Indie Park

A global community where indie developers showcase apps, recruit testers, and turn thoughtful feedback into better products.

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Inspiration

Independent developers often struggle to find early users, trustworthy testers, and practical feedback. Indie Park was created as a welcoming global community where makers can share their apps and where curious users can discover and improve new products.

What it does

Indie Park lets developers publish app profiles, link to the App Store, TestFlight, or Google Play, recruit testers, receive comments, and save promising projects. Free members can publish one app and one active tester call. Indie Park Pro unlocks multiple app posts, multiple tester calls, engagement insights, and expanded editing.

The community also includes reporting, blocking, favorites, account management, and in-app account deletion.

How we built it

The client is built with React and TypeScript and packaged for iOS with Capacitor. A Cloudflare Workers API keeps the app separated from the database. D1 stores application data, while R2 handles uploaded images.

Authentication uses passwordless email one-time codes. RevenueCat's Capacitor SDK manages monthly and annual Indie Park Pro subscriptions, purchase restoration, and entitlement state. The backend also verifies Pro access before allowing paid features.

Challenges

The biggest challenge was combining a web-first React experience with native iOS purchasing and App Store requirements. We also designed server-side Pro enforcement so access is not trusted only on the device. Preparing moderation, privacy disclosures, account deletion, screenshots, and international English-first content was another major part of shipping responsibly.

Accomplishments

We delivered a new iOS app with real RevenueCat-powered subscriptions, restore purchases, passwordless authentication, app discovery, tester recruitment, comments, favorites, moderation tools, and a Cloudflare API architecture.

What we learned

We learned how RevenueCat simplifies cross-platform purchase state while still requiring careful identity mapping and server-side authorization. We also learned that community products need safety, empty-state planning, and launch content from day one.

What's next

Next, we will grow the first group of makers and testers, improve analytics for Pro members, add stronger discovery and ranking, and expand localization as the community grows.

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