pioneer.app in their group-weekly update mode was the closest thing to early indie hackers. Sadly they shut down that mechanism, I don't know why.
It was great for weekly reality checks but also UI and headline help.
That said, I had a FOMO of the "YC-access" and so I chose to spend B2B money with other companies at the startup stage (I know, foolish move). I spent a lot of money on Banana.dev, and helped their cofounders with feedback around concurrency/load for the API. Right as we gained some traction, they doubled prices, then changed the pricing model to make it unaffordable for us to run on their services. Felt a little nasty. And recently their pricing hit "you can only afford this if you already have VC level money"(probably to thin customers to a profitable subset).
