Ivan Kutskir started Photopea in September 2012, and he says so himself in the first post on the Photopea blog, dated 14 September 2013. He had two computer graphics courses behind him at Charles University in Prague, he had spare time, and he got the idea to make a simple web based photo editor. He worked on it for three months in 2012 and two more months over the following summer. His own summary of that stretch: he learned a lot and realized it was not going to be as easy as he expected.

The milestone clock in this record starts on 1 September 2012, the month he names as the beginning. Every day count below is measured from there, and each one is pinned to a date the founder published himself.

The early releases were modest. Photo Pea 0.3, dated 27 October 2013, had 9,039 lines of code and added a layer tree, a color picker and a parser for Photoshop ABR brush files that he had to reverse engineer because the format is not documented. Version 1.0 arrived on 31 December 2014 at 22,931 lines. There was no company behind any of this. In a 2022 AMA he put the cost of those years in plain terms: after four years of work he had put 7,000 hours into it and was still making no money, and a $20 an hour job over the same period would have paid him $140,000. He also said he did not talk about it with family or friends, because he was afraid people would think he was crazy for pouring that much time into his own project.

Money came in a strange order compared with most software businesses. The first thing anyone could pay for arrived on 17 September 2016, when he published a post titled Photopea Premium offering a $5 per month upgrade. His description of it is unusually honest: it does not give you any extra features, it helps us improve Photopea for you, and after upgrading your account button becomes green and you can start being proud of yourself. That is the first paying customer date used here, 1,477 days after he started. It also lines up with the year he graduated and stopped treating Photopea as a hobby, which he described in a later AMA as the point where he began working on it full time, having never held any other job.

Real revenue came from advertising instead. In the August 2020 Reddit AMA he wrote that he did not fully believe in Photopea until 2017, when he started to monetize it with ads and was able to make $400 a month. That figure is the first_100_mrr marker in this record, anchored conservatively to 31 December 2017, the end of the year he names, at 1,947 days.

The mechanics of the ad model are simple enough that he explained them in one line: he makes around five cents for every hour someone spends inside Photopea. In 2019 people spent five million hours in the editor, so he made around $250,000. That is the first_100k_arr marker, again anchored to the end of the stated year, 31 December 2019, at 2,677 days. By the April 2021 Hacker News AMA the number had moved again. He opened with almost $1 million in the last 12 months, 90% from ads, with the rest coming from Premium subscriptions and from licensing a self hosted version of Photopea. That is the most recent figure he has published himself, which is why the current revenue on this record is dated April 2021 rather than something newer and less certain.

Distribution is the part founders usually want to copy and cannot. Kutskir has said he is not used to doing any marketing, that it took him years to reach 1,000 daily users, and that what he did do was post the editor on Reddit, Hacker News and Designer News. Growth after that came from people finding a free Photoshop substitute that opens in a tab and telling other people about it. In the 2017 blog post he asked readers directly to help by using it, recommending it to friends, making tutorials and sharing it, and noted that many of them already did.

The cost structure explains why he could survive four unpaid years. Photopea runs entirely in the browser, in JavaScript with GLSL shaders through WebGL for layer blending, adjustments and filters. There is no server side computation, no database, just static files. In 2020, with roughly seven million monthly users, he said he paid around $50 a year for file hosting. He wrote almost everything himself, including his own PNG and GIF parsers, ZLIB decompression and OpenType parsing, because there were no good image editing libraries in JavaScript in 2012. He estimates about 10% of the code came from someone else.

By December 2017, four years in, he reported 2.5 million people had used Photopea and spent 120,000 hours in it, and that he had solved 400 bugs and feature requests. He was 27, the only developer, and had designed the logo himself. The pattern here is not a clever launch. It is one person shipping numbered releases for four years to an audience that grew faster than his ability to charge them, then finding that five cents per user hour, multiplied by millions of hours, is a business.