🗞️ What's New: $12k/mo selling templates, a billboard built for backlash, stop starting new things
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Here's what you'll find in this issue:
- A $15k product bet, with a $30k loan hanging over the founders. Now their templates bring in $12k/mo.
- 5 vibe coding tools. Some of the latest apps for coding with AI.
- Yesterday's Build Board updates, featuring CiteWing, Clipcroft, and Aura++.
- 30-second growth tip: Post a billboard that makes people angry.
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$12k/mo selling templates, after a $30k setback 🛠️
A client left without paying the full bill. Rakesh Nakrani and his cofounder borrowed ₹20 lakh (about $30k) to cover salaries, rent, and other expenses. With that debt still hanging over them, they spent another four months and about $15k building a dashboard template. Today, their seven-person team at CodedThemes makes around $12k/mo selling templates and UI kits.
They chose dashboard templates because clients kept asking for admin panels. To figure out what to build, they read customer comments on competing ThemeForest templates and looked for what buyers wanted.
ThemeForest soft-rejected their template, Able Pro, three times. They kept fixing it, got approved, and made their first sale on day one.
They paid off the loan by 2023. But AI brought a new threat in 2025: revenue dropped by up to 50% in some months as developers built their own boilerplates. Now they're making their products AI-ready and building UIAble, a component library AI coding tools can read and use.
How do you get developers to pay for templates when so much code is free? The full interview explains how Rakesh did this and a lot more.
How AI and SaaS leaders put pricing into practice 👀
Watch four talks on pricing AI products and introducing usage-based models. Leaders from Replit, Fin, Snowflake, Clay, and Growth Unhinged discuss what to meter, how to show customers their variable spending, when to revisit a pricing model, and how to forecast AI costs and returns. Recorded at Monetize 2026, Stripe and Metronome's conference on modern pricing and billing.
Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻💻
Hatch: The next-generation AI assistant for getting real work done.
Augment Code: Context-aware AI agent that navigates huge repos and writes fixes like a senior dev.
Claude Code: Understand your codebase, edit files, and run tests from your terminal or IDE.
GitHub Copilot: Get AI code suggestions and agent-assisted changes inside your editor.
Cline: Plan, act, and execute tasks inside VS Code with an open-source dual-mode agent.
The Build Board 🪧
Every day, indie hackers post updates about the products they're building. Here are three selected updates posted yesterday, October 22. The numbers below enumerate our picks, not leaderboard ranks.
Enjoy building in public? Post an update to your product page on Indie Hackers, and it will automatically be added to the daily leaderboard.
Bite-sized growth tip 🍪
Post a billboard that makes people angry.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack's AI sales tool, Artisan, ran billboards that said "Stop Hiring Humans." Not exactly subtle, but the slogan gave people something to argue about and put Artisan in the middle of the conversation.
The billboards were part of a broader controversial marketing campaign that also included Reddit posts. According to our growth report, that campaign generated over a billion online impressions and brought in over $2 million in new ARR.
We'd love your feedback! 🙃
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Special thanks to Yushavel Calderon for the graphic design, and to James Fleischmann for contributing a post.
