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Research · October 9, 2026

How often do indie makers actually ship?

We looked at 800 public GitHub repos behind indie products and counted, week by week, whether anything landed on the main branch over the last 12 weeks. Shipping turns out to be bursty. Steady weekly shipping is rare.

7%
of active repos had a commit in every one of the 12 weeks
3 / 12
median weeks with any commit, among active repos
21.9%
of all repos had no commits at all in 12 weeks
3.9%
of solo-maintained repos shipped every week

Most weeks are quiet weeks

Active repos by number of weeks with at least one commit (last 12 weeks)
n = 625 active repos · hover a bar for its count
0501001501 of 12 weeks: 150 repos (24%)1 of 12 weeks: 150 repos (24%)15012 of 12 weeks: 97 repos (16%)2 of 12 weeks: 97 repos (16%)23 of 12 weeks: 66 repos (11%)3 of 12 weeks: 66 repos (11%)34 of 12 weeks: 64 repos (10%)4 of 12 weeks: 64 repos (10%)45 of 12 weeks: 44 repos (7%)5 of 12 weeks: 44 repos (7%)56 of 12 weeks: 38 repos (6%)6 of 12 weeks: 38 repos (6%)67 of 12 weeks: 28 repos (4%)7 of 12 weeks: 28 repos (4%)78 of 12 weeks: 33 repos (5%)8 of 12 weeks: 33 repos (5%)89 of 12 weeks: 16 repos (3%)9 of 12 weeks: 16 repos (3%)910 of 12 weeks: 18 repos (3%)10 of 12 weeks: 18 repos (3%)1011 of 12 weeks: 27 repos (4%)11 of 12 weeks: 27 repos (4%)1112 of 12 weeks: 44 repos (7%)12 of 12 weeks: 44 repos (7%)4412weeks with commits (out of 12)
Show as table
Active weeksReposShare
115024%
29716%
36611%
46410%
5447%
6386%
7284%
8335%
9163%
10183%
11274%
12447%

The single most common pattern is one active week out of twelve. Only 16.8% of active repos had commits in 9 or more of the 12 weeks, and 32.6% in at least half of them. When a repo does have an active week, the median is 6 commits. People work in bursts, then go quiet.

Solo makers, and how they tell people

69.3% of active repos are effectively solo (the owner wrote at least 80% of the commits). Among those, just 3.9% had a commit every week. 52.2% of active repos tagged a GitHub release in the last 90 days and 29.3% keep a changelog file. Even among the steadiest repos (9+ active weeks), 37.1% tagged no release at all: they ship constantly and never mark it.

What it means if you build in public

  • A quiet week is the norm, not a failure. Post it anyway: what you learned, what blocked you, what’s next.
  • Consistency of telling beats consistency of committing. Readers follow a weekly update, not a commit graph.
  • Busy weeks get lost too: most steady shippers never tag a release, so their progress is invisible unless they write it down.

That’s the gap Ship & Shout fills: it reads your week (busy or quiet) and drafts an honest post from it. Try it on any public repo, no account needed. If you tag releases rarely, the free changelog generator turns a quiet-looking week into a readable one anyway.

Method and caveats

  • Sample: 800 public, non-fork, non-archived repos owned by an individual GitHub account (not an organization), with 10–5,000 stars and a homepage URL, pushed at least once in the past year, found via GitHub topic search (saas, micro-saas, indie-hacker, side-project, buildinpublic, saas-starter, solopreneur, chrome-extension and similar).
  • Activity: GitHub’s weekly participation stats (default branch) for the 12 completed weeks before October 9, 2026. “Active” = at least one commit in the window (625 of 800).
  • Solo: the owner authored ≥80% of the window’s commits. Releases: non-draft releases published in the last 90 days. Changelog: a CHANGELOG / CHANGES / HISTORY file at the repo root.
  • Caveats: commits aren’t shipping (one big commit can be a launch, ten can be typos). Work on other branches, private repos and non-code work is invisible. Topic-tagged repos skew toward makers who label their projects. It’s a snapshot, not a trend.
  • Only aggregate numbers are published; no individual repo is named.