This article asks how boundaries of solidarity are constructed. From a sociological perspective, solo self-employed workers, who are both employees and entrepreneurs, fall into a collective interpretation gap in the discourse on solidarity. However, this changes at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on the analyses of 21 qualitative interviews and a text corpus of 2428 newspaper articles, we trace the public discourse on “Soforthilfe.” Using a combination of structuring content analysis and text mining, we show that the market dependency of the solo self-employed serves to identify the group’s need for financial support (social boundary), but also to controversially discuss the design of this support (substantive boundary). We show how norms of solidarity are configured throughout the discourse, releasing market dependence as a relevant boundary for solidarity – at least temporarily.