Any solo projects still making a lot of money?

Are solo projects still making serious money today?

Yes: genuinely solo projects are still reaching $25,000, $50,000 and even more than $100,000 a month today.

The freshest clean examples are hard to dismiss. Jason Zigelbaum says he runs Zigpoll with no cofounder, funding or sales team and recently reached roughly $125,000 MRR. Pieter Levels currently lists Photo AI at about $105,000 in monthly revenue and $80,000 in monthly profit. Jason McCreary says Shift consistently makes more than $50,000 MRR with no employees.

There is also a fairly thick layer below the $50,000 mark. Jack Friks recently reported $35,000 MRR from Post Bridge while still building and running it himself. Brennan Dunn rebuilt RightMessage after buying out his former partner and now runs the roughly $30,000 MRR business solo. ScreenshotOne recently passed $25,000 MRR, while NinjaPear crossed $15,000 in monthly gross revenue only six months after launch.

These businesses vary wildly in age, audience and product. Taken together, they show something simple: the high-revenue one-person software business is still very much alive.

What should actually count as a solo project?

We should call a project solo only when one founder still runs the business without a permanent internal team.

That definition matters because many famous “solo founder” stories stop being solo once the company works. TypingMind is a good current example. Tony Dinh originally built the product alone, but in a recent newsletter he referred to “my team and I,” and TypingMind now actively sells a team product. It remains bootstrapped and founder-led, but using it as evidence for a one-person company today would be misleading.

We do allow occasional contractors and outside infrastructure. Post Bridge still qualifies even though Jack Friks says he previously hired contractors to clean up a few things. He also says directly that he built the product alone and still runs it that way. Shift has used contractors at times during its ten-year history but currently has no employees.

The line we care about is permanent organizational complexity. A solo founder can use Stripe, AWS, accountants, AI agents or occasional specialists. Once salespeople, engineers, support staff and managers become part of the normal operation, we are looking at a small company rather than a solo project.

Are more people actually building companies alone now?

Solo founding is becoming much more common, and the change is large enough to call structural rather than anecdotal.

Carta studied tens of thousands of US companies and found that 36.3% of startups formed in the first half of 2025 had a solo founder, up from 23.7% in 2019. Stripe Atlas sees an even stronger shift in its own population: solo founders recently represented 63% of new C corporations formed through Atlas, an all-time high for the platform.

Those datasets cover different types of companies, so we should not compare the percentages as though they measure the same universe. The direction is clear in both.

The economics of starting alone have changed enormously. Hosting, billing, authentication, analytics, design tools, customer support software and global distribution can all be rented cheaply. AI has pushed the threshold further by taking over chunks of coding, research, support and content work that a founder previously had to do manually or hand to someone else.

Starting without a cofounder has therefore become a normal choice these days. Whether the resulting company actually makes money is a much harder question.

Are typical solo founders making more money too?

No: the typical solo startup is not getting richer along with the spectacular winners.

Stripe's recent analysis of thousands of Atlas companies found a striking split. Among solo-founded startups, median revenue during the first six months fell 23% year over year for the 2025 cohort. Revenue at the top decile rose 19%.

The gap between winners and ordinary projects has become huge. Four years earlier, a top-decile solo founder generated about 34 times the first-six-month revenue of the median solo founder. That ratio reached 61 times in 2025.

This fits what we see in practice. Software is much easier to ship, so more founders can enter the market. Customers have also gained far more alternatives. The same tools that let an excellent founder build faster let thousands of mediocre products appear faster too.

The solo-founder boom is creating more opportunities at the top while making the typical market noisier and more competitive.

Stripe Atlas measure	Latest result
Solo founders among new Atlas C corporations	63%
Median first-six-month revenue, year over year	-23%
Top-decile first-six-month revenue, year over year	+19%
Top-decile revenue versus median four years earlier	34x
Top-decile revenue versus median in 2025	61x

Which solo projects are actually making $25K+ a month right now?

There are at least six unusually clean current examples of solo projects at roughly $25,000 a month or more, including two above $100,000.

We deliberately prefer businesses where the founder has recently discussed both revenue and operating structure. That removes a lot of old screenshots and businesses that quietly hired teams afterward.

Zigpoll is currently the largest clean SaaS example we found at roughly $125,000 MRR. Photo AI follows at approximately $105,000 in monthly revenue. Shift is above $50,000 MRR despite being around a decade old. Post Bridge is around $35,000 MRR, RightMessage around $30,000 MRR and ScreenshotOne above $25,000 MRR.

Below that threshold, the pipeline continues. NinjaPear recently passed $15,000 in monthly gross revenue as a full-time solo operation, while Superpower ChatGPT has reached five-figure MRR around a free Chrome extension with more than 150,000 weekly active users.

Adding only the disclosed figures in the table gives us a floor of roughly $370,000 a month across six one-person businesses. The metrics are not perfectly comparable because Photo AI reports monthly revenue while the others mostly report MRR. We are using the sum to show scale rather than pretending it is a formal industry statistic.

Solo project	Recent disclosed revenue	Business
Zigpoll	~$125K MRR	Customer surveys
Photo AI	~$105K/month revenue	AI photography
Shift	>$50K MRR	Laravel upgrades
Post Bridge	~$35K MRR	Social media scheduling
RightMessage	~$30K MRR	Website personalization
ScreenshotOne	>$25K MRR	Screenshot API

Can we actually trust these solo-founder revenue numbers?

We can trust the stronger solo-founder revenue disclosures as good evidence, but we should not treat founder screenshots and interviews like audited accounts.

There are several levels of evidence. Photo AI's current figure appears directly on Pieter Levels' own site, together with a profit figure. The owners of Zigpoll, Shift, Post Bridge, RightMessage and ScreenshotOne recently gave detailed interviews explaining their revenue, customers, costs and operating structure. Those are much stronger than third-party revenue estimates.

We still exclude claims when the details do not line up. Designjoy is a good example. Its own website currently says Brett Williams runs the agency entirely himself, with no other designers and no outsourced design work. That makes the solo status unusually clear. However, the famous six-figure monthly revenue figures circulating online trace back to older podcast introductions rather than a current first-party revenue disclosure. Designjoy stays useful as an operating-model example, but we no longer count it in the verified current revenue table.

We apply the same caution to very fresh founder profiles. One of the newest Indie Hackers stories describes Aryan Mahajan's businesses as producing more than $100,000 in recurring monthly revenue. The article does not establish that the operation has no permanent team, so we leave it outside the solo sample.

The result is less spectacular than simply collecting every viral revenue claim on X. It is also much more defensible.

Is AI the reason solo projects can get this big now?

AI is raising the ceiling for solo founders, although high-revenue one-person businesses were already possible before generative AI arrived.

Stripe found that top-decile solo founders were about twice as likely as median founders to build AI-native products. After two years, AI-native solo startups generated almost twice the revenue of other solo-founded startups. The advantage appeared broadly between roughly the 50th and 95th percentiles rather than coming from one freak winner.

AI also changes existing businesses. Shift is a ten-year-old developer tool rather than an AI startup. Jason McCreary says AI has recently allowed him to return to doing everything himself after occasionally using contractors. The product stayed the same basic business; the amount of work one person could absorb changed.

Still, the current winner list is far broader than AI wrappers. Zigpoll sells surveys. Post Bridge schedules social media. RightMessage personalizes websites. ScreenshotOne renders webpages. Shift upgrades Laravel applications. Several of the clearest solo successes solve old software problems with very little AI in the customer's mental model.

AI helps most when a founder already has a useful product or understands a market. It can compress coding, support, research and operations dramatically. Customer demand remains the scarce part.

Why are B2B solo projects doing so much better?

B2B currently gives solo founders much better economics than consumer software, and Stripe's data shows a very large gap.

Top-performing solo founders were nearly 30% more likely than middle-decile founders to build for businesses. After 24 months, the median solo B2B company generated more than four times as much revenue as the median solo consumer company. Even among top-decile founders, B2B businesses earned almost twice as much.

The economics are easy to see in the current examples. RightMessage can charge businesses for improving conversion. NinjaPear sells company intelligence and enrichment data. ScreenshotOne becomes infrastructure inside another company's product. A relatively small number of customers can support meaningful revenue.

A consumer app often needs far more paying users to reach the same number. At $10 per month, $100,000 MRR means 10,000 subscribers. At $200 per month, the same revenue requires 500 business customers.

That gap affects much more than billing. Ten thousand consumer customers create more churn events, support contacts and acquisition pressure. For someone trying to remain alone, higher revenue per customer gives the business far more room to breathe.

How are solo founders getting customers without a sales team?

The best solo founders currently rely on distribution systems that keep working without requiring the founder to sell every account personally.

Zigpoll gets roughly a third of new signups through the Shopify App Store. Even more interesting lately, Jason Zigelbaum says around 14% of new signups now come from AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini recommending the product. Zigpoll has reached about $125,000 MRR without an internal sales team.

Post Bridge found demand through social media. Jack Friks originally built the scheduling tool because he was manually cross-posting his own content, then shared it publicly. He says the product doubled MRR in six months after an eight-month plateau, while his own X, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube content remained central to acquisition.

Superpower ChatGPT took yet another route. Saeed Ezzati released the Chrome extension only days after ChatGPT appeared, kept the extension free and built a large installed base. The business now has more than 420,000 downloads, around 150,000 weekly active extension users and a newsletter with roughly 350,000 subscribers. Monetization came after distribution.

The common thread is leverage. App stores, search, audiences, extensions, communities and partner channels can bring customers repeatedly. A solo founder relying mainly on one-to-one outbound eventually runs into a calendar problem.

What kind of solo business scales best?

Recurring B2B software is currently the strongest general model for a one-person company because revenue can grow without the founder repeatedly reselling or redelivering the product.

Stripe found that recurring billing is much more common among its best solo founders. Top-decile B2B solo founders were 26 percentage points more likely to use recurring billing than middle-decile founders. Customer behavior then compounds the difference: nearly 30% of customers at top-decile solo startups returned the following month, compared with only 8% for middle-decile startups.

ScreenshotOne shows another useful variation. Dmytro Krasun combines subscriptions with extra usage charges. More customer usage can therefore increase revenue without requiring him to negotiate another contract or perform more manual work.

Productized services can also work if the founder puts hard limits around delivery. Designjoy currently charges a flat monthly price, uses an asynchronous Trello queue and delivers one active request at a time. The one-request rule is crucial because it prevents ten customers from turning into ten simultaneous full-time jobs.

The products differ, but the operating principle is consistent: the customer should be able to pay more without creating an equal increase in the founder's workload.

Model	Example	Why it can stay solo
Recurring B2B SaaS	RightMessage	Customers keep paying without repeated sales
Usage-based infrastructure	ScreenshotOne	Revenue grows with API usage
Automated developer tool	Shift	Software performs work developers previously did manually
AI software	Photo AI	Compute delivers most of the customer output
Productized service	Designjoy	Strict queue limits control human workload

Are high-revenue solo projects actually profitable?

Yes: some high-revenue solo projects are extremely profitable because they carry almost none of the payroll that normally sits underneath a software company's revenue.

Photo AI gives us the cleanest figure. Pieter Levels currently reports approximately $105,000 in monthly revenue and $80,000 in monthly profit. That implies a margin of roughly 76%.

RightMessage provides a smaller but equally revealing case. Brennan Dunn says the business is now around $30,000 MRR, while expenses are roughly $1,000 per month. That does not automatically mean $29,000 of accounting profit because the founder's own labor and taxes still have to be considered. It does show how unusual the cost structure can become when software revenue sits on top of one person.

Shift is even leaner on infrastructure. Jason McCreary recently described basic overhead of roughly $100 a month against more than $50,000 MRR. Payment fees, taxes and founder time sit outside that figure, so calling it a 99.8% net margin would be nonsense. The useful observation is that servers and software barely move the economics.

This is why $30,000 MRR in a solo company can be financially more interesting to its owner than several times that revenue inside a staffed startup. Revenue becomes much more powerful when very little of it needs to fund an organization.

Does staying solo eventually hold the business back?

Usually, yes: staying solo gives a founder extraordinary efficiency, but teams still pull ahead when there is enough demand to justify parallel work.

Stripe tracked top solo and multi-founder startups over two years. Solo companies initially generated more revenue, but top-decile multi-founder startups were producing 53% more revenue than top-decile solo startups by month 24. The advantage remained even after Stripe accounted for investor funding.

At the extreme end of bootstrapped businesses, the gap becomes surprisingly small. Among 99th-percentile companies, bootstrapped multi-founder startups were only about 5% ahead of bootstrapped solo startups after two years. Exceptional founders can apparently remain competitive for much longer than conventional startup wisdom would suggest.

Individual companies show how the transition happens. TypingMind began as one of the strongest modern solo-founder examples, but Tony Dinh now openly refers to his team. The company has moved deeper into enterprise features such as team administration and organizational deployments, where security, support and sales create work that is difficult for one person to absorb indefinitely.

Some founders deliberately refuse that next stage because they care more about freedom and profit than maximum revenue. Others hire. The interesting change today is how far one person can get before that decision becomes unavoidable.

Can someone starting from zero realistically copy these $100K-a-month solo projects?

A new founder can copy the structure of these solo businesses, but reaching $100,000 a month remains a very unusual outcome.

The 61x gap between Stripe's top-decile and median solo founders should kill any idea that this has become easy. Cheap software and AI lower the cost of trying. They also let more competitors try at the same time.

The success stories contain accumulated advantages that disappear when compressed into a revenue screenshot. NinjaPear founder Steven Goh had spent more than 20 years in software and previously built Proxycurl to roughly $10 million ARR before starting again. Brennan Dunn had spent years building an audience around email marketing before relaunching RightMessage. Ryan Robinson, whose RightBlogger SaaS recently reached roughly $29,000 MRR, had spent more than a decade building a blog audience before the product appeared.

Even the apparently straightforward stories usually took longer than they look. Zigpoll spent about two years struggling for traction before revenue started compounding. Post Bridge came after years of failed online projects and an earlier app. ScreenshotOne took roughly four years to reach its current level.

A founder starting today has better tools than any of these people had at the beginning. The harder part is getting customers to care when thousands of other founders have the same tools.

So, are solo projects still making a lot of money?

Yes. Solo projects are still making a lot of money today, and $25,000 to $50,000 a month is clearly achievable for exceptional one-person software businesses, while a smaller group has crossed $100,000 a month.

The evidence is stronger than a handful of old indie-hacker legends. Fresh disclosures put Zigpoll around $125,000 MRR, Photo AI around $105,000 in monthly revenue, Shift above $50,000 MRR, Post Bridge around $35,000 MRR, RightMessage around $30,000 MRR and ScreenshotOne above $25,000 MRR. Several of those businesses explicitly remain one-person operations.

At the same time, Stripe's much larger dataset shows why the internet can give a distorted impression of how easy this is. Median early revenue among solo startups recently fell while top-decile revenue increased, pushing the winner-to-median gap to 61x. Solo founding is booming, but the money is concentrating among the projects that actually crack distribution, retention and pricing.

Today's strongest solo model is fairly clear. B2B generally beats consumer. Recurring revenue beats constantly finding new buyers. Distribution through marketplaces, communities, search, audiences or platforms beats selling every account manually. AI gives the founder more capacity, especially in coding and operations, but it does little to solve weak demand.

So yes, one person can still build a surprisingly large business. The catch is that building an average small software product has probably never been more competitive.