Which solo projects make over $10K/month now?

Which solo projects are actually making over $10K a month now?

Yes. We can verify several genuinely solo projects making well above $10,000 a month today, including Postiz, Zigpoll, Designjoy, Photo AI, TrustMRR, DataFast, Momego, ScreenshotOne and RankInPublic.

Postiz is currently the most striking case we found. Nevo David still describes it as a one-person company, and its connected Stripe data recently showed roughly $216,000 in monthly recurring revenue. That figure is unusually strong evidence because it comes from payment data rather than a founder remembering a good month. Postiz was around $20,000 MRR earlier in its recent growth run, passed $70,000, then $100,000, and has since moved beyond $200,000. The trajectory is more interesting than the headline number: this is a solo SaaS adding roughly another $100,000 of MRR after already becoming a seven-figure business.

Zigpoll gives us another unusually clean case. Founder Jason Zigelbaum told Indie Hackers that he still runs the customer-survey SaaS alone, with no cofounder, funding or sales team. Zigpoll entered the year around $1.03 million ARR and reached about $125,000 MRR by the middle of the year, equivalent to a $1.5 million annual run rate. That is roughly 44% growth in six months from a business that was already large.

Below them, Designjoy founder Brett Williams still publicly describes his design subscription business as a "$100k/m one-man design agency." Pieter Levels disclosed $105,000 of monthly Photo AI revenue earlier this year, although more recent public revenue counters suggest it has since fallen closer to $80,000. Marc Lou's latest disclosed month produced about $42,000 from TrustMRR and $26,000 from DataFast; since then, DataFast's connected payment data has moved close to $30,000 MRR.

Further down the range, John McEvoy still operates Momego alone at roughly $30,000 MRR, ScreenshotOne is around $20,000 MRR based on Dmytro Krasun's latest founder-reported figure, and Antonio Escudero recently put RankInPublic between roughly $11,000 and $17,000 a month.

The answer is much stronger than "a few people once posted a $10K Stripe screenshot." We found solo businesses currently operating at $20K, $30K, $80K, $100K, $125K and above $200K per month.

Solo project	Latest useful monthly figure	Business	How strong is the evidence?
Postiz	~$216K MRR	Social-media SaaS	Very strong: payment-verified
Zigpoll	~$125K MRR	Customer-survey SaaS	Strong: recent founder disclosure
Designjoy	~$100K/month	Design subscription	Strong founder claim, current solo positioning
Photo AI	~$80K currently; $105K directly disclosed earlier	AI photography	Strong on earlier figure; current figure less precise
TrustMRR	~$42K recent monthly revenue	Startup database/marketplace	Strong founder disclosure
DataFast	~$30K MRR	Analytics SaaS	Very strong: payment-verified
Momego	~$30K MRR	Transit app	Strong founder disclosure
ScreenshotOne	~$20K MRR	Screenshot API	Strong founder disclosure
RankInPublic	~$11K–$17K/month	SEO/distribution service	Strong recent founder interview

Is the "$10K/month solo project" label hiding businesses that are not really solo?

Yes, and this is where most lists become unreliable: "solo founder" often survives long after the founder has stopped running the business alone.

Carrd is one of the classic examples. AJ built it into a roughly $100,000-MRR business during its famous solo period, which makes Carrd historically important. More recent accounts point to a small team around the product, however, so we should not casually describe the current Carrd as a one-person operation just because it started that way.

TypingMind has the same problem. Tony Dinh built it alone and disclosed more than $1 million in trailing annual revenue remarkably quickly. Later reporting described a three-person setup consisting of Dinh, a full-time employee and a contractor. That remains an extremely lean company, but three people is different from one.

Testimonial.to also belongs more comfortably in the "built solo" category than in a strict current solo list. Damon Chen created a seven-figure product, yet newer profiles describe other people helping around the business.

There are edge cases even among businesses that still call themselves solo. Happierleads founder George Georgiadis currently says on the company's own site that he bootstrapped the software to $1.5 million ARR with no cofounder and no team. Around the same time, however, he also discussed bringing people into the business and one company article referred to "people" who could handle some work. That ambiguity is enough for us to leave Happierleads outside the strict core rather than force it in.

For this article, "solo" means one principal operator running the business without a conventional employee team. Using that definition removes some of the internet's most repeated examples, but it makes the remaining ones much more useful.

Which current solo project is the strongest proof that one person can build a big company?

Postiz currently gives us the cleanest answer because its combination of scale, growth, team size and payment evidence is unusually hard to dismiss.

Nevo David publicly called Postiz a one-person company when it crossed roughly $70,000 MRR. It then passed $100,000, reached around $2 million ARR, and its connected Stripe data has lately been running above $200,000 MRR. The latest figure we found was about $216,000, equivalent to roughly $2.6 million ARR if maintained.

Zigpoll is less explosive but arguably just as instructive. Jason Zigelbaum says he runs the company without a cofounder, sales team or outside capital. Revenue doubled repeatedly after a slow first two years, and the company went from roughly $1.03 million ARR at the start of the year to about $1.5 million annualized within six months.

Designjoy shows that software is not required. Brett Williams still positions Designjoy as a one-man agency making about $100,000 a month. The business works because customers buy a standardized design subscription rather than hiring Williams for an open-ended consulting engagement.

These examples move the ceiling far above $10,000. A strict one-person business can currently reach $1 million ARR, $1.5 million ARR and apparently more than $2 million ARR without first becoming a normal startup with departments, managers and a sales organization.

Is Pieter Levels still the best example of a successful solo founder?

Pieter Levels is still one of the strongest solo-founder case studies, but he no longer owns the clearest current revenue record in our sample.

Photo AI remains a huge one-person product. Levels directly disclosed $105,000 of monthly revenue and roughly $80,000 of monthly profit earlier this year. His latest public revenue figures appear lower, around $80,000 a month, so repeating the $105,000 figure as today's run rate would exaggerate the current business.

That decline actually makes Photo AI more useful to study. Revenue has fallen by roughly a quarter from Levels' clean $105,000 disclosure while the project remains an exceptional solo business. A product does not suddenly become a failure because it retreats from six figures to roughly $80,000 a month.

Levels also provides the best long-term evidence for the portfolio approach. He has spent more than a decade launching projects, closing many of them and keeping a handful that compound. Photo AI, Interior AI, Remote OK and Nomads.com did not all peak at the same time. Revenue leadership moved between products as markets changed.

One recent change also shows why we keep refreshing these numbers: Levels has made Nomads.com almost free, charging only a nominal signup amount after years of paid membership. Older articles still describe Nomads.com as a roughly $15,000-per-month membership business. That historical number can no longer be treated as a clean current run rate under the same business model.

Levels remains the clearest proof that solo entrepreneurship can work repeatedly over many years. Postiz currently gives us the more impressive single-project growth curve.

Are AI solo projects taking over the list?

AI is creating some of the fastest solo-project growth today, but the biggest current examples are much more mixed than the hype suggests.

Photo AI is obviously AI-native. Postiz has also leaned heavily into AI agents and automation during its latest growth phase. BoltAI, Daniel Nguyen's native Mac client for AI models, has generated roughly $15,000 to $30,000 a month according to his public interviews, with around $25,000 described as a typical level during the period he discussed.

Yet Zigpoll's underlying product is customer surveys. Designjoy sells design work. Momego tells people when buses and trains are arriving. ScreenshotOne renders webpages into screenshots, PDFs and videos. DataFast does web analytics. RankInPublic helps founders distribute products and build search visibility.

The newer AI tools matter because one person can write, test, support and market more software than before. Pieter Levels has openly described using Claude Code for large parts of his development workflow. George Georgiadis says AI agents allowed him to automate large amounts of support and operations at Happierleads. Nevo David has built Postiz around increasingly automated distribution workflows.

Still, AI has not magically created customers. Zigpoll found growth by concentrating on e-commerce and agencies. Momego accumulated city-specific App Store search positions for years. ScreenshotOne solves a narrow developer problem well enough that companies keep paying for it. The solo businesses doing best these days usually pair cheaper production with a distribution advantage that is much harder to generate automatically.

Does a portfolio of small projects really count as solo-project success?

Yes, as long as we judge each project separately instead of adding every dollar together and pretending one product generated it.

Marc Lou makes the distinction particularly easy to see because he publishes detailed monthly revenue by project. In his latest full breakdown, TrustMRR generated about $42,000 and DataFast about $26,000. ShipFast produced around $3,000, CodeFast around $4,000 and Ship or Die roughly $2,000.

The interesting part is how different that looks from an older snapshot. ShipFast and CodeFast had both been around $20,000 a month earlier in their lives. Someone searching old founder posts could still describe them as "$20K/month solo projects," even though neither currently belongs in that category.

TrustMRR moved the other way. It launched with about $20,000 of monthly ad revenue, cooled off, changed direction and later became the biggest product in Lou's portfolio. DataFast has continued climbing and has recently been close to $30,000 MRR on connected payment data.

That constant turnover is central to the portfolio model. A solo founder does not need to predict one winner perfectly. Cheap experiments let a founder keep replacing shrinking products with growing ones. Lou's latest portfolio revenue remains many times above $10,000 even though the products generating most of that money have changed.

How many customers does a solo project need to make $10K/month?

Anything from a couple of clients to thousands of subscribers can get a solo project past $10,000 a month, and the current examples cover almost that entire range.

Designjoy sits near one extreme. Its subscription costs several thousand dollars per month, so a tiny number of simultaneous clients can create meaningful revenue. The capacity constraint is Williams himself, which is why the service tightly controls how requests enter the production queue.

ScreenshotOne is further toward the middle. It has reported more than 1,000 paying customers, and its current MRR is around $20,000. Revenue per customer is therefore measured in tens of dollars rather than thousands.

Momego represents the consumer model. McEvoy has reported roughly 5.2 million cumulative downloads and around 400,000 active users alongside approximately $30,000 MRR. Only a small share of that audience needs to pay for subscriptions because the top of the funnel is enormous.

Zigpoll takes yet another route. Its pricing reaches into the hundreds of dollars per month for higher-usage customers, and founder Jason Zigelbaum says focusing on agency users helped lift revenue per account by roughly 24% without a blanket price increase.

So $10,000 a month tells us surprisingly little about the size of the customer base. The underlying business could be two expensive design subscriptions, hundreds of SaaS accounts, a thousand API customers or a consumer app used by hundreds of thousands of people.

Model	Example	What gets the project past $10K/month
High-ticket productized service	Designjoy	A small number of ~$5K subscriptions
B2B SaaS	Zigpoll	Higher-value recurring business accounts
Developer API	ScreenshotOne	1,000+ paying users at much lower ARPU
Consumer subscription	Momego	Huge free audience with a small paid conversion rate

Does $10K/month mean the solo founder personally keeps $10K?

No. Two solo projects with the same revenue can produce completely different amounts of cash for the founder.

Photo AI gives us rare numbers for both sides of the equation. Levels disclosed about $105,000 in monthly revenue and $80,000 in monthly profit at the same point. That works out to a margin around 76% before the founder's personal taxes.

BoltAI can be even lighter on variable costs because customers bring their own AI API keys. Daniel Nguyen has described margins close to 90% while selling perpetual software licenses rather than bundling expensive model usage into the purchase price.

ScreenshotOne has to pay for browser infrastructure, bandwidth and compute. Momego has app-store fees, data and infrastructure costs. RankInPublic mixes software with more hands-on distribution work. Designjoy has very low software costs, but Williams' own design time is the scarce resource.

Revenue comparisons are useful, but incomplete. A $20,000-a-month software product with minimal support and 90% gross margins can give its owner more freedom than a $40,000 service business that consumes nearly every working hour.

Are these $10K/month solo projects basically passive income?

No. The current winners look highly leveraged, but they still require someone to operate them.

Momego has kept shipping updates after years in market, including work on transit alerts, widgets, performance and integrations. ScreenshotOne needs a reliable browser infrastructure product to keep working when websites and rendering environments change. Postiz has been adding integrations and automation while growing at an unusually fast pace. Levels continually changes Photo AI and his other products.

What disappears is much of the organizational overhead. A solo founder does not spend the week hiring managers, coordinating departments or sitting in internal planning meetings. Self-service onboarding, automated billing, narrow products and AI-assisted support allow far more customer activity to pass through one person.

Designjoy makes the distinction particularly obvious. Williams still has to design. The leverage comes from standardizing how clients buy, submit work and queue requests, so the business can produce far more revenue than traditional hourly freelancing without pretending the actual creative work is passive.

"Passive income" describes these businesses badly. A better description is a very high ratio of revenue to organizational complexity.

Is it easier to build a $10K/month solo project now?

It is dramatically easier to build and operate the product, while getting to $10,000 of real customer demand remains difficult.

The production side has changed first. One founder can rent hosting, payments, email, analytics, AI models and databases instead of building infrastructure. Coding agents can handle parts of development, debugging and support. Postiz, Photo AI and Happierleads show how far one operator can now stretch with automation.

That lower barrier also creates more competition. Anyone capable of producing a competent SaaS app in a weekend is competing with thousands of other people who have acquired the same capability. Shipping quickly has become less distinctive precisely because so many founders can do it.

Distribution keeps showing up in the winners. Postiz initially pushed hard through open source, GitHub, Reddit, integrations and later social distribution. Zigpoll spent years finding the right e-commerce segment. Momego built search positions around individual cities. Marc Lou can launch into an audience accumulated across previous products. RankInPublic literally sells founders help with the distribution problem.

These days, building the software is increasingly the cheap part. Getting a steady stream of people to discover it, trust it and keep paying is where $10,000 a month is usually won or lost.

How fast can a solo project reach $10K/month?

A solo project can now cross $10,000 surprisingly fast, but some of the best current businesses took years to become interesting.

Postiz demonstrates the fast path. Nevo David has documented a climb from roughly $20,000 to $70,000, then through $100,000 and above $200,000 MRR over a very short period. RankInPublic also jumped from only a few hundred dollars of monthly revenue to a reported $17,000 peak after Antonio Escudero found a distribution model that worked.

Zigpoll had almost the opposite experience. Jason Zigelbaum says meaningful traction took about two years. Once the product found its customer base, revenue began doubling year after year and eventually reached $125,000 MRR.

Momego is older still. John McEvoy launched the transit app in 2017 and spent years expanding city coverage, improving App Store positioning and experimenting with monetization. Its current $30,000 MRR came from compounding rather than one viral launch.

ScreenshotOne sits between those paths. Dmytro Krasun launched the product in 2022 and gradually moved through a few thousand dollars of MRR into five figures. Its current revenue is less spectacular than Postiz's, but the curve has been much steadier.

Fast growth is possible, especially when a founder catches a new platform or distribution window. The slower examples are probably more useful for anyone trying to work out whether $10,000 a month is reproducible rather than merely possible.

Do solo projects usually stay above $10K once they get there?

No. The latest numbers show that $10,000 a month is a threshold a project can cross in both directions.

Marc Lou gives us the clearest live example. ShipFast and CodeFast were both roughly $20,000-a-month products during stronger periods. His latest disclosed month put them around $3,000 and $4,000 respectively. Ship or Die has also moved from a five-figure month to low four figures.

Photo AI is declining from a much higher base. Levels directly reported $105,000 per month earlier this year, while his more recent public revenue counter has been closer to $80,000. Interior AI has also moved down from stronger earlier levels while remaining a meaningful business.

Nomads.com shows a different kind of instability: the founder intentionally changed the business model. Levels recently removed the old paid-membership barrier almost entirely because he wants a larger community and expects sponsorship to play a greater role. A historical monthly-revenue figure from the membership model tells us very little about what the project will earn under the new setup.

Zigpoll currently looks stronger. Its founder reported about 44% growth during the first half of the year after several years of expansion. Postiz is stronger still on near-term momentum, with payment data continuing upward beyond the founder's earlier $2 million ARR announcement.

Getting beyond $10,000 once does not tell us whether a product has become durable. For a current list, repeated revenue, customer retention and a business that still operates under roughly the same economics matter much more.

How rare is a real $10K/month solo project?

A genuine $10K/month solo project is still an outlier, even though the ceiling for the best founders has moved far higher.

The public success stories create a distorted sample because founders such as Pieter Levels, Marc Lou and Nevo David disclose far more than ordinary business owners. Their projects appear repeatedly in databases, newsletters and social posts because we can actually see the numbers. Thousands of private niche businesses disclose nothing.

There is an opposite bias too: failed projects disappear. Levels has launched dozens of experiments that never became substantial businesses. Lou's portfolio contains products making tens or hundreds of dollars alongside TrustMRR and DataFast. A visitor who only sees the successful launch thread misses the denominator.

Lou's current portfolio makes the power-law shape especially clear. TrustMRR and DataFast account for most of the meaningful product revenue while a long tail of projects produces very little. Levels' portfolio has behaved similarly over a longer period, with a small number of winners carrying the economics.

So the existence of $100K and even $200K solo businesses should make us more confident about what is possible, not about what is typical. Crossing $10,000 a month still means a project has escaped a very large graveyard of products that never found enough paying demand.

What do the solo projects making over $10K/month today have in common?

The strongest current solo projects are narrow businesses with unusually high operating leverage and a distribution channel the founder can run without building a company around it.

Postiz focuses on social publishing and automation rather than trying to become an all-purpose marketing suite. ScreenshotOne handles a technically annoying but well-defined job: turning webpages into screenshots, PDFs and videos through an API. Momego solves public-transport tracking. Zigpoll concentrates on asking customers questions at useful moments. Photo AI turns generative image models into a recognizable paid outcome: photographs of the customer.

Their distribution is equally important. Postiz used open source, integrations, social content and communities. Momego spent years accumulating city-level App Store visibility. Zigpoll found leverage in Shopify and agency customers. Levels brings a large direct audience to new products. RankInPublic built a business around the same discovery problem other founders struggle with.

Finally, each business limits the amount of human coordination created by a new customer. More API calls do not require ScreenshotOne to hire an account manager for every new developer. Another Momego subscriber does not create a transit-consulting project. A DataFast signup can onboard itself. Even Designjoy, the most labor-heavy example here, controls workload through a highly standardized subscription and request queue.

Those three ingredients—tight scope, cheap fulfillment and repeatable distribution—show up much more consistently than any particular technology.

So which solo projects really make over $10K/month now?

Yes: solo projects making more than $10,000 a month are very real today, and the strongest current examples go far beyond that threshold.

The cleanest names we found are Postiz at roughly $216,000 MRR, Zigpoll around $125,000 MRR, Designjoy around $100,000 a month, Photo AI around $80,000 on its latest public counter, TrustMRR above $40,000 in a recent month, DataFast around $30,000 MRR, Momego around $30,000 MRR, ScreenshotOne around $20,000 MRR and RankInPublic recently between roughly $11,000 and $17,000 a month. BoltAI also belongs close to this group based on Daniel Nguyen's reported $15,000-to-$30,000 monthly range, although its freshest exact revenue evidence is weaker.

Postiz changes the scale of the answer. We are no longer asking whether one person can somehow scrape together $10,000 a month with a tiny SaaS. A one-person software company can currently generate more than $200,000 MRR, while several unrelated solo businesses sit around $100,000 to $125,000 a month.

That does not make these outcomes normal. The same research gives us plenty of projects that crossed $10,000 and later fell back below it. It also shows successful solo founders launching many weak products for every breakout winner.

The real shift is the operating ceiling. Software, APIs, self-service payments and increasingly capable AI tools allow one person to serve a customer base that would previously have required a small company. Distribution has become the harder constraint.

So if the question is simply "Which solo projects make over $10K/month now?", we have a clear answer: quite a few do, across SaaS, mobile apps, APIs, AI products and productized services. And the best current examples suggest that $10,000 a month is no longer anywhere near the upper limit of a serious one-person business.