Case studies
What actually worked, with receipts
Real indie, AI and vibe-coded products: what they are, how they grew, what to copy and what went wrong. Numbers come from founders' own posts or press coverage and link inline. Self-reported figures are labelled as such.
Showing 13 of 13
TypingMind: a weekend ChatGPT front-end that grew past $1M a year
How Tony Dinh turned a better UI for the ChatGPT API into a $1M+/year product, starting with one-time licenses and adding team subscriptions later.
fly.pieter.com: a vibe-coded game that hit '$1M ARR' in 17 days, then $0
Pieter Levels built a browser flight simulator with AI and sold in-game ads and planes. The headline was $1M ARR in 17 days. The follow-up shows why one-off revenue is not ARR.
Cal AI: a photo calorie counter that MyFitnessPal bought within two years
Two high-school founders shipped a 'snap your food' calorie app in 2024. It passed $30M in annual revenue and was acquired by MyFitnessPal.
ShipFast: a Next.js boilerplate built in a week that made $6,000 in 48 hours
Marc Lou packaged code he kept rewriting for his own apps into a boilerplate. It made $6K in two days and $220K in about four and a half months.
TrustMRR: built in under 24 hours as a reply to one tweet, $20,378 in 3 days
Marc Lou built a verified-revenue leaderboard after Pieter Levels complained about fake MRR screenshots. Ad slots sold out in three days.
Tally: a free form builder that grew to $5M ARR, fully bootstrapped
Tally launched in 2020 with a generous free tier and a 'Made with Tally' badge. Five years later it passed $5M ARR with 11 people.
Plausible Analytics: $1M ARR with no ads, by picking a fight with Google
A two-person open-source analytics tool took 324 days to reach $400 MRR, then grew to $1M ARR through blog posts that hit the Hacker News front page.
HeadshotPro: AI headshots, $10M+ in revenue, with affiliates as a growth engine
Danny Postma launched HeadshotPro in 2023 and grew it into an AI headshot studio with $10M+ lifetime revenue. Affiliates bring in $50K+ a month.
Photo AI: Pieter Levels' AI photo studio built on plain PHP and jQuery
How Photo AI went from launch in February 2023 to $61,808 per month by July, with a tech stack most developers would call outdated.
Interior AI: built in 5 days, later reported at ~$45K MRR with >99% margins
Pieter Levels built Interior AI in five days in 2022. In 2024 he reported about $45,000 MRR and around $250 in monthly costs. Here is what that teaches, and what the skeptics said.
Formula Bot: a weekend no-code app, one Reddit post, and a $4–5K API bill
David Bressler built Excel Formula Bot in Bubble over a weekend. A Reddit post brought 100,000 visitors overnight and a surprise OpenAI bill before pricing was in place.
Bannerbear: two years, three pivots, then a steady climb to $50K MRR
Jon Yongfook burned a year of savings on 12 startups in 12 months, narrowed to image generation, pivoted to an API, and grew with a strict code-one-week, market-the-next rhythm.
GummySearch: 140,000 users, then shut down by a platform's API policy
A solo-built Reddit audience-research tool earned a large following, then closed in 2025 after failing to get a commercial Reddit API license. A lesson in platform risk.