ImageRouter: 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 with an allowance of 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, found its users in the Chrome Web Store, where Google marked it Featured, and 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, which the founder says gave it organic growth with no ads or paid creators: 300,000 downloads 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: 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 and US$17,899 of monthly recurring revenue 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, 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, and 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%, and 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.

Solo founder · 27 months after launch, revenue growing

Said US$245K a monthRecords US$263K MRRSaid less than the records

The founder took a twenty-year-old product category with no open-source entry and open-sourced all of it, which gave him millions of Docker downloads and 37,000 GitHub stars without a marketing budget. Revenue stayed small for a year. It multiplied when he turned the product toward people who automate their posting with n8n workflows and, from late 2025, with AI agents, which need an API-first scheduler and keep paying because they post without human effort.

Solo founder · 35 months after launch, revenue falling

The founder released it as a free open-source tool nine days after he wrote that the new GPT-4 Vision and Turbo API previews allowed only 100 requests a day. Hacker News and GitHub trending brought the repository more than 35,000 stars in under three months, and the README sends readers on to the paid hosted version for people who do not want to set up keys and servers. It had made US$1,000 within 19 days, with a Stripe payment link and no user accounts.

Solo founder · 41 months after launch, revenue falling

It answered a request that people already typed in public: what does the person in this viral video say? A free bot replied inside X, where the request was made, and the website sold the same service for longer files at a few dollars a month. The speech and translation models are bought from other companies, so one person could build and run it.

Solo founder · 12 months after launch, revenue falling

The conversion itself is rented: the company's terms say it uses Recraft AI's vectorization, which Recraft lists at US$0.01 a request. The founder built the parts around it, machine export formats and cleanup, and wrote a search page for nearly every cutter, laser and craft use. Stripe data shows that this reached US$4,261 of revenue in June 2026 and US$2,651 in the 30 days to 25 October 2026.

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

xAI released Grok Bot, a messaging app of AI agents, in beta on 11 August 2026. The two founders published their own open version about two hours later, under the name OpenGrokBot, and pitched it to people who wanted the same idea on Claude or Codex instead of Grok. Payment records show the first payment on 27 September 2026 and US$5,503 in the 30 days to 25 October 2026.

Solo founder · 6 months after launch, revenue growing

The founder first gave away the same idea as free open-source code, which collected about 2,000 GitHub stars, and he already had a free Chrome extension with at least 10,000 users among search specialists. The paid version removes the installation work and adds data that the free code does not have. Most of the first buyers came from that existing audience.

Solo founder · 21 months after launch, revenue falling

The founder first published the same idea as a free command-line tool on GitHub and npm in July 2024, and it collected about 2,100 GitHub stars and a Product Hunt launch. The paid desktop app then sold to people who wanted the result without a terminal: a US$19 one-time license for local models, or credits for cloud models. Revenue peaked in November and December 2025 and fell when the founder moved his time to another product.