Pranay Agarwal was working as a designer at Blinkstore, a self-hosted print-on-demand startup, when he and Mofid Ansari started building Mockey as a mockup tool that plugged into that product. Sellers needed a fast way to preview apparel and merchandise, and the early version solved that without forcing anyone to open Photoshop or pay for a photoshoot. The jump in usage once it was integrated told them the idea had legs.

For a long stretch Mockey stayed a nights-and-weekends project, free to use and supported only by ads. By December 2023 Pranay was convinced enough to quit his full-time role and work on it exclusively. The product had volume, around 100k visitors a month, but display ads only brought in roughly $700 monthly, which is thin for a tool that popular.

The turning point came in April 2024 when they rolled out paid subscriptions alongside the ads. The single change that moved the numbers most was unglamorous: they capped free users at three mockups per day. People who used to download as much as they wanted now hit a limit message, and a meaningful share of them converted. Pranay says revenue roughly tripled after the caps went in.

Most of the growth was organic. Mockey ranked for mockup-related searches and spread through design communities and word of mouth, helped by free resources Pranay kept publishing, like his Doodles Figma illustration set. Eleven months after starting to monetize seriously, the business was generating about $12k a month from the subscription-plus-ads mix, mostly from subscriptions.

By his own account the team stayed bootstrapped and lean, reinvesting what came in rather than chasing a big launch. The stated next target was $50k a month, with the same playbook: keep the free tool widely useful, keep ranking in search, and tighten the points where heavy free users decide it is worth paying.