Click here to unsubscribe.

🗞️ What's New: 5 days to a $5k app, get paid before usage, your single most important task