Indie Dev: My Non-AI Consumer Apps Earn 5x My AI Product With Near-Zero Maintenance
iannuttall · x · 2026-08-14
Indie developer Ian Nuttall confesses he hates being "a founder": he loves building and learning by doing, but once it turns into features for others, complicated DevOps, feature creep, and competing with dozens of alternatives, he starts looking for the kill switch. Despite heavy daily use of Conductor, Codex, Claude Code, Cursor/Grok bot and similar tools, he has long struggled with knowing what to work on.
After taking time off, he went back to building small consumer products, sites and tools outside tech and AI — and those apps now make 5x more than keep.md, with almost no maintenance, no costs, and a fraction of the dev build time. He says he struck gold with SEO and market choice, but with no moat, sharing them publicly would only harm him; he also admits the revenue isn't long-term, and is still weighing whether to just do more of that.
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