MakewebAI sold for $60K, solo founder (reported)

01

How much did MakewebAI make, and what was it sold for?

Each row shows the evidence grade and the source numbers from the list at the end of this page. The grades are explained in How Aiolum verifies.

A one-person AI website builder with about 30 paying users, listed for US$18,000 and reported sold for US$60,000 in September 2024
Fact	Value	Grade	How we know	Sources
Sale price, reported 5 September 2024	US$60,000	D	AlternativeTo news by Mauricio B. Holguin, 5 September 2024: "Makeweb.ai has been acquired for $60,000 just 50 days after its launch." The article names "Zishan Sami's Thread on X" as its official source. The buyer is not named.	[1]
Asking price on the marketplace	US$18,000	D	Same article: "initially listed on Acquiredot.com for $18,000". Acquire.com is the marketplace meant. The listing page was not found.	[1]
Sale price compared with the asking price	about 3.3 times	calc	Calculated: US$60,000 divided by US$18,000.	[1]
Interest from buyers	about 60 NDAs, 6 offers, 3 LOIs above US$50,000	D	Same article: "around 60 NDAs, 6 offers, and 3 LOIs with competing bids exceeding $50,000".	[1]
Paying users and revenue before the sale	over 30 paid users; more than US$1,000 net revenue in total	D	Same article. The revenue is a total since launch, not a monthly figure.	[1]
Sale price compared with total revenue	about 60 times	calc	Calculated: US$60,000 divided by the reported US$1,000 of net revenue. The buyer paid for the product, the code and the domain, not for profits.	[1]
Reason for selling	slow growth and limited financial runway	D	Same article. Runway is the time a founder can keep working before the money runs out.	[1]
Time spent building before the sale	about 6 to 7 months; the founder's first SaaS product	D	Same article. SaaS (software as a service) is software rented by subscription over the web.	[1]
Founder	Zishan Sami, solo founder	C	Archived About page, 20 September 2024: "Makeweb.ai is built by Zishan, an IIT Kharagpur graudate and a solo founder in the making." The archived blog signs the posts "Zishan Sami", "Sr. Software Engineer & A Solopreneur".	[4, 5]
AI models used	GPT-4o and Llama3-70b	C	Archived home page, 11 August 2024: "We use combination of powereful LLMs like GPT-4o & Llama3-70b under the hood"; screenshot cloning "powered with GPT-4o".	[2, 5]
Launch prices	US$34 a year (Basic) and US$49 a year (Pro)	C	Archived home page, 11 August 2024, at an early-adopter discount from US$69 and US$99.	[2]
Prices after the sale	US$14 a month (Basic) and US$49 a month (Pro)	C	Archived home page, 3 December 2024. The page then said "Trusted by hundreds of users around the world."	[3]
Launch date	about 17 July 2024	calc	Calculated: 50 days before the 5 September 2024 report. The sale may have closed some days before the report, so the launch may be slightly earlier. The first blog posts are dated 9 June 2024, so the product existed before the launch that the founder counted from.	[1, 5]
Months from launch to the sale	2	calc	Calculated: July 2024 to September 2024.	[1]
Outside funding	none	D	AlternativeTo: "Despite being bootstrapped".	[1]

How to read this table: a grade D value is reported by one secondary source (AlternativeTo) that repeats the founder's own post, and nothing else confirms it. A grade C value was read on the product's own archived pages. An X value was computed on this page. No value is grade A or B.

MakewebAI prices from Internet Archive copies of the home page: the launch prices of 11 August 2024 and the prices of 3 December 2024, after the sale (grade C). The site no longer exists, so there are no current prices.
Plan	Per month, billed yearly (US$)	Per month, billed monthly (US$)	Limit
Basic, August 2024 launch offer	2.83 (US$34 a year)		1 site, 100 AI prompts a month, custom domain, code export
Pro, August 2024 launch offer	4.08 (US$49 a year)		10 sites, unlimited AI prompts (launch offer)
Basic, December 2024		14	1 site, 100 AI prompts a month
Pro, December 2024		49	10 sites, unlimited AI prompts

In August 2024 both plans were sold only by the year, at an early-adopter discount: Basic at US$34 a year (shown as down from US$69) and Pro at US$49 a year (shown as down from US$99). The 70% offer was marked "0 Left" and the 50% offer "6 Left". The FAQ said there was no free trial and no refund. By December 2024 the page showed US$14 a month for Basic and US$49 a month for Pro with an option to pay yearly and "Get 2 months free"; the yearly amount was not in the archived text. The per-month values for yearly billing below are calculated: the yearly price divided by 12.

02

When did MakewebAI launch, and how did it grow?

From a blank app page in March 2024 to a reported sale in September 2024, then a domain for sale. Each entry carries its grade.

27 March 2024CThe Internet Archive's first copy of www.makeweb.ai: an empty React application page, "Web site created using create-react-app". [7]
9 June 2024CZishan Sami publishes three posts on the product blog, including "Welcome to Makeweb.ai", which lists text-to-page generation with GPT-4o and Llama3-70b, screenshot cloning, AI editing of a selected part, one-click publishing and code export. [5]
About 17 July 2024calcLaunch, by the count of "50 days after its launch" in the sale report (calculated). [1]
11 August 2024CThe archived home page sells two yearly plans at US$34 and US$49. The 70% early-adopter offer is marked sold out and 6 places are left at 50%. [2]
August to early September 2024DAccording to AlternativeTo, the founder lists the business on Acquire.com at US$18,000 and receives about 60 NDAs, 6 offers and 3 LOIs above US$50,000. [1]
5 September 2024DAlternativeTo reports, from the founder's thread on X, that MakewebAI was sold for US$60,000, and that the service will keep running for its users. [1]
3 December 2024CUnder its new owner the archived home page has monthly prices of US$14 and US$49 and the line "Trusted by hundreds of users around the world." [3]
April 2025CThe last Internet Archive copies of the home page with the product, dated 7 and 28 April 2025. [7]
2 November 2026Cmakeweb.ai answers with a redirect to a page that offers the domain name MakeWeb.ai for sale on the marketplace Atom. [8]

03

Why did MakewebAI work?

Four causes, in the order they mattered. Each one is a reusable lesson.

01

Timing

Website generation from chat and from screenshots was one of the most visible uses of the new multimodal models in mid-2024; GPT-4o, which reads images, came out in May 2024. A product in that category was easy to explain to buyers on a marketplace, which may be why the listing drew about 60 NDAs, as AlternativeTo reported.

02

A small, complete product

One engineer built the editor, the AI generation, hosting with SSL certificates and custom domains, templates, and code export. A buyer got a working product with paying users, not an idea. The founder said, as AlternativeTo reported, that his goal was to learn the whole business cycle from start to sale.

03

Competition between buyers

AlternativeTo reported an asking price of US$18,000 and three LOIs above US$50,000. When several buyers bid for a small asset, the price follows the bids, not the revenue: the reported sale price is about 60 times the reported total revenue.

04

Low running cost

The sites it produced were static pages, with no backend or database to run for each customer. The main cost per user was the calls to the AI models, limited on the cheaper plan to 100 prompts a month.

How it was built

These details come from the product's own pages as kept by the Internet Archive. They are grade C. [2, 5, 3]

The marketing site was built with the Gatsby 5.13.6 static site generator (named in the archived page's generator tag); the editor ran as a separate web app at app.makeweb.ai.
Generation used GPT-4o for text and screenshots and Llama3-70b, a model from Meta, to create components on a canvas.
Generated components used HTML, CSS, Tailwind CSS and JavaScript. The FAQ said the tool could only build static websites, with no backend and no blog system.
Published sites ran on a subdomain of makeweb.live or on a custom domain, with free SSL certificates and a CDN with DDoS protection, as the plan list said.
Users could download the full code of a site, which the page sold as "No vendor lock-in".
The page loaded the affiliate script of Lemon Squeezy, a payment and subscription service, with the store name "makeweb".

Tools named in the sources

Each one opens its page in the Tools tab, with every story that uses it.

OpenAI APIC LlamaC Tailwind CSSC GatsbyB Lemon SqueezyB Google AnalyticsB Acquire.comC

04

Who tried this before MakewebAI, and why did they fail?

Four companies in our database of failed startups promised that anyone could build a website without a designer or a developer, one of them with AI. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.

Died 2014 to 2020Burned US$4.7M

The Grid

The promise

An AI that designs your website for you, so you skip the designer.

Why it died

The AI of the time could not design pages of consistent quality, and Wix and Squarespace offered polished, easy tools.

Product/Tech Failure

Died 2012 to 2013Burned US$2.3M

Sosh

The promise

A drag-and-drop builder that produces professional websites without code.

Why it died

Too complex for beginners and too limited for professionals; the code it produced was messy.

No Market Need

Died 2013 to 2016Burned US$120K

WebCake

The promise

An all-in-one tool for small businesses to design and publish a responsive website.

Why it died

Wix and Squarespace had more features, and WebCake had no money left to keep up.

Competition

Died 2005 to 2008Burned US$12K

Infogami

The promise

Rich web pages that anyone could create and edit without technical skills.

Why it died

Too early for mass adoption of do-it-yourself web tools, and WordPress grew faster.

Competition

The failed startups come from our database of 1,749 dead startups, retold here in our own words. Its entries are AI-assisted summaries of public sources, so these cards carry no evidence grade.

What changed

The Grid promised in 2014 what MakewebAI sold in 2024: describe the site and let software design it. The Grid's designs were weak because the AI of 2014 to 2020 could not write good page code. By 2024 models like GPT-4o could write HTML and Tailwind CSS from a sentence or a screenshot well enough that one engineer could build the whole product in a few months on top of an API.

What did not change is the competition. Sosh, WebCake and Infogami lost to Wix, Squarespace and WordPress, and in 2024 those platforms, Webflow and many funded AI builders all added AI site generation. MakewebAI did not try to win that race. As AlternativeTo reported, the founder sold within weeks of launch because growth was slow and his money was limited, and he took the price that competing buyers offered.

05

Can one person copy MakewebAI now?

The product is easy to copy. The sale price is not.

An AI website builder of this kind is a few months of work for one engineer on top of a model API, and many now exist, so a new one has little to stand on. What a reader can copy is the decision to build a complete small product, list it early on a marketplace with honest numbers, and let competing buyers set the price. The reported price came from buyer interest in a hot category in mid-2024, not from revenue, and that interest may not repeat.

Where it is still open: Small, complete AI products in categories that buyers already understand, sold early to buyers who want a working product with users rather than a revenue stream.

1Build a complete product around one new model ability (here, reading screenshots), including hosting, domains and payment.
2Charge from the first day, even a small yearly price, so the listing can show paying users.
3List on a marketplace such as Acquire.com with a modest asking price, sign NDAs with many buyers and ask for written offers.
4Keep the stack simple (static output, one payment provider) so a buyer can take it over without the founder.

What could go wrong for MakewebAI?

The risks are the mirror image of the causes above.

What is not verified

The sale price of US$60,000, the asking price of US$18,000, the 30 paying users, the US$1,000 of net revenue and the 60 NDAs, 6 offers and 3 LOIs all rest on one source: an AlternativeTo news article of 5 September 2024 that repeats a thread on X by the founder, Zishan Sami. The thread itself could not be read (x.com needs a login). The buyer is not named, and no Acquire.com page, buyer statement or payment record was found. A reader could look for the buyer's own account of the purchase, an Acquire.com case study or a later interview with the founder.

Which launch the 50 days count from

The article says the sale came 50 days after launch, which points to mid-July 2024. But the product blog has posts dated 9 June 2024, the founder worked on it for 6 to 7 months by the same article, and the full marketing page appears in the Internet Archive only on 11 August 2024. The launch date on this page is calculated and may be off by some weeks.

The price was for the asset, not the profits

As reported, total revenue before the sale was a little over US$1,000, so the price was about 60 times revenue. A buyer paid for code, a domain, users and a place in a popular category. This is not evidence that the business could support a person.

The business later disappeared

The new owner raised prices to US$14 and US$49 a month by December 2024. The last archived copies with the product are from April 2025, and on 2 November 2026 the domain redirected to a page that sells the name MakeWeb.ai. What the buyer did with the product is not known.

Unchecked testimonials

The archived home page shows a "Wall of Love" of short quotes with names and job titles, some of them launch congratulations addressed to the founder. These quotes were not checked against their authors.

More in Build software with AI

Other businesses in the same group, best evidence first. All 25 stories in the group, 12 with grade-A revenue.

AI app builder · Israel

Base44

Evidence A

$80M exit

Solo founder · sold 5 months after launch

It launched in the month that AI models became good enough to write a whole app. It sold to people who cannot program, it charged from day one, and it was sold to a company that already had millions of customers.

7 grade-A facts · 5 that failed before it

AI designer for mobile app screens · USA

Sleek

Evidence A

$247K/yr run rate

Team of 2 to 10 · 11 months after launch, revenue falling

It took a narrower job than the general AI design tools, mobile apps only, for people who build apps without design skills. The three founders reused what they had learned from four earlier design tools, built it in three weeks, and showed finished designs on X before the launch. Each new Gemini model gave them a better result and a new demo to post.

5 grade-A facts · 4 that failed before it

AI game builder for Roblox Studio · USA · Funded

SuperbulletAI

Evidence A

$230K/yr run rate

Solo founder · 14 months after launch, revenue growing

The founder had made Roblox games for nine years, with 200 million visits on his own games, and his launch post on the official Roblox developer forum was read 112,656 times. He launched free, with 1 million tokens a month, and charged US$20 a month for heavy use. Then he added top-ups and a marketplace of tested systems that the AI installs, instead of writing every system from nothing.

4 grade-A facts · 4 that failed before it

Built with the same tools

Businesses whose sources name tools that MakewebAI also uses: Lemon Squeezy, Google Analytics, OpenAI API, Tailwind CSS. Every tool has its own page in Tools.

Browser extension for AI chat apps · Israel

AI Toolbox

Evidence A

$109K in 12 months

Team of 2 to 10 · 25 months after launch, revenue growing

Heavy users of AI chat apps lose old answers, because the apps had no folders, no filtered search and no bulk export. AI Toolbox adds these inside the apps, for four apps at once, sells them mostly as one-time licenses, and, by the seller's account, finds its buyers through search pages instead of ads.

5 grade-A facts · 5 that failed before it

AI appointment setter on WhatsApp and website chat · Germany, US company

Setter AI

Evidence A

$104K in 12 months

Team of 2 to 10 · 32 months after launch, revenue falling

It sold one promise that a customer can measure: a first reply to every new lead within 10 seconds, to businesses that already pay for many leads through Meta ads. A demo on the website brought sales calls through organic search before the product was built. Revenue then fell from US$9,000 to US$12,000 a month in late 2025 to under US$2,000 in September 2026, in the same months in which the founder launched other products.

7 grade-A facts · 5 that failed before it

AI content agent that turns a person's recordings, files and links into posts for every social network · Poland

CaptureFlow

Evidence A

$4.2K MRR from 9 subscriptions

Solo founder · 9 months after launch, revenue growing

Founders and small B2B teams know their subject but do not have time to write for every social network, and generic AI writing does not sound like them. CaptureFlow starts from material the person already produces, a call, a voice note, a recorded talk, and reshapes it into native posts in their voice. TrustMRR, reading the company's Stripe account, shows US$4,182 of monthly recurring revenue from 9 subscriptions and US$28,071 of revenue in total on 27 October 2026, with monthly revenue growing every month of 2026.

4 grade-A facts · 4 that failed before it

Same pattern: Sold

Businesses that were sold. Each story gives the buyer and the price when the sources name them. All 36 stories with this pattern, 5 with grade-A revenue.

AI makeup try-on app · Canada

GlowUp

Evidence A

Sold after $1.2M ARR

Solo founder · sold 5 months after launch

Its result is a before-and-after picture of the user's own face, which a short video shows in seconds. The founder chose TikTok as the channel before he built the app, then tripled revenue from almost the same installs by moving and testing the paywall with Adapty.

4 grade-A facts · 4 that failed before it

AI headshot generator · Singapore

The Multiverse AI

Evidence A

Sold after $348K revenue

Team of 2 to 10 · sold 27 months after launch

Said over US$350K in totalRecords US$348.5K on StripeHeld

It entered a market that already had about ten AI headshot sites, at a lower price, and won customers through Google search and affiliate writers instead of ads. A US$4,000 order from one company showed that team headshots were the better sale. The founders sold in 2025, when a general chat model began to make similar images.

2 grade-A facts · 4 that failed before it

Chrome extension that adds import, folders, export and automation to Google's Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM) · India

Kortex

Evidence A

$231K in 10 months

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.

5 grade-A facts · 5 that failed before it

Sources

The grade next to each source is the best grade that the source can support. "Read in full" means that the text of the page was downloaded and the numbers were checked in it.

D AlternativeTo news, 5 September 2024, by Mauricio B. Holguin: MakewebAI has been acquired for $60K just 50 days post-launch
Read in full (downloaded 1 November 2026). Cites "Zishan Sami's Thread on X" as its official source; the thread itself was not opened. Source for every money figure, the user count, the listing and the reason for the sale.
C Makeweb.ai home page, Internet Archive copy of 11 August 2024
Read in full. The founder's own page before the sale. Source for the features, the models, the launch prices and the FAQ.
C Makeweb.ai home page, Internet Archive copy of 3 December 2024
Read in full and compared with the August copy. The page after the sale. Source for the later monthly prices.
C Makeweb.ai About Us page, Internet Archive copy of 20 September 2024
Read in full. Source for the founder's name and the solo-founder statement.
C Makeweb.ai blog, 9 June 2024: Welcome to Makeweb.ai: Revolutionizing Website Creation with AI, by Zishan Sami; with the author page, Internet Archive copies of 20 September 2024
Read in full. Source for the first public description of the product, the post dates and the founder's title.
C AlternativeTo: Makeweb.ai app page
Read in full (1 November 2026). Directory entry: "Developed by Zishan", since 2024, subscription.
C Internet Archive CDX index of makeweb.ai captures, 2024 to 2025
Read the list of captures and the capture of 27 March 2024. Source for the first and last dates the site was archived.
C makeweb.ai, HTTP response of 2 November 2026
Read the response headers only: a 302 redirect to https://www.atom.com/name/MakeWeb.ai. The redirect target was not opened.
C Database of failed startups, local export
Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors.