Indie developer case studies: revenue and exits — 2/2
Indie developer cases
25–44 of 44
Lea, a Tool That Turns LINE Official Accounts Into E-Commerce Stores, Sold to a Buyer Found Through an Online Salon
Lea, an indie SaaS providing e-commerce features on top of LINE official accounts, was sold to INFLU Inc. in July 2022 (price undisclosed). The buyer was found through a paid online salon — a record of an unusual route: "walk into the place where the market is booming yourself."
PDFShift: An HTML-to-PDF API at $8,500/Month — One Channel Ended a Two-Year Plateau; a $500K Sale Fell Through
A Paris-based solo developer's HTML-to-PDF conversion API earned $9 on day 20, reached 150 customers and $3,200/month by January 2020, and turned profitable that September. MRR flatlined for over two years starting September 2021, then returned to 8–9% monthly growth after resuming Google Ads, now at $8,500/month.
Stella: MVP in 2 Days, $350K/Month in 2 Months — an AI App Built by a Solo Creator With 4 Million Followers
AI visualization app Stella hit $300K/month (about ¥45M) two months after launch and $350–360K by interview time, from a 2-day MVP. 12,000 paying customers and 200,000+ downloads. Building a distribution network of 1.2M on Instagram and 2.8M on TikTok before the product mattered.
¥50,000 a Month, Five Years After the First Release. An Indie App's "Quietly Effective Tactics" — and the Ones That Didn't Work
A case of an indie-developed app reaching ¥50,000 a month — five years after the first release, about two years after monetization began. Funnel improvements and the Apple Small Business Program worked; defaulting to the annual plan and A/B testing did not. The record discloses which tactics succeeded and which failed.
Aceternity UI: 7 Free Components to Start, $80,000/Month Within 2 Months of the Paid Tier — a Two-Story Model
Manu Arora of Jaipur, India started a free UI component library with just 7 components built over a weekend. Two months after launching the paid Aceternity UI Pro, monthly revenue reached $80,000 (UI Pro $40K + custom dev work $30K).
CLOUD PAPER: Shingo Irie’s Other Sale — an Estimate/Invoice SaaS Sold via M&A Two Months After the MENTA Transfer
After transferring MENTA to Lancers, Shingo Irie also sold his cloud estimate and invoicing service "CLOUD PAPER" via M&A in December 2020 (price undisclosed). A rare Japanese record of a single indie developer executing two exits in the same year.
Peing: Built in 6 Hours, 200M Monthly PV in One Month — Sold at the Breaking Point of Virality
Peing, an anonymous Q&A service built in 6 hours by 26-year-old indie developer Seseri, hit 400,000 daily PV on day 5 and a 200M monthly PV pace within a month. Overwhelmed by server load and the limits of solo operation, it was sold to Jiraffe just one month after launch (price undisclosed).
PhotoAI at $132K a Month, Zero Employees, 37,000 Commits a Year: Dissecting Pieter Levels' "Solo-Run" Playbook
AI photo generator PhotoAI earns $132K a month (about ¥19.8M), and Pieter Levels' entire portfolio tops $228K a month—run with zero employees. 37,000 commits a year, two-second deploys, GPT-4-automated moderation. Levels openly admits only 4 of his 70 projects hit. Here's what's actually behind his operation.
¥4.61 Million a Year, Five Years After Starting to Learn Programming. The Full Three-Year P&L and Playbook of an Indie Education App
An education web/smartphone app that began as a homemade tool to ease cram-school work grew from ¥120,000 (FY2023) to ¥1.47 million (FY2024) to ¥4.61 million in revenue (¥3.91 million profit) in FY2025. The developer discloses what drove each year's growth. Fully independent as of March 2025.
TypingMind: Quit at $600 MRR, Then $45K/Month — Every Decision in Tony Dinh’s Build-Sell-Release Loop
Vietnamese indie developer Tony Dinh quit his job at $600 MRR. TypingMind, shipped right after the ChatGPT API opened, made $1,000 on day one, $10,000 in 10 days, and later $45K/month. Meanwhile, when the Twitter API crisis hit Black Magic, he decided within two weeks to sell it for $128K. Every offensive and defensive call is public.
MENTA, Shingo Irie's 30th Indie Project: From ¥1.4M Monthly Revenue to a Share Transfer to Lancers — the Full Story
Online mentoring service MENTA was Shingo Irie's 30th indie project. From ¥90,000 in gross transactions on day one, through a pivot to programming-only, it grew to ¥9M in monthly gross transactions and ¥1.4M in revenue. Launched June 2018, it was transferred to Lancers via share transfer in October 2020.
Zenn: A Solo-Built Dev Community Transferred to Classmethod 4.5 Months After Launch
Nine days after launch, the solo-built Zenn published "Zenn needs help," fielded offers from more than 20 companies, and was transferred to Classmethod 4.5 months after going live. The decision-making process of a case where "growth was too fast for one person to handle" is fully public.
ScrapingBee: Two Failures, $5M ARR, an 8-Figure All-Cash Exit — the Complete “By-the-Book” Journey
ScrapingBee, a web scraping API built by a French duo, followed two failed products with $1K MRR in its first month → $100K ARR in 14 months → $500K in 2 years → $1.5M with a team of 4 → $5M ARR, and was sold to the Oxylabs group in 2025 for eight figures, all cash. The entire journey — an ideal template for indie developers — is publicly documented.
From 30 yen in revenue to 8 years later: how running 3 apps in parallel got an indie developer to 200,000 yen a month
Indie development the author started in 2017 earned nothing for five straight years, then 30 yen in year six, 1,000 yen in year seven, 40,000 yen in year eight, and 200,000 yen in year nine. The turning point came the year after shutting down a large-scale service he spent a full year building in 2022, when he set five rules and rebuilt.
A one-time-purchase 2,000-yen iOS app "MT" hit 5 figures in its launch month, 100,000+ yen cumulative in 3 months
A gadget blogger with an engineering day job built "MT," a one-time-purchase 2,000-yen terminal app. It hit 5 figures in revenue in its launch month, and over 100,000 yen cumulative after 3 months. The turning point was "the person writing the review became the person who built the thing being reviewed."
13 games, 700 yen total. Four years to reach the first 8,000-yen payout
A 38-year-old with no prior experience learned Unity and released 13 games over about four years — yet cumulative revenue sat around 700 yen. The turning point came in July 2024, when banner ads were added to his second RPG. 100–200 yen a day for two months finally cleared Google Play's 8,000-yen payout threshold.
Walica: From 50 Users a Day to 300,000 a Month, on Two Hours Every Weekend for 4.5 Years
A bill-splitting calculator, "Walica," built by two second-year colleagues out of college, saw fewer than 50 daily users for its first full year after launch. Growth began once it started ranking in search. By March 2023 it hit 300,000 monthly users, having started with an annual operating cost of about 1,000 yen for a domain.
First revenue: 22 yen. One year and three months rebuilding 5 apps to reach 10,000 yen a month
A musical-instrument-store review site launched in October 2019 fizzled. Moving to Flutter, the developer released 5 apps, but ad revenue stalled at 22 yen on the first day. Right after implementing in-app purchases at the end of 2020, revenue reached 10,000 yen a month.
Anniversary app "365-Day Anniversary" hit 10,000 yen a month, two months after launching a subscription
The anniversary-management app "365-Day Anniversary" reached 10,000 yen in monthly revenue two months after its subscription feature launched. The turning point was a design decision that didn't remove ads but instead made them always visible — and repurposed those same ads as the reason to buy the paid plan.
¥250,000/month on his 6th solo project — from a 50-yen-per-transaction failure to 50 paying users at ¥4,000/month
A developer who built six solo projects reached about ¥250,000/month in recurring revenue with his fifth product, an Instagram chatbot tool. His first product failed at a 50-yen-per-transaction commission and a few thousand yen a month; rethinking price point and billing model was the turning point.