Pieter Levels Builds Photo AI to $150K/Month in Under 3 Years

Pieter Levels launched Photo AI in February 2023 after spending 2 months building "a photorealistic AI Photo studio."

The Fast Start

He reached $10,000 MRR after just 3 weeks with 318 customers at ~$31/month average. Then hit $18,000 MRR with 587 customers - notably adding $7,000 in MRR in a single day from one TikTok video.

The Scale

Photo AI reached a new record of $150,000/month with 2,573 active subscribers, 87% profit margin, 100% bootstrapped with $0 funding.

The Stack

"It's just me working on my laptop. Tech stack: PHP + jQuery + SQLite on a Hetzner VPS with Nginx and Ubuntu." Much of this success came from the Lex Fridman podcast appearance.

• Time to $150K/month: ~2 years, 7 months
• Profit margin: 87%
• Active subscribers: 2,573
• Tech stack: PHP + jQuery + SQLite

Later revenue snapshot: March 6, 2026

In a [dated update on his own site](https://levels.io/photoai-40870-line-index-php-105k-mo-revenue), Pieter reported monthly revenue of $105,000 and monthly profit of $80,000 for Photo AI. These are the figures reported on that date, separate from the earlier $150K/month milestone above. The update does not identify the recurring portion of that revenue, so it is not treated here as verified MRR or converted to ARR.