Is Pieter Levels making less money now?

Why are people asking if Pieter Levels is making less money now?

Because Pieter Levels’ own public revenue counters have been moving down lately, and he has started talking openly about weaker sales across indie software.

This question has become much more relevant over the past few weeks. Several of the products in Levels’ X bio have been revised downward again, including Photo AI and Interior AI. At the same time, Levels recently summed up what he is seeing around him as “more apps than ever but less sales than ever.”

That comment fits his own numbers unusually well. His biggest AI products are cooling, but newer income streams such as Vibe Jam and X are growing. The useful distinction is between two things that can easily get mixed together: whether Levels’ established products are shrinking and whether Pieter Levels himself is actually making less money overall.

The first one is already fairly clear. The second takes more work.

How much money is Pieter Levels publicly making now?

Pieter Levels currently shows about $189,000 per month across the revenue lines in his public profile, before Remote OK, merchandise and investment returns.

His current X bio lists Photo AI, Vibe Jam, Interior AI, X and Nomads.com with monthly revenue figures. A second line puts his MAKE book at roughly $7,000 per month. These are Levels’ own rounded public numbers rather than audited accounts, so we treat them as a live scoreboard rather than financial statements.

The biggest missing piece is Remote OK. The site is still active, and Levels’ recently updated project history still puts Remote OK among the projects that have “made or still make good money for a long time.” Yet Remote OK no longer has a revenue figure in his current profile. We do not fill that gap with a guess.

That means $189,000 is the revenue we can currently see, rather than a precise total for everything Levels earns.

Current revenue stream	Public monthly figure
Photo AI	~$80K
Vibe Jam	~$44K
Interior AI	~$23K
X	~$20K
Nomads.com	~$15K
MAKE book	~$7K
Total currently shown	~$189K
Remote OK	Not currently disclosed
Investment returns	Not currently disclosed

Was Pieter Levels really making $420,000 a month?

Yes, Pieter Levels briefly hit a $420,000-per-month revenue pace, but that number lasted about one day and badly overstates his normal income at the time.

Levels published the breakdown himself after appearing on the Lex Fridman podcast. Photo AI was running at $161,000 per month, MAKE at $93,000, Nomads.com at $61,000, Interior AI at $43,000, his personal site and X-related revenue at $34,000, Remote OK at $29,000 and Applicant AI at about $1,000.

Levels immediately said the number had already dropped “way down.” He estimated that the podcast had increased total revenue about 2.5 times, while Photo AI had roughly tripled.

That gives us a useful reality check. Dividing the $420,000 spike by 2.5 suggests something around a $168,000 monthly pace before the viral surge. We should not treat that calculation as a financial statement, but it shows how misleading the $420,000 headline can be.

Levels really reached it. He just was not quietly collecting $420,000 every month afterward.

Is Pieter Levels’ revenue still falling right now?

Yes, the freshest public snapshots suggest Pieter Levels’ core product revenue is still moving down right now.

An independent browser snapshot of his X profile from roughly two weeks earlier showed Photo AI at $89,000 per month, Interior AI at $27,000 and Nomads.com at $16,000. The current profile shows approximately $80,000, $23,000 and $15,000.

Across those three directly comparable products, disclosed monthly revenue moved from about $132,000 to $118,000. That is roughly an 11% decline in a very short period.

Rounded X-bio numbers obviously do not have the precision of Stripe exports. They can move because Levels updates them at different moments. Still, three separate products moving downward together is much harder to dismiss as one stale counter.

Product	Roughly two weeks earlier	Current figure	Change
Photo AI	~$89K	~$80K	-10%
Interior AI	~$27K	~$23K	-15%
Nomads.com	~$16K	~$15K	-6%
Combined	~$132K	~$118K	-11%

Is Photo AI actually shrinking?

Yes, Photo AI is clearly shrinking on revenue right now, although the traffic data makes the reason more interesting than a simple collapse in demand.

Photo AI was already making $61,808 per month in 2023. During the exceptional Lex Fridman surge it briefly reached a $161,000 monthly pace. More importantly, Levels directly reported $105,000 in monthly revenue and $80,000 in monthly profit in March 2026.

As seen above, the latest public profile now puts Photo AI around $80,000 per month. That is about 24% below Levels’ own March disclosure, with another roughly 10% drop visible between the two most recent profile snapshots.

Yet third-party traffic estimates are moving the other way. HypeStat’s Similarweb-derived series estimates that Photo AI went from roughly 253,000 monthly visits to 316,000 and then 325,000 across its latest three reported periods, an increase of roughly 28% from the first to the last.

If that traffic direction is broadly right, fewer visitors cannot explain the whole revenue decline. Conversion, retention, customer spending or the mix of visitors must also be playing a role. We cannot tell from public data which one is doing the most damage.

Photo AI period	Monthly revenue
2023 direct disclosure	$61.8K
Lex Fridman spike	$161K
March 2026 direct disclosure	$105K
Recent profile snapshot	~$89K
Current profile	~$80K

Is Interior AI shrinking too?

Yes, Interior AI is shrinking too, and here the traffic trend points in the same direction as the revenue.

Semrush estimated that Interior AI received about 65,000 visits in April 2026, 43,000 in May and 31,000 in June. That is a traffic decline of roughly 52% in two months.

As seen above, the revenue counter has also kept moving down lately, from roughly $27,000 per month in the earlier profile snapshot to around $23,000 now.

That combination is cleaner than what we see at Photo AI. Interior AI appears to be dealing with both fewer visits and lower revenue. The site is still a substantial solo business, but we would be stretching the evidence to describe its current trajectory as stable.

Are Nomads.com and Remote OK making less money too?

Nomads.com is clearly smaller than during its old peak years, while Remote OK is the one major current revenue number we cannot see.

As seen above, Nomads.com currently sits around $15,000 per month. Levels reported $30,416 per month from Nomad List back in 2018, so the business is now roughly half that particular historical level. Its $61,000 pace during the Lex Fridman surge was even higher, although that was another temporary spike.

Remote OK has had much larger months as well. In 2021, Levels reported $101,101 in revenue for a single month. The business remained a meaningful five-figure monthly contributor in later public profiles.

Today, Remote OK is still live and still sits in the “Success” category on Levels’ newly updated project page, but its revenue has disappeared from his public bio. That missing figure prevents us from calculating an exact decline for the full old portfolio.

For Nomads.com, the long-term decline is visible. For Remote OK, the current answer is simply unavailable.

Did Vibe Jam replace Pieter Levels’ lost revenue?

Yes, Vibe Jam has replaced a big chunk of the revenue Pieter Levels lost elsewhere, at least for now.

Levels currently puts Vibe Jam at approximately $44,000 per month. For perspective, Photo AI has lost roughly $25,000 per month since Levels’ March disclosure. Vibe Jam alone is currently larger than that entire gap.

There is also more evidence of durability than there was with some of Levels’ viral experiments. His recently updated project ledger places Vibe Jam among his nine long-term financial successes. The competition has attracted sponsors including Cursor, Bolt, Lambda, CodeRabbit, Glif and Tripo and returned for another edition.

Still, $44,000 from a sponsored competition is harder to treat as permanent than $44,000 of recurring subscriptions. Sponsor budgets and event cycles can move quickly.

For this question, though, the money counts. Vibe Jam is one major reason Levels’ total income has fallen much less than Photo AI and Interior AI would suggest on their own.

Did fly.pieter.com become a real long-term business?

No, fly.pieter.com did not become another lasting $1 million-ARR business for Pieter Levels.

The launch was spectacular. Levels built the browser flight simulator publicly, says the saga generated more than 100 million views on X and reported that the project reached a $1 million annualized revenue pace in just 17 days.

Then the revenue faded.

Levels now places fly.pieter.com in the “Okay” category on his own project history, which he defines as projects that took off and made money but were not sustainable. The simulator has also disappeared from his current revenue bio.

That makes fly.pieter.com useful evidence for understanding Levels’ numbers. His distribution can turn a launch into a five-figure or even six-figure monthly pace almost instantly. Keeping that revenue alive for years is much harder.

Is X now a serious income stream for Pieter Levels?

Yes, X is now a real five-figure monthly business for Pieter Levels, and it is currently growing while his biggest AI apps cool off.

In his latest detailed disclosure, Levels said direct X revenue had reached $19,312 over roughly a month, his highest payout yet. He also reported $4,658 in MAKE book sales and $773 in merchandise linked largely to that same X distribution, taking the broader total to roughly $24,744.

Levels said those X earnings came alongside around 73 million views. His current profile rounds direct X income to approximately $20,000 per month, which is consistent with that disclosure.

A social account generating around $20,000 every month is already a meaningful standalone business. Once book sales, merchandise, product launches and sponsorship exposure are layered on top, X becomes even more valuable than the payout counter suggests.

This is one part of Levels’ business that is clearly moving up right now.

Why are Pieter Levels’ AI apps making less money?

Pieter Levels’ AI apps are being squeezed by cheaper cloning, stronger AI tools and a flood of similar products, and we think commoditization is now a real part of the decline.

Levels has recently been documenting the same behavior from both sides of the market. He highlighted a case where a software founder said his product had improved dramatically while revenue fell by a third, only for one customer to explain that he had recreated the product himself with AI so he would no longer need to pay for it.

Levels has done the same thing as a customer. He recently said he had cancelled his own SaaS subscriptions and vibe-coded replacements. He also pointed to free or open-source recreations of products such as Wispr Flow, Granola and WHOOP appearing increasingly quickly.

The supply side is getting crowded too. After reviewing more than 80 applications from a seed incubator, Levels said he was struck by how many products looked similarly polished and how difficult it had become to identify meaningful differentiation. AI has made decent software much faster to build, which also means every decent idea attracts competitors faster.

His own products are responding to that pressure. Photo AI recently expanded into full video generation and editing rather than remaining a narrow AI-photo tool.

The pressure is real. Public data does not tell us exactly how many dollars of Photo AI or Interior AI revenue were lost because of cloning, better base models, lower conversion or ordinary product aging. The two products are already showing different traffic patterns, so one explanation probably does not cover everything.

Is Pieter Levels becoming less dependent on SaaS?

Yes, Pieter Levels is now much less dependent on classic software revenue than his old product mix suggests.

If we group Vibe Jam, direct X revenue and the MAKE book together, they account for roughly $71,000 of the $189,000 currently displayed in his public revenue figures. That is about 38%.

Those businesses monetize something broader than access to a software tool. Vibe Jam monetizes an event and sponsor ecosystem. X monetizes content and attention directly. MAKE turns the same audience into book sales. Levels.vc adds investing on top, although we keep investment returns outside the monthly operating calculation.

The shift gives Levels more ways to get paid when one app slows down. A person who discovers him through a viral post can now produce ad revenue, buy his book, join a product, attract a sponsor or become distribution for whatever he launches next.

A growing share of the business is therefore being built around Levels’ audience itself rather than around one SaaS subscription.

Are Pieter Levels’ profits falling too?

Pieter Levels is probably earning less operating profit from Photo AI now, but the public data is too thin to say his total profit has fallen as fast as revenue.

The clearest profit disclosure came in March 2026, when Levels reported $105,000 in Photo AI revenue and $80,000 in profit. That works out to a margin of roughly 76%.

Applying the same margin to today’s disclosed Photo AI revenue would produce roughly $61,000 in monthly profit. That is only a scenario, because Levels has not published a fresh Photo AI profit number and model costs may have changed.

His fixed infrastructure remains absurdly cheap for the scale involved. Levels recently said his sites handle around 4.15 billion requests and 300 million visitors per year while his VPS servers cost $2,932 annually, or roughly $244 per month. AI inference, GPUs, payment fees and other product costs sit outside that hosting number, so the entire portfolio obviously costs more than $244 per month to operate.

Lower Photo AI revenue probably means fewer profit dollars. The size of the drop remains uncertain because we do not have current margins across the portfolio.

Is Pieter Levels making less money than before the AI boom?

No, Pieter Levels is still making far more business revenue than he did before the AI boom.

In February 2018, Levels reported $52,843 in monthly revenue across Nomad List, Remote OK and MAKE. A year later, Nomad List and Remote OK together crossed $83,333 per month, giving him his first $1 million annual revenue run rate.

His currently disclosed revenue is around $189,000 per month, and that figure does not even include Remote OK.

So even after the recent decline, Levels is producing more than 3.5 times his reported 2018 monthly revenue and more than twice the level at which his original businesses first crossed $1 million per year.

The useful historical picture is a large expansion followed by a partial retreat. The AI boom pushed Levels into a much higher income range, and he has given back part of that gain without coming close to his pre-AI scale.

Period	Public monthly revenue	Comparison with current disclosed revenue
2018	$52.8K	Current figure is ~3.6× higher
2019 $1M ARR milestone	$83.3K+	Current figure is ~2.3× higher
Current disclosed streams	~$189K	Remote OK still excluded

Could Pieter Levels’ investments mean he is personally making more anyway?

Yes, Pieter Levels could be making more from investments even while his software revenue falls, so business revenue and personal wealth should not be treated as the same question.

Levels now runs levels.vc and lists investments in Cursor, Replicate, Perplexity, fal, Sync and Blueprint alongside public technology stocks.

Some of those bets have already produced exits or announced exits. Levels describes Cursor as his first real investment exit, and SpaceX has agreed to acquire Cursor. His project history also notes that Replicate was acquired by Cloudflare.

What we do not know is how much Levels invested, what percentage he owned, how each deal was structured or how much cash he actually received. Those missing numbers make any attempt to calculate his investment income speculative.

We can still draw one firm boundary. Falling SaaS revenue does not prove that Levels’ total personal income, investment gains or net worth are falling. The public evidence is strong enough to answer the business question, but not the wealth question.

Can Pieter Levels still launch products that make real money?

Yes, Pieter Levels can still launch things that make serious money; the harder part now is keeping that revenue around.

Vibe Jam has become one of his biggest current income streams. Fly.pieter.com reached a $1 million annualized pace within 17 days before fading. His latest X-related month produced roughly $25,000 across platform payouts, book sales and merchandise.

The distribution behind those launches remains huge. That latest X income disclosure came from a period in which Levels says his posts generated around 73 million views.

His newly updated project ledger also gives us a useful view of the underlying batting average. Levels currently classifies nine projects as long-term financial successes and another 11 as projects that took off and made money without remaining sustainable. Dozens of other projects failed or had no profit goal.

That history explains why one shrinking product is less dangerous for Levels than for a normal one-product founder. He is still producing new shots on goal at a very high rate, and some of them still turn into meaningful businesses.

Will Pieter Levels keep making less money?

We expect more pressure on Pieter Levels’ established software revenue, but we would not project the current decline in a straight line.

The negative side has become pretty concrete. His product counters are still being revised downward. Interior AI traffic has fallen sharply. Levels himself is now repeatedly talking about weaker software sales, easier cloning and customers building their own alternatives. In one of his latest comments, he described the market as having more apps than ever and fewer sales than ever.

At the same time, his new revenue streams are already compensating for a meaningful part of the decline. Vibe Jam became a substantial business. X payouts reached a record. His book keeps selling. Investment exits have started arriving.

For Levels, the next phase comes down to a simple test: can he keep finding new $20,000-to-$50,000 monthly income streams before older products lose the same amount?

Based on the latest numbers, the old products are currently losing ground faster than before. His ability to replace that money is still very much intact.

So, is Pieter Levels making less money now?

Yes. Pieter Levels is making less operating revenue now than during his recent AI-boom high, and “mostly true” is the right answer.

The decline is real rather than something created by comparing today with one viral screenshot. Multiple established products are moving down at the same time, including Photo AI, Interior AI and Nomads.com, and the latest comparable profile snapshots show that the decline is still happening.

Levels has also become much better at replacing lost software revenue. Vibe Jam, direct X monetization and book sales now make up a large chunk of what he publicly earns. Remote OK still brings in an undisclosed amount, while investment gains sit completely outside the monthly product numbers.

The famous $420,000 month makes the decline look more dramatic than it really is because that pace lasted roughly one day. The opposite claim, that Levels is still making as much as ever, is also difficult to defend when his biggest product counters keep falling.

As seen above, his current disclosed businesses still produce roughly $190,000 per month before Remote OK and investments. That remains more than three times his 2018 revenue and more than twice the level at which Nomad List and Remote OK first became a $1 million-a-year business.

The numbers show a very high-earning founder whose old software engines are shrinking while his distribution is taking over more of the monetization. Calling it an income collapse would overshoot the evidence. Saying Pieter Levels is making less money from his operating businesses now is, for the moment, the better reading of the numbers.