Gumroad is a $100m/yr business. The founder, Sahil, has put his life and soul into it. Today it runs with 3 part-time maintainers and Sahil working 1 hour a week. The rest is handled by AI.
Sahil uses Hermes to automate everything. Token spend is fairly high ($43K/mo!) and it now surpasses the human payroll, but for the size of their business, it’s small change given the previous outlay on us weedy meatbots. Here’s a chart showing the gradual replacement of humans at Gumroad.
It’s quite remarkable, and it demonstrates how large tech businesses can run with very little human intervention in 2026. Of course, it’s taken over a decade for Gumroad to develop their product, their brand, and their loyal customer base – building that from scratch today would still take a huge amount of human effort. At least, I think so… but perhaps I’m wrong. The power of tech influencers in today’s world shouldn’t be underestimated, for better or worse.
Pagecord is small enough that I can run things myself without using AI beyond coding agents, while only working a few hours a week on predominantly feature development and marketing (me blogging, mainly 😅). To me, stories like Sahil’s are encouraging because if Pagecord ever breaks out of its tiny niche (10x growth required – let’s go!), I’m confident most aspects of it could be automated, allowing me to invest my time where the human touch is definitely required (escalated customer support, socials, blogging).
None of this should impact the customer experience, it would arguably make it better. Say what you like about AI, but it is allowing the running of small businesses with tiny profit margins like mine much,* much* more sustainable. A year ago the indie dev slog was still real. Today it feels liberating.
I’m hopeful these tech advances mean we're going to see wonderful new products being bootstrapped by teams of one, which can be maintained and supported for years to come by solo founders without them needing to sell out or mothball their pride and joy. Time will tell, but I'm bullish.
Here’s to the new generation of AI-assisted indie devs! 🥂