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Makerlog is gone. Checked directly on September 18, 2026: makerlog.io no longer resolves — a DNS lookup returns no record for the domain at all — and getmakerlog.com issues a permanent 301 redirect to ambitiousfounder.com, an unrelated personal blog with no task log and no community behind it. There is no login screen left to reach.
That is the whole answer, and it is worth stating plainly because almost nothing else on the web does. Community roundups, tool directories and comparison pages still describe Makerlog in the present tense, still quote member counts, and still link to a domain that answers nothing. If you arrived here because a link sent you somewhere strange, you were not imagining it.
The rest of this is the part that is actually useful: what Makerlog was, what the streak mechanic did that made thousands of builders organize their week around it, which other product called Makerlog you might be thinking of, and where that behaviour lives now.
Is Makerlog still around?
No. Here is every domain in the story and what each one does today, checked one at a time rather than taken from a listing.
| Address | Status | What happens today | What that means |
|---|---|---|---|
| makerlog.io | Dead | Does not resolve. A DNS lookup returns no record for the domain at all. | This is the address most old links and roundups point at. There is nothing behind it to load, cache or redirect. |
| getmakerlog.com | Redirects | Answers, then issues a permanent 301 redirect to ambitiousfounder.com. | The app domain still exists but no longer serves Makerlog. A permanent redirect is the owner saying the old address is not coming back. |
| ambitiousfounder.com | Unrelated | Loads: a personal blog belonging to a different founder, writing about their own life and work. | No task log, no feed, no streak counter, no community. If you followed a Makerlog link and landed on someone's blog, this is why. |
| makerlog.ai | Different product | Loads: project tracking for makerspaces and hardware builders, built around a Python library. | Same word, different thing. It is not a continuation of the indie maker community and never was. |
| wip.co | Live | Loads: the maker community WIP, still running. | The closest surviving equivalent for streak-based public shipping, and the place most Makerlog regulars ended up. |
One thing I am deliberately not repeating: a member count. The figures still circulating disagree with each other and trace back to third-party profile pages rather than anything Makerlog ever published. A number nobody can check is worse than no number, and it is a large part of why the stale listings read as authoritative in the first place.
There was no visible farewell post, no shutdown notice on a page you can still open, and no redirect to a successor. That matters for a practical reason: a platform that announces its closing leaves a trail search engines can follow, and one that simply stops answering leaves the old descriptions standing. Makerlog stopped answering.
What was Makerlog, and why was the streak the whole product?
Makerlog was a public task log for indie makers. You posted the small concrete things you actually finished each day, everyone else's entries appeared in a shared feed, and a counter tracked your consecutive days of shipping. Its own pitch was about as direct as a pitch gets: your task list, made public, so you stay accountable and ship better products.
It was built by Sergio Mattei and launched on Product Hunt in July 2018, growing into one of the handful of rooms indie hackers genuinely lived in. Mattei walked through how it worked and how he ran it in a 2020 Indie Hackers podcast interview. Around the task feed sat discussions, product pages, a Slack chat and a paid patron tier, but none of those were the reason people opened it. The streak was.
You can still see the product for yourself. The Internet Archive's January 2024 capture of the homepage shows the three-step onboarding it led with — log your completed tasks publicly, earn a streak, grow alongside other makers — and, at the top of that capture, a site-wide banner about the progress of a rebuild it was calling Makerlog NEXT. As far as the public record goes, a rebuild-in-progress notice is the last thing the front page ever said.
What did "streak building" actually mean?
A Makerlog streak was the count of consecutive days on which you logged at least one completed task. That is the definition the product itself used, and it is worth pulling apart, because four small design choices are doing all the work and they are the part worth carrying into whatever you use next.
The unit was done, not planned
You logged tasks you had finished, not tasks you intended to start. That one word is the whole difference between a task log and a to-do list, and it is why the feed read as evidence rather than intention.
The log was public by default
Every entry went into a shared feed where other builders saw it, replied to it and reacted to it. The accountability came from being watched by people who recognised your project, not from the counter itself.
The bar was deliberately low
One completed task kept the day alive. On a bad day the rational move was to ship something small rather than nothing, which is exactly the behaviour a streak is supposed to produce.
The count was consecutive days
Miss a day and it went back to zero. A hard reset is what gave the number its weight, and it is also what made a two-week holiday feel expensive.
Put together, those four choices turn a number into a habit. Nothing about them requires Makerlog specifically, which is the good news, and nothing about them is automatic once the software counting for you disappears, which is the bad news.
The limit is worth naming too, because the tooling nostalgia tends to skip it. A streak measures consistency, not progress. You can run a two-hundred-day streak on trivial work and still have a product nobody has heard of, and the pressure to protect a number is exactly what pushes entries toward trivia. I went through how to design one that survives a bad week in the guide to shipping streaks, including the rest rule most people only invent at 11:50 pm when they already need it.
Which Makerlog are you looking for?
Three different things carry the name, and search results mix them freely. If your search felt like it returned an unrelated product, it probably did.
- Makerlog, the indie maker task log. The one this page is about: getmakerlog.com and makerlog.io, a public feed of completed tasks with a streak counter. Gone.
- makerlog.ai — project tracking for makerspaces and hardware builders, based around a Python library that models a physical build from idea to completion. Live, and completely unrelated to the community.
- MakerLog: Craft Diary. An iOS journaling app for crafters, tracking craft projects rather than software. Also live, also unrelated.
Only the first one had streaks, a feed, or anything to do with shipping software in public. If you landed on either of the other two while looking for the maker community, nothing has been renamed or acquired. They simply share a word.
Where does streak-based public shipping live now?
It split into three places, and which one is right depends entirely on which half of Makerlog you actually miss.
- WIP is the direct descendant of the mechanic. You log completed todos in front of a small community of makers and it counts your streak, much as Makerlog did. The difference is that it is paid and vetted rather than free and open, which filters out the drive-by accounts and also filters out the builder who has not earned a budget yet.
- Your own public logis the version nobody can switch off. A changelog page, a running notes file, a "shipped:" thread you keep adding to. It costs nothing, it is permanent, and it is the only option on this list that survives the next platform closing.
- A founder community where people know your project covers the half a counter cannot. The pressure in a streak never came from the arithmetic. It came from a handful of people who would notice you had stopped. The map of indie hacker communities breaks down which rooms are good at which job, and community-led growth for solo founders covers turning that room into something more than accountability.
The tempting fourth option is the GitHub contribution graph, and it is a trap for this purpose. It counts typing, not shipping. A day of commits on a branch nobody will ever see turns the square green, which is the precise failure mode the Makerlog rule about logging finished tasks was built to avoid.
Whichever you choose, the public half still needs writing. If posting daily is the part that worries you, the build-in-public playbook covers what is worth sharing, and you can see who is shipping consistently right now in the founder directory.
What should you look for in a replacement?
Makerlog did five separate jobs at once and it is easy to replace one of them and assume the habit will hold. It will not. Score any candidate against all five before you commit a year of daily entries to it.
| The job | WIP | Your own log | A founder community | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Counts the days for you | partly | An automatic counter removes the daily decision about whether today counted. Doing it by hand works, but you will argue with yourself. | ||
| Forces a definition of done | partly | partly | Makerlog's task box made you name the finished thing. Without that constraint, streak entries drift toward "worked on the app" within about three weeks. | |
| Puts it in front of people who notice | This is the part nobody rebuilds by accident. A log with no readers is a diary, and diaries do not create accountability. | |||
| Survives the platform closing | The hardest-won lesson here. Years of daily entries lived on someone else's domain, and when that domain stopped answering they went with it. | |||
| Free to keep going | partly | Makerlog's free public log is the specific thing that has no like-for-like replacement. The surviving options are either paid or self-run. |
Read down the columns and the shape of the problem shows up. No single option covers all five, and the two rows that most people ignore when choosing — people who notice, and surviving the platform closing — are the two that Makerlog's disappearance actually tested. The workable arrangement for most solo founders is a pair: keep the canonical record somewhere you own, and post it where a handful of builders will answer.
Own the record
A changelog on your own domain outlives every platform you post it to.
Pick a room, not a counter
Ten builders who recognise your project beat any number on a profile.
Keep the done rule
Log finished things only. It is the rule that kept the feed honest.
And there is one thing none of the replacements give you back: the particular people who already knew what you were building. Reputation in a maker community is slow to earn and does not export. That is the real cost when a room like this goes quiet, and it is a good argument for spreading the relationships across more than one place while everything is healthy.
Frequently asked questions
Is Makerlog shut down?
Yes. Makerlog, the public task log and streak community for indie makers, is no longer reachable. Checked directly on September 18, 2026: makerlog.io does not resolve at all, and getmakerlog.com returns a permanent 301 redirect to ambitiousfounder.com, an unrelated personal blog with no task log and no community. There was no farewell post or shutdown announcement on a reachable page, which is part of why so many directories and roundups still list it as an active community.
What was a Makerlog streak?
A Makerlog streak was the count of consecutive days on which you logged at least one completed task. Its own onboarding described a streak as the count of consecutive days of completed tasks, and that definition did the work: the unit was something finished rather than something planned, the entry was public in a shared feed, the bar was low enough that one small task kept the day alive, and missing a day reset the count to zero. That combination is why the number felt meaningful and why people organized their week around it.
What is the best Makerlog alternative?
WIP is the closest surviving equivalent, running the same mechanic of logging completed todos in front of a small maker community, though it is a paid and vetted room rather than a free public log. The free alternative is to run the streak yourself: a public changelog or a daily shipped post in one community where builders already know your project. Pick based on which half you actually need. If you need the counter, any tool works. If you need people who notice when you stop, the tool is the least important part of the choice.
Why do software directories still list Makerlog as active?
Because most directory listings are written once and never re-checked. Community roundups, tool directories and comparison pages still describe Makerlog in the present tense, repeat member counts that trace back to third-party profiles rather than anything Makerlog published, and link to a domain that no longer resolves. It is worth treating any directory entry as a claim rather than a status, and spending the ten seconds it takes to open the link before you plan around it.
Can I get my Makerlog tasks or streak history back?
Almost certainly not. There is no reachable app to export from and no login screen to reach, so private task history is not retrievable through any route available to a former user. The Internet Archive holds captures of Makerlog's public pages, so the homepage and some public profiles can still be read there, but an archive crawl is not a data export and it will not contain everything you posted. The practical lesson is to keep your own copy of your shipping record somewhere you control, which costs nothing while a platform is healthy.