$200K/Month Giving His Product Away For Free

Ivan Kuckir is the founder of Photopea, which is basically a clone of Photoshop that you can use for free in your browser.

I shared Ivan’s story back in 2021 when he was making $1M/year 💰

He monetizes with display ads and subscriptions (for an ad-free version), with ads making up 90% of the revenue.

Now after almost a decade of working on it, Ivan recently revealed…

I make slightly over 200,000$ a month from ads on Photopea.

🤯

After starting the project in 2013…

It took about 200-300 hours to create the first version of Photopea. I wasn’t working on it full-time since I was also busy with my university studies. I coded the main features first and then focused on other ones.

He finished university and started to see traction…

I was living in a dorm here in Prague, sharing a room with three other students. Photopea was more like a hobby to me.

It wasn’t a job; it was something I enjoyed doing…I was excited to see it grow – starting with about 20-30 users a day – and enjoyed adding new features. I was adding new features or updates almost every week, just being thrilled by its gradual growth…

People found Photopea by word of mouth, through blog reviews, or video content.

🤑 Ivan could have gone the SaaS route and charged a monthly fee for access, but…

Initially, I wasn’t sure if people would be willing to pay for Photopea… I wanted to attract as many users as possible by offering it for free.

I thought that if I could gather a large user base, I could make significant money without asking people to pay, similar to how Google or Facebook monetize with ads.

Ivan eventually hired 2 people to help him, but still works a lot himself…

I spend about six to eight hours a day on Photopea. It’s like a full-time job, but I still enjoy it. Most of my work has no deadlines.

His costs…

I spend about 600$ per year for servers and 20$ for the domain. I also had an additional cost for an AI feature – $1.000$ per month.

That adds up to only $12,620 per year.

Not sure how much he’s paying his two employees on top of that. 

But I’m guessing he’s running his $2.4M per year business on less than $100,000 per year 🤯

Ivan’s advice for anyone starting out…

Don’t be intimidated by the idea of entering a crowded market or tackling complex tasks. Begin by focusing on the core, essential features of your product, the ones that are most important and useful. These don’t have to be numerous or complicated.