Building an open-source project as a solo developer

I'm building an open-source self-hosted Substack alternative focused on developers

I've been using Substack for my tech blog and newsletter for a while.

As a developer, I truly believe that sharing knowledge through a newsletter is one of the best ways to grow an audience — and eventually monetise your efforts.

Substack is built for a general audience, not devs. I was missing code highlighting and minimalist design.

I wanted to build something dedicated for developers:

• open-source, free to use, self-hosted

• beautiful code highlighting

• markdown-first writing

• clean, minimalist design

• dark mode support

I believe that an open-source model is a great way to build a product. IndiePubStack is:

• fully open-source and free to use (MIT licence)

• designed to be self-hosted (Docker image distribution)

• built on top of reliable services (Kinde for auth, Resend for email delivery)

All you need is an inexpensive VPS and a domain name, free Kinde and Resend accounts (that will be enough for a long time). For example with Resend you can grow your newsletter up to 1000 subscribers for free (with unlimited emails), Kinde free tier includes 10500 MAU (monthly active users).

Kinde also recently released billing feature, so I’m planning to add support for premium tiers soon, so you can start monetiziation of your newsletter with paid content.

I'm already using IndiePubStack for my personal blog and newsletter, I have a couple of blogs posts recently published here:

• https://indiepubstack.andreyfadeev.com/posts/5/getting-started-with-leiningen-a-beginners-guide

• https://indiepubstack.andreyfadeev.com/posts/3/expressive-clojure-testing-with-the-matcher-combinators-library

The future depends on the community feedback, if the open-source project gets some traction, the next logical step will be to build a SaaS platform on top of it.

If you want to support the project (or even contribute) please checkout the GitHub repository: https://github.com/IndiePubStack/IndiePubStack, stars will help a lot!

There is dedicated X (Twitter) account for the project: https://x.com/IndiePubStack

Any form of feedback will be extremely helpful, I’m working hard my evenings preparing for the ProductHunt launched that planned on 3rd September 2025: https://www.producthunt.com/products/indiepubstack