I Analyzed 700 Indie Hacker Projects. Here's What Everyone Is Actually Building in 2026

I pulled the numbers from Forg across 700 public projects, 1.5k+ indie hackers, and a mountain of company data to answer three questions I keep arguing about with other founders:

1. What are indie hackers actually shipping?

2. What stack are they running?

3. How are they charging for it?

The patterns turned out sharper than I expected. Here's the honest read.

AI didn't win. It lapped the field.

"AI is popular" is not news. What surprised me was the margin.

AI is the single most common project tag, and if you group the whole family together (AI, AI Agents, AI Tools, AI Video Generators) it accounts for 8.5% of every tag on the platform. No other theme comes close.

But the tag counts undersell it. The growth curve is the real story.

In the last six months, AI jumped from 5 projects to 28, a +460% increase. SaaS grew from 5 to 18 projects, up +260%. But the more striking finding is that entire categories appeared from nowhere. "AI Agents" went from zero projects to thirteen in a single six-month window. AI Video Generators, Privacy, and Marketing tools didn't exist as meaningful categories here six months ago. Now they do.

Builders are skilling up to match. LLMs, RAG, LangChain, the OpenAI API, and prompt engineering are all showing up on profiles now. It's still a minority cohort, around 2.8% of users, but it's the fastest-forming one on the platform.

Takeaway: If you're starting something today, "AI-native" isn't an edge anymore. It's the baseline everyone else is already at.

There is now one indie hacker stack, and it's frontend-first

Ask ten founders their stack and you used to get ten answers. Not anymore. The skill data has quietly converged on a single, boring, effective setup.

Product Design tops the list with 55 builders claiming it, followed by JavaScript (52), TypeScript (49), React.js (48), and Figma (45). After that comes Python (22), PostgreSQL (18), Node.js (13), and Next.js (12).

Two things jump out immediately.

First, design is not a nice-to-have. Product Design is the number one skill, and Figma outranks Python. The modern solo builder is expected to make it look good, not just make it work.

Second, TypeScript is nearly caught up with JavaScript (49 vs 52) and growing faster in project tags. If you're picking one to invest in deeply, the trend line points clearly at TS.

The full picture: JavaScript + TypeScript + React + Next.js + Figma + a Postgres backend. That's the default kit now.

Everyone charges the same way: free (at first)

This one is almost unanimous. Freemium is 73% of all projects. Add straight-up free products and 88.5% of projects have a free entry point. Subscription-only accounts for just 8%, and one-time purchase sits at a mere 3.7%.

The free-door funnel has become the reflex. Which is exactly why the opposite is interesting. One-time pricing has been nearly abandoned. In a world where everyone is training users to expect a free tier, "pay once, own it forever" is starting to look like a differentiator rather than a mistake.

Still web-first, and it's not close

For all the mobile hype, the platform is overwhelmingly built for the browser. Web accounts for 77% of all projects. Mobile (iOS and Android combined) makes up 17%. SaaS is 47% of all product types, with mobile apps at 21%.

The playbook most builders are running is to ship web first and add mobile only if traction demands it. Cross-platform combos exist, like Web plus Chrome Extension for automation tools or iOS plus Android for social apps, but they're the exception, not the plan.

The gaps nobody is filling

The most useful part of any trends report isn't what's crowded. It's what's empty.

A few categories are almost untouched. Testing and QA has just 3 projects. IoT and hardware has 1. Crypto payments has 1. Firefox extensions have 4. APIs sold as a standalone product account for only 15 projects. And as mentioned above, one-time pricing covers just 3.7% of the market.

None of these are glamorous. That's the point. Everyone is piling into AI-flavored freemium web SaaS, which means the whitespace has moved to the unsexy corners: developer tooling, hardware, and business models that don't start with "free."

So what should you build?

The safe bet, statistically, is an AI-enhanced, freemium, web-first SaaS built on TypeScript, React, and Next.js, with a designer's eye on the UI. Do that and you'll fit right in.

But "fit right in" is another way of saying "crowded." The more interesting move is to take the modern stack everyone has converged on and point it at a corner nobody is serving: testing, hardware, a genuinely great Firefox tool, or a premium product you pay for once.

A caveat worth stating: this is a snapshot of one platform, and skills are self-reported. Treat it as a strong signal about where indie builders are heading, not gospel. But the direction is hard to miss. AI is up and to the right, design is on equal footing with code, and free is the default front door.

What are you building right now, and does it match the pattern or break it? I'd genuinely like to know.