GitHub

Calling GitHub a 'tool' undersells it. It's the substrate of modern software. Your code lives there. Your issues, your CI, your packages, your project boards, your AI pair programmer, your security scanning, all on the same platform. And it's priced reasonably enough that an indie founder can fund themselves on the free tier indefinitely. What matters for indie founders specifically: GitHub is your public resume. Your commits are visible. Your contributions to other projects are visible. Investors, customers, and potential hires can verify you're a builder in seconds. Open-sourcing something you built alongside your SaaS is one of the highest-leverage moves an indie can make. Instant credibility, organic search traffic for years, and a recruiting funnel that costs nothing. The Free tier is honestly enough for most solo founders. Unlimited public and private repos, GitHub Pages for static sites, 2000 free Actions minutes per month, Copilot for $10/month, basic Projects boards. The $4/user Team plan adds branch protections and required reviewers. You don't need Enterprise until you have an actual enterprise. Copilot is now part of the muscle memory of writing code. Disabling it feels like coding with one hand. Copilot Chat in the editor handles 'why is this broken' moments faster than Stack Overflow. Code review with Copilot has gotten genuinely useful for first-pass PR feedback. Worth the $10/month for any working developer. Where GitHub feels dated: Projects (their Linear/Trello alternative) is competent but slow. Discussions never quite reached the engagement of Discord. And Actions is powerful but the YAML config is fiddly enough that you'll often paste it into ChatGPT to debug. None of that matters. GitHub is where code lives. You're using it. Lean into the social side too: pin your best repos, write proper READMEs, ship one open-source utility per year. The compounding effect on your reputation over time is real.