Solo app development is romanticized as laptops-on-the-beach freedom. The reality, drawn from public postmortems and a decade of developer interviews, is stranger and more instructive: you are the whole org chart, and maintenance never ends.
Sharing revenue, growth charts, and failures in public has become the indie developer’s marketing department. What building in public actually is, why it works, and the costs nobody tweets about.
A one-person app business runs on a surprisingly small stack. The tools indie developers actually pay for — from design and code to RevenueCat, TestFlight, and the humble email inbox — and where the money’s wasted.
