Nomad List

Nomad List began as a Google Sheet ranking cities for remote workers — the fastest possible backend for validating whether anyone cared. Pieter Levels has written repeatedly that frameworks are a trap when you are still hunting product-market fit.

The MVP did not need auth, sharding, or a roadmap to microservices. It needed cities, scores, and a way to take money from people who found it useful.

Once the idea stuck, Levels rewrote Nomad List in vanilla PHP with SQLite on a single VPS — the same stack he uses across Nomad List, Remote OK, and later products. No Laravel, no ORM ceremony, no container orchestration.

He has publicly described Remote OK as fitting in a single PHP file and documented CDN tweaks (SPDY, CloudFront, PageSpeed) when pages got slow — optimization, not re-architecture.

In interviews and on his blog, Levels reports Nomad List and sibling products on hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors and high six- to seven-figure annual revenue — still maintained largely alone on VPS hosting he describes as tens of dollars a month, not AWS-scale bills.

The stack did not graduate to Kubernetes. The business graduated to profitability. That is the point of the story for indie hackers: boring tech held because the product held.