360Cruising (CruiseGPT): Revenue, team and how it was built

Team of 2 to 10 · 16 months after launch, revenue growing

Every team that builds with AI models ends up with several provider accounts, keys, invoices and SDKs. One gateway with open code replaces them, and a developer can read the code before sending traffic through the hosted version. In 2026 the founders added DevPass, a flat monthly price for coding agents. Its allowance is up to three times the price in model usage. The verified monthly receipts grew from US$57,994 in January 2026 to US$249,922 in August 2026; TrustMRR does not split them by product.

Solo founder · 11 months after launch, revenue flat

The founder had written a marketing blog for ten years, so his own readers bought on the first day. He built the first version in 8 weeks with the no-code tool Bubble, because he had no money for developers. He sold one thing that the model makers do not sell: all of their models in one subscription.

Team of 2 to 10 · sold 14 months after launch

Gemini Notebook had more than 30 million users and no folders, no export and no public API for personal accounts. Kortex sold the missing half for a few dollars a month. It found its users in the Chrome Web Store, where Google marked it Featured. It also found users in two lifetime-deal launches. The founder wrote that more than 100,000 users came 'without a single ad'. Most of the verified revenue arrived in February and March 2026, when a US$49 lifetime licence was on sale.

Team of 2 to 10 · 42 months after launch, revenue falling

The plugin lives inside Obsidian's community plugin store. The founder says that the store gave it organic growth with no ads or paid creators. The downloads reached 300,000 by the end of 2024, 1 million by February 2026 and 2 million by October 2026. The code is free, so there was nothing to sell until the company added a managed layer on top. The layer is hosted models, web search and tools that work without any setup. One-time lifetime plans, first Believer and then Supporter, brought large payments in single months. TrustMRR, reading the company's Stripe account, shows US$913,644 of revenue in total. Monthly recurring revenue was US$17,899 from 1,356 subscriptions on 27 October 2026, after a fall of about 51% from the best month, February 2026.

Solo founder · 9 months after launch, revenue falling

In the founder's words on TrustMRR, agents like OpenClaw and Hermes can take on a solo founder's busywork. But setting one up means renting a server, wiring up API keys and fixing it when it breaks. Heyron does that setup for a flat monthly price, so a non-programmer gets a working agent in about two minutes. Stripe data shows nearly US$50,000 in its first month of sales, March 2026, and US$62,946 in April.

Solo founder · 6 months after launch, revenue falling

People already pay for an assistant and already ask it for pictures and video. CreativeClaw sells inside that conversation, so it needs no interface of its own, no sales calls and no provider accounts on the customer's side. Revenue stayed under US$5,300 a month for five months, then rose about 18 times in September 2026. This rise came after the founder had packaged the server for ChatGPT and prepared its entry in the plugin directories. He has not published the cause of the rise.

Solo founder · 25 months after launch, revenue falling

A normal chat window is one long thread, and a side question either breaks that thread or is never asked. The founder sold a fix for that one problem to heavy AI users. The subscription version earned little; the one-time licence that followed sold to many buyers, and Stripe data on TrustMRR shows US$131,070 in total. Sales then fell, because each one-time buyer pays only once.

Solo founder · 12 months after launch, revenue falling

People who pay for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity separately can pay once instead. The founder sets one price for all models because a user sends about the same number of messages in one tool as in several. He limits only the most expensive models. He adds new models as they appear, often several in one week, and publishes the revenue daily.

Solo founder · 33 months after launch, revenue falling

The app costs almost nothing to run: the owner reports a profit margin of 99%. The App Store page shows no new version since July 2025. A small, steady flow of downloads, about 2,500 in 28 days in October 2026, keeps about 150 paid subscriptions alive. The owner is an experienced app marketer who already sells more than a dozen other apps from the same developer account.

Team of 2 to 10 · 45 months after launch, revenue falling

Said US$19K a monthRecords US$9.6K in JulyDid not hold

It appeared in January 2023 inside Google Slides, a program where people already work. At that time writing slides from one sentence was new, and users showed it to each other without paid advertising. A blog about presentation topics then brought about 80% of new users from Google search, by the founder's account. Both channels weakened: search traffic fell, and Google added the same function to Slides. The verified total is real, and so is the fall: monthly revenue fell by half between February and July 2026.

Solo founder · 37 months after launch, revenue flat

For two years it was a powerful node editor that architects did not want, and it made about US$150 a month. The founder replaced it with a chat box where you say what you want, and changed one-time payments to subscriptions. Stripe revenue then grew 5.3 times from November 2025 to March 2026. His salary paid for the slow years.

Solo founder · 9 months after launch, revenue growing

Candidates for consulting jobs need dozens of practice cases. The usual options are a free peer partner of uneven quality, or a coach who charges US$100 to US$300 an hour. A language model can play the interviewer at any hour for US$49 a month. The founder wrote that the customers come from search: the sitemap lists 596 blog pages written for Google and for AI assistants.

Solo founder · 15 months after launch, revenue falling

It does the work in the cells instead of explaining what to paste. It works in the Excel that people already have, without a Microsoft Copilot license. The founder already taught Excel to a large French audience. The AI models are bought by the request from OpenAI and Anthropic, so one person could build and run it.

Started small, grew after funding · sold 11 months after launch

Its founders wrote some of the methods that the industry already used to run models cheaply, such as AWQ for 4-bit weights. They turned that research into a paid serving API. They proved the speed on a public benchmark and partnered with a cloud company that needed exactly that speed. Eleven months after its first public post, the partner agreed to buy it.

Solo founder · 4 months after launch, revenue falling

The founder turned the go-to-market frameworks she uses as an advisor into a product with one job and one price. It is a small, early business. Stripe data shows US$500 of revenue in its first four months and two active subscriptions in November 2026. The founder has listed it for sale.

Solo founder · sold 28 months after launch

One researcher had led AI-guided optics design at Alphabet and Meta. He put the tooling of that field into the open, with a shared benchmark that anyone could run. Apple, which designs cameras, displays, sensors and lidar parts, bought the assets and hired him. The buyer's filing with the European Commission is the only hard document; it gives no price.

Team of 2 to 10 · 14 months after launch, revenue growing

Johnny Siu had led tenancy services at Goodlord, a UK rental software company, and saw property teams spend their days on the same messages. Antler's partner wrote in October 2024 that 87% of tasks in the industry are repetitive and low-skill. Tenants already wrote on WhatsApp. So an AI that answers there, inside the operator's own policies, saves staff time without asking the operator to change systems.