About this directory
Indie SaaS is a hand-curated, searchable directory of 83 independently-run SaaS tools across 19 categories — from serverless Postgres to transactional email APIs, from issue trackers to LLM observability.
What makes this different
- Every entry is hand-written. No scraped descriptions, no affiliate rewrites, no SEO farm boilerplate.
- Tools are selected for being independently run or feeling that way — this is a guide for indie founders and small teams, not a Gartner quadrant.
- The entire dataset is one JSON file on GitHub. Pull requests welcome.
Why it exists
This site is the first reference engine built on searchengine.life, a platform for launching niche search engines. The pitch: declare your engine in TypeScript, commit to your repo, and get a hosted search index, UI and API. This site runs the same shape: a defineEngine() file in the repo, a hand-seeded data source, and a public search UI at a dedicated subdomain.
For v1 the ranker is client-side BM25 with fuzzy and prefix matching, powered by MiniSearch. When the full runtime ships, this same dataset will flow through a hybrid BM25 + vector ranker with recency boosts — without any changes to the defineEngine() contract.
How to contribute
- Fork Caceras/searchengine.
- Edit
engines/indie-saas.json. Add a new entry matching the shape of existing ones. - Open a PR. Every entry is reviewed by a human.
Credits
Built on Next.js 16, React 19 and Tailwind 4. Deployed on Vercel. Reference engine for searchengine.life.