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PRESENTED BY

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

This founder monetized free open-source tools instead of going the traditional SaaS route.
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: Let users sell things on your platform so they recruit customers for you.

You ship fast. Customer support shouldn’t get in the way. Fernand helps you stay on top of everything with inbox, AI chat, and docs in one place. Built for indie hackers who want to move fast. $29/month. Try for free on getfernand.com

He quit his job to build free software for a living 🆓

Caleb Porzio saved money, quit his job, and started building open-source projects for fun with no real monetization plan. Within a year, sponsorships were paying his bills. Now, his portfolio of free tools brings in five-figure MRR through courses, e-books, and premium components. Building in the open and giving it away turned out to be the business model for him.

His portfolio includes Livewire, Alpine, and Flux UI. Livewire is the flagship: it simplifies full-stack development by letting you skip heavy JavaScript frameworks. But the tools alone didn't build the business. Caleb had an existing audience in the Laravel community from conference talks and a stint at a popular agency, plus a natural charisma for writing engaging content and building relationships. He admits things would have been much harder without that head start.

In our interview, Caleb covers competing in open source where nothing stays proprietary for long, why he learned more observing Taylor Otwell than from any instruction, and his aggressive "don't spend money" philosophy. Solid lessons from a different path.

Read the full article →

Grow your team without the growing pains. 📈

You've built something real. But once your team starts growing, you’re suddenly drowning in payroll processing, benefits enrollment, and compliance questions you never signed up for.

That's where Justworks comes in. We handle the parts of running a business that don't deserve your attention: automated payroll that actually works, benefits your team will actually use, international hiring without the legal minefield, and tax compliance you can trust. When things get confusing (and they will), our team of small business experts is there 24/7 with actual answers — no automated responses, no AI agents.

Thousands of founders have freed up their time for what actually matters. Whether you're just hiring your first employee or scaling your team, Justworks grows with you, without the growing pains.

Visit www.justworks.com to see how other makers are building without the busywork.

Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻‍💻

Hatch: All-in-one AI workspace for chats, documents, and files that understands your whole project. From the founders of Indie Hackers. :)
Kilo Code: Open-source AI assistant that orchestrates complex tasks, writes, and self-repairs — all inside VS Code.
Junie: Chat, refactor, and generate tests across JetBrains IDEs with context-aware AI.
Repo Prompt: Generate and edit code across repositories using AI-driven prompts.
Bolt.new: Prompt an app — Bolt spins up and deploys the full-stack in one click.

See all 30 tools in the directory →

Bite-sized growth tip 🍪

Let users sell things on your platform so they recruit customers for you.

Emmanuel Straschnov and Josh Haas built Bubble, a no-code app builder. In 2016, they launched a marketplace where users could sell templates, plugins, and services to other users. This completely changed how people related to Bubble.

The best users became entrepreneurs who made money when the platform grew, which meant they had every reason to promote Bubble, create tutorials that attracted buyers, and answer forum questions to build credibility. Suddenly Bubble had a salesforce they never had to hire. The marketplace also solved the "what do I build?" problem for new users, since they could just buy a template and customize it instead of starting from scratch. Fewer people bounced.

If your product has any creative output, consider letting users sell what they make. You take a cut, they get a business, and everyone wants the pie to get bigger.

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. Spectry.io: Find what's hurting conversions. Behavior analytics + AI. Have you ever wanted to ask "How is it going?" from your website?	▲ 12

	2. WinnerSpy: Find products worth testing from Facebook Ads Library Building WinnerSpy: reducing noise in Facebook Ads Library product research	▲ 11

	3. Galinia: AI Meditation App I just launched my first app. Here's what launch day actually feels like.	▲ 6

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

You have docs about your startup. Your AI has no idea they exist. 🧠

Think about everything you know about your business: your ideal customer profile, your pricing rationale, your competitive landscape, your roadmap, your lessons learned. It's probably scattered across Google Docs, Notion pages, and your own head.

Now think about how much of that your AI can actually use when you ask it a question.

None of it.

Hatch is an AI assistant where your docs and your chats live in the same app... and they talk to each other. Write docs about your business (or get the AI to write them!), tag them in any conversation, and your AI reads them before it responds. Not a summary. Not a pasted snippet. The whole thing.

What that means in practice:

Write your ideal customer profile once: every marketing chat knows your customer, your positioning, and your voice
Keep a running startup journal: ask “what should I focus on this week?” and get an answer based on what you've actually shipped and learned
Store your SOPs and playbooks: get help that follows your process, not generic five-step guides from the internet
Open any combination of chats and docs side by side in floating windows: work on multiple problems at once without losing context

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

Channing's Tweet Pick 🐦

Just so you know what you're getting into!

—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 | 120 Westlake Avenue N, Seattle, Washington 98109

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🗞️ What's New: Quitting to build portfolio of tools, solo founder crisis, users who recruit users