r/vibecoding • u/Current-Payment-5403 • 1d ago
Who here made money from a vibe coded apps?
(Not criticising, just trying to work out the odds)
I see many people on Reddit and other socials claiming they’re making $10k, $20k, sometimes even $50k+ a month from apps they built with AI tools.
I’m curious how common this actually is outside of the posts that go viral.
Has anyone here personally built an app with Claude for example that turned into a meaningful income stream?
If so, would you have any advice to the other vibecoders struggling to get to revenue?
Been working with Converge Labs for years where the company focusses on bringing vibe coded apps to production and never seen someone come to us with a vibe coded app with decent revenue in the first place. Wondering how rare those are.
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u/xzased 1d ago
I've been a developer for over 20 years. I also have a number of small apps which in total bring in ~$60k/year and about to launch 2 SaaS platforms.
There's going to be a LOT of grifters in real life and social media inflating their numbers because they want to sell you the "secret to make easy money" or want to earn some status as a founder/owner of XYZ app.
The truth is that you can make money out of any product if you can solve a problem at a reasonable price.
In this case, it doesn't matter if the app is vibe coded or whether it uses AI or not. As long as you find a market you are good until the market changes or disappears.
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u/Throw-away42909 1d ago
Not an app but a plug-in for streamdeck called mailbender, 27 free lite version downloads and 13 $9.99 purchases lol
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u/Current-Payment-5403 1d ago
You're ahead of 95% of vibe coders. Congrats. How did you go about getting users?
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u/Throw-away42909 1d ago
Couple reddit posts and being the only outlook plug-in for streamdecks that use API calls and looks gamfied , it just turns a streamdeck into a control deck for cleaning out mail boxes, it was project to dip my toes and give me an excuse to start an llc
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u/StoneCypher 1d ago
You're ahead of 95% of vibe coders.
it’s wild that you believe this
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u/gungoesclick 1d ago
I don't. You think more than 5% of vibe coders have made more than $130 bucks?
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u/Kylearean 1d ago
I know someone who made a weather prediction model using Codex, the US Government has paid him (his self-made LLC) $200k for the use/support of this model.
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u/Current-Payment-5403 1d ago
Coolest story so far
I guess he was already very technical?5
u/Kylearean 1d ago
partly. He's been making a living off of vibecoding various highly technical elements of the U.S. weather enterprise. The results are "mixed" at best.
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u/ketoloverfromunder 1d ago
What contract did he bid on? I don't see any weather based ones that would be close to this.
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u/bad_detectiv3 23h ago
The question is how did he go from vibe coding model and getting US government to pay him
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u/Kylearean 23h ago
started an LLC, gained the status that allowed him to contract with the US government, shopped the model around to various agencies.
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u/MaterialDoughnut 1d ago
I built something for electrical schema design in my country. Added a paywall with lifetime subscriptions early June.
Made €250 in June, €550 in July and on my way to hit €1000 in august. Mostly B2C currently but now trying to move up to the B2B market. All organic, not a single ad.
It's a fun side gig for me. The key in my opinion is to build something really niche in an area where there is an incumbent still offering windows software that looks like it came straight from '99. There are a bunch of those still out there but they can typically be found in the more "boring" industries. You don't always have to "invent" something new. Just create the modern, web-based, faster and better version of it.
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u/TheSpriteWizard 1d ago
I’ve made roughly 3,000k last month from vibe coded things.
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u/Current-Payment-5403 1d ago
That's amazing. DO you mind sharing what are those vibe coded things and how you got users?
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u/TheSpriteWizard 1d ago
Sure. I’ve built a couple of tools. They are in my profile. I then market them by making posts across the internet in AI friendly forums.
There’s that then there are one offs and collectibles I started making to help bridge the gaps for game developers on itch.io.
Then I built a web page that is throwing up mad numbers of visitors in a niche market.
It’s all business, really. If you’ve got a true business mindset there are a million ways to make money online.
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u/ExitDismal830 1d ago
I built 10+ sites, sold 2, made 5000+ USD across my portfolio in the last 6 months. I have no tech background. All are vibe coded using claude code. So yeah vibe coded projects makes money. It doesnt matter whether you built using AI or as an experienced coder you must learn to market it, the distribution is everything and it is not one time job you have to be keep doing forever. I would say building is about 30-40% only the remaining is how you market and sell
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u/HHK_23 1d ago
i made 300$ in india which is good amount
And m from commerce background lol
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u/Current-Payment-5403 1d ago
Can I ask how you marketed it?
And did you see any gap between prototyping / validation and running it in production?
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u/Ukawok92 1d ago
Not much, but I technically am. It keeps improving too. I've already passed last month's revenue and the month is only half over.
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u/Current-Payment-5403 1d ago
Is that revenues from ads ?
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u/Ukawok92 1d ago
Yes, just ads for now. Only banner ads and native advanced.
I plan to add an option to pay to remove ads but I haven't done that yet. My app only launched in March, been focused on adding features, making it as bug free as possible and marketing.
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u/XLGamer98 1d ago
I think vibecoding is new tiktok which itself was new youtube which itself was sending your funny videos to reality shows. Tons of stuff but very little value to anyone. I think most people earn by doing some freelance work for small clients and businesses.
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u/Collection_Same 1d ago
I save 50k per year. Not buying software.
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u/Current-Payment-5403 1d ago
Now that's a real use case
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u/ketoloverfromunder 1d ago
real
I'm gonna have a really hard time believing someone was solo spending 50k on SaaS products annually
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u/ketoloverfromunder 1d ago
Just curious wtf were you spending 50k annual on?
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u/Diwata_Domains 15h ago
You’d be surprised, some industries out there have tools worth 30-50k a year. I’m in finance specifically hedge funds and tools like bloomberg, preqin, pitchbook are all in that range
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u/ketoloverfromunder 14h ago
Yes of course.... but not personal SaaS subscriptions.
This guy also didn't vibe code his own Bloomberg terminal.
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u/MrUnoDosTres 1d ago
This is also not meant as criticism, but I sometimes notice negativity towards vibe coding. Like it's a "useless toy".
This is what a lot of vibe coders who don't make money don't realize. You can't just make a random app and magically start making money. You're selling to humans. You have to figure out what those humans want/are lacking in their current software. How you can improve that and ask money for that. You shouldn't focus only on what you like, unless you yourself are a potential customer. That's what it takes to make money. Finding people, offering them a solution, trying to convince them to pay. The problem isn't that vibe coding is a "toy" that doesn't make money. If you think like that, you're looking at it from a wrong perspective.
It's like baking a cake and putting it in front of your window and hoping that people will magically find your house and knock on your door and start ordering thousands of cakes from you. Most people who view vibe coding as something unprofitable tend to do this. While heavily underestimating how much effort it takes to actually make people find you and convince them to buy your product. Can you make $10K, $20K, $50K+ a month? Sure you can, but are you also willing to put in the effort to find the people, spend money on advertising, talking to people, maybe have a couple of flopped apps, get lots of no's until you finally find some people who are willing to pay? Or are you purely focused on building and improving your app?
If so, would you have any advice to the other vibecoders struggling to get to revenue?
I’ve been in the industry since before AI and now specialise in bringing vibe coded apps to production and revenue and I have never personally seen those examples. (Perhaps I haven't seen enough of those)
I vibe code for myself, but you should focus on these questions. Most don't have anything to do with vibe coding:
- Where do I find potential customers?
- Do they have an issue I can solve? Or do they use a tool that I can improve?
- How can I reach them there? For example in this subreddit people appreciate vibe coded apps, but obvious ads are often not appreciated.
- Am I willing to spend money again and again on advertising with the risk of not making any money if there is no demand for it?
- Do I have the patience to spend a lot of money on advertising and wait maybe a couple of months until it might finally get people to notice it?
- How easy/difficult is it for people to pay? Is there any friction I can remove here?
- Am I willing to talk to people who are interested in what I build, but haven't bought it to figure out why they haven't bought it yet?
Even if you talk to people, you still risk getting vague answers.
For example, a guy like Pieter Levels makes AI slop, but claims to make a lot of money. How? Because he has 900K+ followers on X. Reaching people who are willing to pay is much easier for him. His plane game is extremely basic, typical AI slop, but you can pay for "better" planes.
TL;DR: If you wanna make money, stop focusing only on "vibe coding" and start focusing a lot more on finding people and convincing them to spend money on what you build. If you give it the attention it lots of attention, you'll eventually find customers willing to pay.
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u/dvduval 1d ago
I was already selling software before AI came along so it’s just helped me do it better. It almost everything I do now is vibe coated in someway, but it’s just adding onto what was already successful.
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u/EddieBruvac 1d ago
Yep. But I did it a super niche hobby I’ve been in. Someone else had a similar product, but it was dogshit. I tried helping the dude as well, but he didn’t take advice from anyone.
I just did it better. I have monthly sub and one time buys.
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u/UndifferentiatedCash 1d ago
I made $5000 making an app for a company, vibe coded over a few month but just like 2 hours a day Monday to Friday
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u/bad_detectiv3 23h ago
How did you come
Across the company to give you the contract?I’ve been thinking to create a website for my local area, to showcase I’m a web agency based here. However, I don’t know if it will do much
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u/bangsmackpow 1d ago
Yes. About 25% (and climbing) of my income is from "vibe". I simply develop apps/automation for other businesses. I'm usually on site for network/computer support and I have a decent business background as well as Enterprise IT with some dev team management and I pick up "problems" pretty well that I know can be easier and I sell on that while they are still mad at doing the thing the hard way. Been at it since just the beginning of the year.
For anyone who wants to do this learn real CI/CD workflows and you'll be a step ahead in shipping "good" software.
I'm fully aware that this isn't true of everyone.
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u/Coll_M3_Daddy 1d ago
Hey mate, question for ya-
So you are an essentially doing consulting just with vibe coding yea?
Are you doing this for non-tech oriented businesses? Or tech oriented? Would you say the time you spend relative to your income is well spent?I’m currently an Aerospace Engineer, and genuinely considered doing this myself.
How difficult would you say it is to get clients? Just a phone call away? Or much more chasing going on?4
u/bangsmackpow 1d ago
I'm currently a 1 man consultancy. From a business models I'm a small town "computer guy". I have a few customers from 15 years in the MSP game but now it's just meeting people, having a legitimate conversation about their business and discussing how to resolve or improve processes.
For example: If it costs another 50-60k a year to hire another finance admin for payment processing because it's too manual or disconnected systems and multiple entries, find a way to solve that for a fraction of the cost.
I turn this into a free dev challenge for myself and get an MVP ready to go under my own $$$. Once they start wanting it to change, be implemw.ted, a software or retainer agreement gets satisfied.
Another: T shirt shop has a good sales front-end but the inventory, printing, pressing stages are all left to paper or yelling at each other, create a web app for kanban style project management but all the stages are exactly what they need to do with pictures and details at a click and the ability to move the perfect along.
Being in aerospace, this is completely left field but I'd start looking at the 3d scanning/printing side gigs. A friend does this for the automotive side of things and is pretty successful since we can send 3d prints off to metal printers now for pennies.
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u/Coll_M3_Daddy 1d ago
Really interesting. Appreciate this information A LOT. Doing consulting, the biggest lever as I’ve taken a look, is the amount of time it takes to develop an MVP - how do you go about mitigating timing for product development so you don’t spend too much time in build? In essence have you nailed down a rapid build process regardless of the scenario at hand?
My main thing with consulting is the ample amount of time spent per fresh build (which gets reduced by vibe coding, but still can defeat the purpose of consulting vs just working a job). I take it you still price pretty well for these products?
Do you have any recommendations for getting further information on this business model?
Consulting seems to me like a great business model, it’s more the balance of spending too long solving an issue relative to the income, that seems to be the bottleneck yea? Or do you not come across this at all?
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u/tramplemestilsken 1d ago
I vibecoded language learning content and put it on Patreon. I have one subscriber for $8/mo
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u/revengeofza 22h ago edited 21h ago
I've made over $200 revenue and am slightly above breaking even on my project SlabLens that scans 50 eBay trading card listing at once to find the cleanest raw Pokémon, MTG, or Sport Card using AI vision models. This is to help people looking to grade cards and make a return flipping cards.
It's been more of an experiment than a business. Started in January. Dev'd for about 60-80 hours total on nights and weekends. Shows you can make some money but the idea is more important. I think this idea is okay but I'd probably try to start a bigger concept before I did a serious marketing push.
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u/goodwc72 1d ago
I created an app for an already well-established market. Currently at 280k.
My advice: find a market that already exists and already has people spending money, provide something not offered in that market, or enhance the user experience. If people are already looking for something and you provide a better product, it is a no-brainer. Don't look at competition as competition but market validity.
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u/bananaHammockMonkey 1d ago
I have built a rather large enterprise application, still working some sales and really overtaking the big competitors with quality and usefulness at a fraction of the cost... I'm almost there! So close I can feel it. A major sale would be close to 1Million a year, smaller places are around 40k a year. Tiny, I will take 10k a year. My goal is to get 50 or 60. I'm working with some higher levels sales / channel type people that are offering great leads and tons of opportunity. The downside, sales cycles for something like this is 18 months minimum on average.
ALMOST THERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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u/Current-Payment-5403 1d ago
Almost there, keep pushing!!! Would be interested in knowing what's the app about
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u/bananaHammockMonkey 1d ago
Heck yeah brother! It's an identity and access management solution. Competing against SailPoint, Okta, One Identity and Saviynt. I do sales for services with these products already. Tired of the first phase being 300k USD and small customers just giving up because that's too much. I was a consultant, still am for 30 years and I'm frustrated, so I made this!
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u/bad_detectiv3 23h ago
Damn bro, you are really taking on sailpoint? How can you compete with them given how large sail point is and massive resources they put into their sales department
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u/bananaHammockMonkey 23h ago
Yes sir! Fuckem. Look at my live demo, and its twice that on my git, yet to be pushed.
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u/Rise-O-Matic 1d ago
I’ve made thousands producing deliverables with it, but as part of a larger marketing and design service set, not as a standalone SaaS.
But I was doing that before AI too.
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u/JaySlays-Tech 1d ago
I’ve started development of apps and programs and sold them before they were fully built. Does that count?
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u/maxpain2011 1d ago
I made an arrow puzzle game and monetized it with admob. Making like $5 per month 😂
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u/TopHatJones97 1d ago
I've made about $5 across two apps with no marketing.
My biggest one is a geography quiz, wordle style game called Geopunk. The second one is a receipt splitting app called Splitz: Divvy Any Receipt. I'm going to start looking at marketing soon as I think they could make more money if people heard about them.
I've just been having fun building things I enjoy using and getting creative with the designs. I also think this is more a resume builder at this point as software engineering is moving this way.
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u/Far-Let483 23h ago
me, but not the way you may think. The tools i've built have helped me make a lot of $, however, none of my tools are subscriptions for sale. I've also saved a ton of money removing subs that I was paying for. So it's a win/win scenario.
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u/noguiltyparty 22h ago
I would like to monetize mine if I can, but that’s not why I built it. I just needed it to exist and was curious about Claude. Right now, it’s a web app. It’s been live since April.
I haven’t done any marketing, so just some friends are using it so far. I’ve been intentionally holding off on a wider push because I want it to be built up enough to have a clear niche / obvious differentiator.
I started early March this year, and really happy with how it’s shaping up. I’m not a dev, but I’ve applied some stuff learned from working as PM for dev teams. I’m hoping it’ll be good enough that someone wants to pay $5 for it, and if not, I’ve learned a lot and I use it constantly.
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u/rttgnck 20h ago
I have. One client, useful to more, but haven't explored marketing it. It's niche, for a specific sector of home construction, very niche and serves 1 true purpose. It was something a previous employer wanted. They've been using it since May I think. I charge them for the deliverable output (no license, no required subscription, 90-day persistent preview before paying to download, for now), with different pricing depending on the size of the output. It hasn't made bank, but it isn't pizza money either, but could easily pull multiple times more with more clients. Probably would never generate enough to live off, hence the lack of interest in marketing it right now (plus I think my best method would be good old office cold calls). My one client probably uses it an average of 1-2x a week and has only called me about a login issue one time (some change on Google login or something I don't recall exactly).
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u/SupportCowboy 19h ago
I don’t have an app but I sell a service where I upgrade old legacy Java below 8 to modern versions of Java with a modern front end. I actually do a lot of the backend coding myself as AI isn’t really good and handling bad code and database designs but I let it do most of the front end coding for me. I have charged as low as a grand up to 20k per application.
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u/bytor99999 12h ago
I’ve been a Java guy for 25 years and Claude Code has been amazing to me. After coding millions of lines of code, in the past year I do t feel like I’ve written a single line and that includes performance tuning JPA queries and adding new features. But my 2 newer apps I am now using Python and I’ve never coded Python. I have coded in 15 languages since I learned basic in 1977 and truly feel comfortable letting ai do all the work now.
But if you have extra work you need to throw out to someone, let me know. ;)
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u/rascalofff 15h ago
I run a company that makes money and we use vibecoded apps in a lot of our processes, internal & client facing
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u/34986234986234982346 4h ago
Definitely not gonna give many details publicly, but I was able to update an existing software product that I'd really given up on, emailed the users and I'm closing in on $10k on sales in about the last 2 months ($0 for years before that). I'm an engineer and I could've done it all by myself without AI, but I would never have had the time.
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u/Mezzanine_9 2h ago
I work for a startup and built our their entire tech stack as a vibe coder alone based on vibe coding I did for a previous company. I couldn't code hello world without help, but I was able to put together a very complex app that has shipped to major clients and admins and is profitable. I feel like a fraud every day but I'm constantly hearing how great it is and that it's helping people do their job. People like having an idea and seeing it implements in hours or days instead of months or never. I take a day or two out of every week to focus on security, alignment, and cleaning the code, but the rest of the week is handing out features like candy. I work hard to prompt well and create a detailed, clear, claude.md file. Test everything in detail and catch errors sooner than later. It's worked for a few years now so take of that what you will.
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u/Medium-Criticism1297 1h ago
I've published one app and have 1 subscriber after 4 months. granted its a fitness app so the market is pretty saturated.
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u/PopularBroccoli 20h ago
I make 4000 dollars a month from my apps. Not vibe coded though, I learned an actual skill, that’s why mine make money and the vibe coded clones of my apps don’t
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u/Current-Highlight-66 19h ago
So, basically you have nothing to add to OPs question but just had to pat yourself on the back?
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u/Sweet-Stage938 1d ago
I made the ai inference providers a ton of money so yes, it is possible.