The year of sustainable indie products

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. Source: @shl on X 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…