Ask a solo app developer what runs their business and you won’t get a list of forty SaaS products. The honest answer is a surprisingly short stack — most of it free or cheap — plus an email inbox doing heroic work. Here’s the toolbox as it actually looks in 2026, category by category, with notes on where beginners overspend.
Design: Figma, plus restraint
Figma’s free tier covers almost everything a one-person project needs. The real design tool for most indie apps, though, is the platform itself: Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines and system components get you 80% of a polished app for free. The developers who struggle here are usually fighting the platform, not lacking a design tool.
Code: Xcode, Swift, and Git
The unglamorous truth: Xcode (free), Swift (free), and a Git host like GitHub are the whole engineering stack. Add GitHub Actions later for test automation, but plenty of successful indies ship for years by pressing Cmd+R and reading crash reports.
Backend: CloudKit before servers
Sync is the first place new indies burn money on infrastructure. CloudKit, Apple’s free-with-quotas backend, handles sync and storage for most indie-scale apps without a server to babysit. Firebase is the cross-platform fallback. Only rent servers when your app genuinely needs logic CloudKit can’t express — and by then, revenue should be paying for it.
Revenue plumbing: RevenueCat
In-app purchase receipts, cross-platform entitlements, paywall A/B tests, charts — RevenueCat turns the worst part of app development into an afternoon. The free tier covers small revenue, which makes it the default recommendation. The alternative is hand-rolling receipt validation, which is a known way to lose a month.
Analytics: privacy-first and lightweight
App Store Connect’s built-in analytics answer most early questions for free. When you need more, TelemetryDeck — built by an indie developer, privacy-first, no personal data — fits the indie ethos better than pasting Google Analytics into a native app. The trap is vanity dashboards: downloads don’t matter if nobody’s Day 7 retention survives.
Support: a plain email address
At the start, [email protected] and canned replies are genuinely enough. Help desks (Help Scout, Front, Groove) earn their price once volume justifies it — think dozens of emails a day. Until then, a good FAQ page in the app deflects more tickets than any tool.
Marketing: a website, a newsletter, and posting
A one-page site (WordPress is fine and cheap), a newsletter from day one — because the App Store gives you no way to reach users who downloaded the free version — and a developer account on X, Bluesky, or Mastodon where you show what you’re building. Product Hunt for launch week. That’s the whole growth stack; everything else is procrastination with a dashboard.
Testing: TestFlight, everywhere
TestFlight is free up to 10,000 external testers and is the single best distribution channel nobody prices in. Ship internal builds daily, external betas weekly. Your beta testers are your first reviews, your first bug reports, and often your first evangelists.
Money and paperwork: boring on purpose
App Store Connect payouts to a separate business bank account, a spreadsheet (or an accountant once revenue is real), and taxes set aside the day money arrives. Nothing here needs a subscription until an accountant says so.
Where the money actually gets wasted
Watch any cohort of new indie developers and the same over-spending appears: enterprise analytics nobody reads, a $40/month help desk for eight emails, custom servers before the first customer, and every AI service bundled “just in case.” The stack above runs real, profitable one-person businesses. The scarce resource was never tooling — it’s the hours you didn’t spend building the thing people buy.
Once your toolbox is set, the two decisions that actually determine survival are how you charge (pricing models compared) and how you get through review (the App Review survival guide).