Chinese Independent Developer List: what everyone is building

The hardest part of indie hacking isn’t building — it’s knowing what others are already building and what actually makes money. 1c7/chinese-independent-developer has answered that for Chinese makers since 2017: developers submit their own websites and apps, each with a one-line pitch and a link. The main edition holds 1,672 entries as of September 30, 2026, and the repo sits at 61,610 stars the same day.

Core features

• Products only, no tools: the inclusion rule says entries must be websites or apps you can open and use right away — developer tools and forums are turned away. Every row is a live thing to try, not a repo to clone.
• Three status tags: each project is marked as in development, live, or closed/unmaintained, so you can tell working products from tombstones at a glance — rare among awesome lists.
• Merged continuously: the top of the README shows entries merged the same day you open it (checked September 30, 2026); contributors self-submit via PR and Issue, and the repo has gone nine years without a break.
• Pitch quality is enforced: the contributing guide demands a concrete one-liner (“3 steps to a vertical short video, no editing skills” rather than “AI video generator”), which makes scanning the list much faster.
• Side editions: command-line/code projects and games live in separate programmer and game editions; 2018–2024 entries are archived in their own file.

Typical use cases

1. Hunting side-project ideas: scanning products others already charge for beats brainstorming in a vacuum.
2. Sizing up a niche: before building, check how similar products pitch themselves in one line and whether they’re still alive.
3. Launching your own product: submit a PR and get an entry with organic traffic.

Quick start

Nothing to install — open the repo and read down from the latest date. To get listed, follow the contributing guide and file a PR or Issue.

Summary

Treat it as a reference book if you’re a Chinese-speaking developer building consumer or B2B products. Two caveats: inclusion says nothing about revenue, and many entries are no longer maintained (the status tags exist precisely for that); the main edition excludes developer tools, which live in the side editions. The repo itself is a plain Markdown list — no license, no code — and 61,610 stars with same-day merges are the quality signal.