我分析了 700 个独立开发者项目：2026 年大家到底在做什么

I pulled the numbers from Forg — 700 public projects, 1,318 builders, and a mountain of company data — to answer three questions I keep arguing about with other founders: What are indie hackers actually shipping? What stack are they running? 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: Technology Last 6 mo Prior 6 mo Growth AI 28 5 +460% AI Agents 13 0 NEW AI Video Generator 6 0 NEW Privacy 12 0 NEW SaaS 18 5 +260% "AI Agents" went from zero projects to thirteen in a single six-month window. Same with AI video generation. These aren't fast-growing categories — they're categories that didn't exist here a year ago and now do. And 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 (~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: Rank Skill Builders 1 Product Design 55 2 JavaScript 52 3 TypeScript 49 4 React.js 48 5 Figma 45 6 Python 22 7 PostgreSQL 18 8 Node.js 13 9 Next.js 12 Two things jump out. 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 learn 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's almost unanimous. Freemium is 73% of all projects. Add straight-up free products and you get this: 88.5% of projects have a free entry point. Subscription-only: 8% One-time purchase: just 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: 77% of projects Mobile (iOS + Android combined): 17% SaaS is 47% of all product types; mobile apps are 21% The playbook most builders are running: ship web first, add mobile only if traction demands it. Cross-platform combos exist (Web + Chrome Extension for automation tools, iOS + 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 / QA: 3 projects IoT / hardware: 1 project Crypto payments: 1 project Firefox extensions: 4 projects APIs as a product: 15 projects One-time pricing: 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's converged on and point it at a corner nobody's 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 up and to the right, design on equal footing with code, and free as 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. PS - The research is done only on the data of forg.to users and projects not globally.