Pieter Levels

Pieter Levels is the picture people mean when they say one person and a laptop. The picture is older than the 2026 headlines, and the headlines are easy to misread. This page is the short public record. The posts on levels.io are the primary source. Two stories on this site go further than a dossier should: the $10 million mix and the cancelled SaaS stack.

The nomad company

In 2014 he set out to launch 12 startups in 12 months. Most did not last. One began as a spreadsheet of cities for remote workers, in Chiang Mai, and became Nomad List. Remote OK followed as a jobs board. On 30 May 2019 he wrote that the two sites together were at about $83,333 a month, a million dollars a year, without ads or funding in that telling. Four years. His numbers. What traveled was the shape: no round, no big team, recurring money from the internet.

He kept shipping into the same shape. On 3 July 2023 he posted that Photo AI, about 14,000 lines of PHP, had 1,872 paying customers and $61,808 that month. The stack was unfashionable on purpose. The lesson he repeats is small, charged for, and light. The timeline uses those years as the nomad era, even though the products outlived the era’s dates.

Two different “dead” lines

Around October 2023 he used “indie hacking is dead” to mean the subculture had become normal: more crowded, less of a hack. The transcript he published from The Bootstrapped Founder is on his site. In July 2026 he meant something else. Execution as a moat, a build stack he priced around $20 a month, customers copying a thin tool instead of renting it. That argument is about defensibility. The dead page keeps the two years from collapsing into one funeral.

Costs, then markets

Through 2026 he wrote about coding with agents on a VPS and cancelling the middle of the stack: scrapers, maps, vision, human moderation. The 9 September receipts put the savings near $25,000 a month, founder-reported, with a named list that does not match the round number one-for-one. What he said he kept was boring infrastructure and model APIs. The margin he later claimed, about 94.5%, is the cost story turned into a percentage. It is his claim. It is not a template.

On 23 September 2026 he said he had passed $10 million a year. The sentence under it, in the post, is revenue plus investment gains. Business revenue stayed in the $200,000–$250,000 a month band in that same telling. He said investment returns had been larger than the shops for about a year, and that most of the gain was unrealized. ETFs, then smaller bets in tools he already used, including a Cursor exit he describes in his own words. None of that is financial advice. He has said so. This page says so again. Do not read the ten as Photo AI.

How to use the record

Use the 2019 post if you want the original company. Use the July 2026 essay if you want his moat argument. Use the September cost and gains posts if you want the split between shops and markets. Do not average them into a single “Levels number.”

He is on the short follow list because the archive exists, not because a lifestyle is copyable. The nomad products did not start as a follower strategy. The audience arrived after the sites were useful to people who wanted to live somewhere else.

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