Indie Seller Weekly #4: New Sellers Doubled in October, and AI Front Desks for Small Shops Are Everywhere

Every week I count the websites that newly put up checkout links on 8 payment platforms (Stripe, Gumroad, Lemon Squeezy, Polar, Creem, Dodo, Paddle, Waffo) to see what people are selling, what is picking up, and which needs nobody has served yet.

This week's numbers

• The link graph picked up 6,307 new sellers this week. 1,315 of them sell software, and 822 sell AI products. By platform: Stripe 4,096, Gumroad 1,222, Polar 430, Lemon Squeezy 419, Dodo 93, Creem 42, Paddle 5. Waffo still has no new sellers in the data.
• October is now complete: 23,200 new sellers, against 11,000 in September. Part of that doubling comes from the link graph indexing faster, so the ratios matter more: software was 18.4% of new sellers in both months, and AI products were about 60% of software in both. Neither moved.
• What did move is platform share. Polar went from 2.4% of new sellers in September to 4.0% in October (263 to 918), Lemon Squeezy from 3.9% to 5.0% (431 to 1,150), and Stripe fell from 75% to 70%. Dodo (107 to 250) and Creem (44 to 112) more than doubled in count, but their share only rose slightly.

Weekly numbers swing a lot: the link graph picks up new links in batches, and we have seen anywhere from 1,100 to 6,500 a week. Look at months for the trend.

5 new products worth a look this week

1. AI見積もり受付くん (ai-uketsukekun.com, paid via Stripe): built by an air-conditioning installer in Shizuoka, Japan. Installers on a job site can't pick up the phone, so you paste one line of code into your website and an AI takes quote requests around the clock: what the customer needs installed, when they're free, and a few photos of the site, then emails you a summary. Requests outside your service area are politely declined. ¥3,000 a month for the first 30 companies, with a 30-day free trial.
2. Skyball (skyball.ai, paid via Stripe): upload volleyball match or practice video and it tags every touch by player and skill, with filters, highlight playlists and stats. Sold to club families and coaches. The first three matches are free; from $17 a month for one player to $84 for a full team, billed yearly.
3. Asset Lab (assetlab.coastalcreativelab.com, paid via Gumroad): an AI image, video and audio studio for Mac, Windows and Linux that takes you from casting characters and storyboarding to scoring and exporting a finished cut. The app is a one-time $49; the models run in the cloud on your own Fal.ai key, billed at Fal's own prices with no markup.
4. SuperCmd (supercmd.sh, paid via Polar): a Mac launcher positioned against Raycast, covering app and file search, window management, clipboard history, screenshots and AI chat. v1 is MIT open source; v2, rewritten in Swift, is closed source and costs a one-time $19.99 for three Macs. Requires macOS 26.
5. Mongo Pilot (mongopilot.com, paid via Stripe): a desktop GUI for MongoDB with a drag-and-drop query builder, a visual aggregation pipeline builder, and CSV and JSON import and export. The AI assistant runs a local model through Ollama, so your data never leaves your machine. 7-day free trial.

One pattern: an AI front desk for one trade

Among this week's new software sellers, about twenty are selling the same thing: answering the phone, replying on WhatsApp and booking appointments for small businesses. Some are for renovation and home-service companies, others for hair salons, med spas or air-conditioning installers, in places from Japan, Brazil and Spain to a single Canadian city.

• The narrower, the easier to sell: "AI receptionist" is a broad term; "quote intake for air-conditioning installers" tells the owner in one line that it's for them. The Japanese product above was built by an air-conditioning company, which knows exactly what a missed call costs.
• Paste one line and it works: the buyers are small business owners who won't configure anything. The easier the install, the better, and the price is kept around the cost of a meal a month.
• Someone now audits the front desk: one new product this week runs attack tests against your AI receptionist and gives you a report in plain English. It's the same idea as last week's "guardrails for agents", applied to a concrete use.

The risk: about half of this category are agencies, and they compete on local relationships rather than product. If you build a product, pick one trade in one country and get its vocabulary and workflow exactly right.

Payment platform news

• Polar, Lemon Squeezy, Dodo and Creem had nothing new on their official blogs or changelogs this week (Polar's latest post is from October 8; Dodo's latest newsletter, from October 24, was covered last week).

For a full comparison of the platforms, see How to Choose a Payment Platform as an Indie Developer; for the full data on 200,000 sellers, see What 200,000 Checkout Links Say.

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Data comes from DataForSEO's link graph and homepage classification (Jev). The weekly only publishes aggregate numbers and products I picked myself, never the seller list.