I kept bookmarking indie AI tools and losing them forever. So I built the place I wished existed.
I have a tab problem.
At peak, I had 47 browser tabs open. Every single one was an indie AI tool I'd stumbled across and didn't want to lose.
A Reddit comment here. A tweet thread there. A GitHub repo someone dropped in a Discord. A Product Hunt comment from a maker who'd built something genuinely clever but launched it at 2am with zero fanfare.
I kept thinking — someone should be collecting all of this in one place.
Then I'd close the tabs. And the tools would disappear.
The frustrating part wasn't the chaos. It was knowing that somewhere out there, a solo developer had spent months building something genuinely useful — and it was quietly dying because the right person never found it.
Not because it wasn't good enough. Because discovery is broken.
The big directories are flooded with VC-backed products with marketing budgets. The indie stuff gets buried under the noise or scattered across five different platforms with no connective tissue between them.
I'm not a developer by background. I couldn't just "build a scraper." But I kept coming back to the same question: why does finding genuinely indie AI feel like archaeology?
So I started building IndieAIs. Slowly. Messily. Learning as I went.
The idea was simple: one place where independent AI builders can be found, and where people who care about that kind of building can do the finding.
No VC noise. No enterprise bloat. Just the bedroom and coffee shop builders doing the most creative work in AI right now.
We launched today on Product Hunt. It's early, it's imperfect, and I'd genuinely love your feedback.
If you've built an indie AI tool — list it. It deserves to be found. If you know someone who has — send them over.
And if you have 30 seconds: https://www.producthunt.com/products/indieais
The origin story is real — I've lived that tab problem. And the diagnosis is right: discovery for indie AI is broken not because there's too little content, but because there's no trusted signal.
The question I'd push on: what's the mechanism that keeps IndieAIs from becoming what it's trying to replace?
"No VC noise" is a value, not a filter. Every directory starts with that intention. The ones that hold it have something structural — a submission process, a community vote, a curator with taste and a public track record.
What's yours?
Because the most valuable thing IndieAIs could become isn't a bigger list. It's the place where a recommendation actually means something. That's a different product than a directory — and it's worth building deliberately.