Indie developer case studies: revenue and exits
Indie development means an individual building and running a service or app outside of company work. Small Start records indie-built businesses whose developers have publicly disclosed revenue or a sale price: monthly revenue, monetization model and acquisition channels, each with a source.
Indie revenue is a wide distribution. A tool stuck at ¥100/month sits on the same shelf as one clearing millions of yen. The archive keeps the low numbers too: ten apps in eight years earning ¥30K/month, and a first payout of ¥22.
- Case studies
- 62
- Sale price
- 9.8億円
Indie developer cases
1–24 of 62
Apollo for Reddit: One Price List Ended a Solo App With 1.5M Monthly Users — a Projected $20M a Year, and $250,000 in Refunds
A Reddit client built by one Canadian developer. At 1.5M monthly users and 50,000 annual subscribers, the API went paid — a projected $20M a year. It closed 22 days after the announcement, with $250,000 of refunds out of pocket.
Rootd: A Non-Coder Reached 2M Downloads With Zero Employees — After Turning Down a $40,000 Offer
Canadian solo founder Ania Wysocka built a panic attack app without writing code or hiring anyone: 2M+ downloads across 150 countries, 36,000+ reviews, 100+ app store features. She declined a $40,000 acquisition bid.
Overcast: The Full First-Year Ledger — $164,134, With $85,715 in Month One, Then a Decade at $15,684/Month
The full first-year breakdown published by Overcast's developer: $164,134 after Apple's cut, of which $85,715 came in the launch month. The post-launch average was $15,684 a month, and the app has been run by one person for ten years since.
CSS for JavaScript Developers: $577K in a 7-day presale
Josh W. Comeau's CSS course took $577K across 4,773 orders in a seven-day presale in March 2021, against a goal of 380 copies and about $50,000. What sold was a course roughly 50% finished, and the lever was an email list that went from 1,000 to 28,000 in fourteen months.
HabitKit: A GitHub-Style Grid Built a $602,000 Year — With $112,000 of It Landing in January Alone
German indie developer Sebastian Röhl made $602,000 from his habit tracker HabitKit in 2025. January alone brought $112,000, MRR sits at $28,000 across 25,100 paying subscribers, and downloads exceed 560,000 across both stores.
Sewashita: 13 Apps, 4.5 Years, 326 Android Installs
HAL has run 13 indie mobile apps for four and a half years. Monthly revenue is 1,800 to 2,000 yen from AdMob plus an average of $39 from subscriptions and one-time purchases. Cumulative downloads reached 21.7K, yet all 13 Android versions together account for 326 installs and daily active users sit at 250 to 270.
TF's apps: ¥103,437 in Year Eight — A Shiga Salaryman Who Kept Publishing His Ad Revenue Every Month, and Hit ¥20,000/Month in Year Nine
A nine-year record of side-project app development by a company employee in Shiga, Japan. Annual revenue was ¥52,859 in 2023 and ¥103,437 in 2024. By 2026 the monthly figures — ¥12,300 in January, ¥20,400 in June — have settled above ¥10,000.
Ankimaker: A High Schooler's Flashcard App Hit 1M Downloads in 8 Years — 300K of Them in One
Ankimaker, a study app a high school student built for his own exams, reached 1 million cumulative downloads about eight years after its June 2016 release. Roughly 300,000 of those came in the single year right after the developer quit his job. Revenue figures stay private, but subscriptions have replaced ads as half of sales.
SocialDog: ¥300M ARR and 1.3M Accounts with Zero VC Funding — Surviving a $42,000/Month API Bill Through Price Hikes and a Bank Loan
SocialDog, which grew out of founder Masashi Konishi's college-era side project "whotwi," has posted seven straight years of revenue growth and profit with no VC money. It passed ¥300M ARR and 1M accounts in October 2022, reaching 1.3M+ by July 2024 — and absorbed Twitter's $42,000/month Enterprise API fee via price increases and a ¥70M bank loan.
VMagicMirror: ¥10M on BOOTH While Giving Away Nearly Every Feature for Free
VMagicMirror, a Windows app that puts a VRM avatar on your desktop, passed ¥10 million in cumulative BOOTH sales four years after launch — with nearly every feature included in the free edition. No ads, no social account, no analytics, and the developer kept his day job.
Repsona: Five Years Solo, ¥12.4M Total Revenue — The Open Ledger of a Task-Management SaaS Its Maker Calls a "Startup Failure"
The developer of Japanese task-management SaaS Repsona published five years of numbers: total revenue of ¥12,403,567, 5,873 registered spaces, 14,641 cumulative users. Ads cost ¥500 per signup, but free-to-paid conversion was about 1%. A look inside his self-assessment: "a great success as a hobby, a big failure as a startup."
kan.kikuchi: ¥5,913,887 a Year from Solo-Built Joke VR Games — With the ¥420K Build Cost and 813 Hours All on the Record
A solo developer's VR games grossed ¥5,913,887 in their first year, netting ¥4,490,828 — more than 80% of it from a single title, Chupa Chupa VR. He published the build cost (¥420,544), the hours (813) and the refund rate (14.1%) too.
An Anonymous Solo Developer's ERP Integration SaaS: ~¥3M MRR with Zero Employees, Zero Ad Spend — and No Hand-Written Code for Six Months
A middleware SaaS that converts legacy ERP SOAP/XML interfaces into modern REST APIs reached roughly ¥3M in MRR with zero employees and zero ad spend, its operator disclosed on Zenn. For the past six months every line of code has been written by Claude Code. SEO posts targeting error messages drive acquisition. The operator is anonymous, so the figures cannot be externally verified.
Jammsworks: Two Childhood Friends, 49 Escape Games and ¥600M in Cumulative Revenue — It Started by Reading 100 Rivals' 1-Star Reviews
Two childhood friends from Gunma released 49 escape-room games between October 2016 and August 2024, passing 30 million downloads and ¥600 million in cumulative revenue. The starting point was reading the negative reviews of 100 competing titles and building the opposite. They also disclose the failure that halved revenue on game two.
280blocker: The Solo-Built Ad Blocker That Sold for ¥377M — 14x Its Operating Profit — When Its Developer Fell Ill
iOS ad blocker 280blocker was sold to listed company Tobila Systems for ¥377 million in August 2021. Its disclosed financials showed ¥38M revenue and ¥27M operating profit, putting the price at roughly 14x annual profit. The app had topped Japan's App Store paid rankings three years running — and changed hands when its solo developer fell ill.
Podscan: $4,000 in the Red Every Month, Two Months After Declaring Profitability — Arvid Kahl's Second Act Is a Fight With GPU Bills
Podscan, the current venture of FeedbackPanda seller Arvid Kahl, transcribes 50,000 podcast episodes a day. One month in: $300 MRR against $2,000 in costs. Profitable after one year — then a big-customer churn flipped it to $6,000 MRR against $10,000 in expenses. He narrates the whole ride, weekly and in public.
Genji Reincarnation: 32 copies in month one, and a payout of zero
Usagijo spent about three years building the visual novel Genji Reincarnation and sold 32 copies on Steam in its first month, one of them refunded. Revenue never reached Steam's $100 payout threshold. Ten press pitches, 25,200 ad impressions and 24 activated review keys are all disclosed tactic by tactic.
Take Me to Koshien: ¥12.9M in 11 months, and the ¥100 ticket that multiplied IAP revenue by ten
Yu Furuta, a solo developer in Nagoya, shipped a high school baseball manager sim in November 2017. By the end of September 2018 it had earned ¥12.9M in total, peaking at ¥2.57M in August. With 48,000 downloads and about 3,000 DAU, 76% of revenue came from in-app purchases. The turn came from a ¥100 draft ticket.
textlint Maintainer azu: ¥2.29M a Year in OSS Sponsorships — textlint, JSer.info, and 14 Years of Continuity Built a Donation-Funded Solo Practice
azu, known for the proofreading tool textlint and the 14-year-running JSer.info, publishes his open-source finances every year. His 2025 GitHub Sponsors income was about ¥2.29M (¥160K–¥366K per month). A rare documented case of donation-only income reaching monthly-revenue levels without selling anything.
BoltAI: $15K a Month on One-Time Licenses in a Subscription-Only AI Market
Vietnamese solo developer Daniel Nguyen went against the "AI tools = subscriptions" consensus and sells BoltAI, a native macOS AI app, as a one-time license: an average of $15K a month and 7,000 customers 18 months after launch. He also documented the $19→$79 price climb and the year lost on his failed first product, KTool.
The Exit 8: A ¥470 Solo-Developed Game That Sold 30,000 Copies on Day One and 1.4 Million in Just Over a Year — How "Spot the Anomaly" Made Streaming Sell Copies
The Exit 8, a ¥470 walking simulator built alone by a former game-company employee, sold over 30,000 copies on launch day in November 2023 and passed 1.4 million worldwide by January 2025. It spawned the "8-like" genre, and its live-action film adaptation reached ¥5.17 billion at the box office.
Inkdrop: ¥150,000 a Month from a $4.99 Markdown Note App — Two Years of an Indie SaaS That Stopped PR Emails and Refused to Go Freemium
Japanese developer TAKUYA's Inkdrop reached ¥150,000 in monthly sales about two years after launch, with a ¥950,000 single-month spike in August 2019. A 1,000-person private beta, a 60-day free trial, no freemium, no more PR emails — the reasoning behind each decision is public, alongside the numbers.
Damon Chen: Bought a GitHub Repo for $20K, Grew It to $1.5M ARR — the “Buy, Don’t Build” Indie Playbook
Former engineer Damon Chen grew Testimonial.to to over $2M cumulative revenue in four years, then in the early ChatGPT boom bought a pre-revenue repository (now PDF.ai) for $20K. Repositioned as "AI you can chat with about PDFs," it grew to $1.5M ARR within months. A defining example of indie development that buys the seed instead of building from scratch.
A high schooler's paid Discord bot nets ¥12,000/month profit — reading the logic behind pricing ¥500 on top of a ¥320 cost
Entering a Discord text-to-speech market full of free bots at ¥500/month, cost about ¥320 per 200,000 characters, and ¥12,000/month profit by year two. Even the signup pace is quantified.
FAQ
- How much do indie developers earn?
- Cases here range from a first payout of ¥22 to ¥1M/month reached after 14 years, and PhotoAI at $132K/month run by one person. Ad-only tools at ¥100K/month and a ¥4,000/month subscription with 50 paying members are documented with sources.
- Can an indie project be sold?
- Yes. Zenn was acquired by Classmethod four and a half months after launch, MENTA sold to Lancers at ¥1.4M monthly revenue, and Potion changed hands between individuals for $300K.