# Repo Prompt Aiolum story: https://aiolum.com/story/repo-prompt/ · added 2026-10-31 · updated 2026-10-31 **In short.** Repo Prompt (Mac app that packs codebase context into prompts for AI models, Canada): US$10K a month, July 2025. Evidence grade D: reported, not verified. Team: 1 founder; no employee named in any source. Launched 16 July 2024; closed later. Mac app that packs codebase context into prompts for AI models · Canada · AI-native · solo founder · closed · group: Tools for using AI models - Outcome: US$10K a month, July 2025 (evidence grade of the headline number: D; headline in US dollars: 120000) - Launch: 16 July 2024; months from launch to the outcome: 12 - Team: 1 founder; no employee named in any source - Outside funding: None; the founder calls himself a bootstrapped founder (May 2026) - Main factor: Distribution - Meters, 1 to 4: evidence strength 1, copyable pattern 2, capital needed 1 - Tags: AI-native, Solo founder, Bootstrapped, Closed, B2B, Information Technology Links: - Visit repoprompt.com: https://repoprompt.com/ - Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/products/repo-prompt **The product.** A macOS app that selected the files of a code repository that mattered for a task, built a dense prompt from them, sent it to a model such as GPT or Claude, and applied the model's multi-file edits back to disk as reviewable diffs. Later versions ran as an MCP server, so coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex could call the same tools. The paid product ended on 27 May 2026; since June 2026 the code is free and open source as Repo Prompt Community Edition. **Why it worked.** In mid-2024 the models could read a large codebase, but no tool moved the right files into the prompt and the edits back out, so developers copied and pasted by hand. The founder built the tool for his own Vision Pro game, gave it away through TestFlight to people who found a Reddit post, and charged only after a community of power users had formed. According to the Indie Hackers interview summarised by Startup Founder Stories, that free start turned into a 5-figure monthly recurring revenue within a year of the first tester build. Evidence grades: A = disclosed by a public company, a filing or a payment processor, or verified by one; B = two or more independent reports agree, or a journalist confirmed it; C = a founder claim that no one else verified; D = reported, not verified: one founder claim or a third-party estimate with no second source; calc = computed on this page from graded facts. ## Summary Repo Prompt was a paid context engineering tool: context engineering means choosing which parts of a codebase a language model gets to read, because a model reasons only over the text in its prompt. The app showed the folder tree of a repository, let the developer tick files, counted the tokens (the word pieces that models bill and limit), added CodeMaps, compressed outlines of the functions and types in each file, and copied the result as one prompt into a chat model such as ChatGPT or Claude, or sent it through the developer's own API key, a password that lets a program call a model provider on the developer's account. The model's answer came back as a structured list of edits that the app applied file by file as reviewable diffs. From 2025 it also ran as an MCP server, a program that exposes tools to coding agents through the Model Context Protocol, so Claude Code and Codex could use its file search, context builder and edit tools. Eric Provencher, a Canadian software engineer who was earlier a staff engineer on extended-reality tools at Unity, shipped the first build to testers on 16 July 2024 through TestFlight, after a Reddit post about automating copy-pasting. The app stayed free for months with a Ko-fi donation button on its site; Startup Founder Stories' summary of his Indie Hackers interview says he had made about US$5,000 from donations before charging. By 12 June 2025 the archived site listed a free tier and a Pro plan at US$14.99 a month, sold through Polar. The Indie Hackers interview, online by 5 July 2025 and summarised by Startup Founder Stories, says the product reached a 5-figure monthly recurring revenue, US$10,000 a month, within a year of the first tester build, and that he left his full-time job for it. That single figure is the headline of this page and rests on one source, a founder interview that this site could not read directly, so this page grades it D, reported and not verified. No payment processor, journalist or buyer has confirmed it. The business as a paid product ended on 27 May 2026: the founder wrote that he had joined OpenAI's developer experience team, that every subscription was cancelled and the license checks removed, and on 13 June 2026 he published the code as Repo Prompt Community Edition under the Apache-2.0 license. The page also shows what happened to earlier developer tools that gave the product away and struggled to charge for it. ## Pricing Repo Prompt prices as listed on its archived home page of 12 June 2025 (grade C); since 27 May 2026 the app is free, and the Community Edition needs no license (grade C) | Plan | Per month, billed yearly (US$) | Per month, billed monthly (US$) | Limit | |---|---|---|---| | Free tier, June 2025 | 0 | 0 | 32k token limit for copying and chatting; own API keys | | Pro, June 2025 | 12.42 | 14.99 | no token limits, CodeMaps, up to 3 machines | | Buy-to-own license, June 2025 | 219 one-time | | June special, regular 249; 1 year of updates, then 99 a year optional | | Community Edition, October 2026 | 0 | 0 | free and open source, no license key | The prices come from the page's JavaScript bundle saved by the Wayback Machine, because the page renders by script. The June 2025 page listed a free tier with a 32k token limit for copying and chatting, a Pro plan at US$14.99 a month or US$149 a year, and a buy-to-own license at US$219 as a June special against a regular price of US$249, with one year of updates and an optional US$99 a year after that; the checkout links went to Polar. The founder wrote on 27 May 2026 that all subscriptions were cancelled and the licensing restrictions removed, and the site today offers the Community Edition and the archived Classic app as free downloads. ## How much revenue did Repo Prompt make before it closed? The numbers, graded A free Mac tool paid by donations that, by its founder's account in a mid-2025 interview, reached US$10,000 a month within a year, then stopped charging in May 2026 when the founder joined OpenAI | Fact | Value | Grade | Note | Sources | |---|---|---|---|---| | Monthly recurring revenue, mid-2025 | US$10,000, a 5-figure MRR | D | The Indie Hackers interview titled "Hitting a 5-figure MRR within a year by giving his AI coding tool away for free", stated by the founder, as summarised by Startup Founder Stories on 21 July 2026 ("$10K MRR in 1 year"). The interview itself could not be read, because Indie Hackers does not allow this site's crawler; the Wayback Machine's index shows it online by 5 July 2025. | [1, 12] | | Yearly run rate from that figure | US$120,000 a year | calc | Calculated: US$10,000 times 12. | [1] | | Donations before charging | about US$5,000 in total | D | Startup Founder Stories' summary of the interview. The archived site of 19 November 2024 and of 12 January 2025 shows a Ko-fi donation link and a TestFlight link, and no paid plan. | [1, 4] | | Prices, 12 June 2025 | Pro US$14.99 a month, US$149 a year, or US$219 buy-to-own | C | Archived home page bundle. Free tier with a 32k token limit; Pro licenses active on up to 3 machines; the terms list a regular price of US$249 and an early-bird price of US$199 for the first 7 days; the checkout links go to Polar. | [3] | | Team | 1 founder | C | Every source names only Eric Provencher. Startup Founder Stories lists the product as a side project by a solo founder in Canada; his GitHub profile gives Canada and a previous staff engineer role on XR at Unity. | [1, 7] | | Outside funding | none reported | C | The founder describes himself as a bootstrapped founder in his post of 27 May 2026. | [2] | | Product Hunt launch, January 2026 | 277 points, 4th of its day | C | Product Hunt page read 23 October 2026. The shutdown announcement was later reposted in the product's forum there. | [8] | | End of paid plans, 27 May 2026 | all subscriptions cancelled, license checks removed | C | Founder's blog post. He joined OpenAI's developer experience team; annual and lifetime license holders were told to check their inbox, with no public detail of what they received. | [2] | | Community Edition, read 23 October 2026 | 965 stars, 131 forks, 2,144 commits, Apache-2.0, Swift | B | Public repository repoprompt/repoprompt-ce, live since 13 June 2026. | [6, 5] | | Time from first tester build to the headline figure | 12 months | calc | Calculated: 16 July 2024 to July 2025, the month in which the interview is known to have been online. | [2, 12] | How to read this table: a grade D value is a single founder statement with one date, read only through a permitted summary of the interview, with no second source. A grade C value is read from the founder's blog, the company's current or archived pages, or a newsletter. A grade B value is visible in a public repository. A "calc" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A. ## When did Repo Prompt launch, and how did it grow? Timeline From a weekend prototype for a Vision Pro game to a paid tool, and then to an open-source project, in under two years. Each entry carries its grade. - **June 2024** (grade C [2]): Anthropic ships Claude 3.5 Sonnet. The founder later writes that it was the first model to deliver usable code with a context window large enough for real codebases, while Cursor limited models to 32k tokens. - **16 July 2024** (grade C [2]): First build of Repo Prompt goes to testers through TestFlight. They found it through a Reddit post about automating copy-pasting. - **19 November 2024** (grade C [4]): The archived site offers a TestFlight link and a Ko-fi "Donate" button. No paid plan. - **December 2024** (grade C [2]): OpenAI releases o1 Pro. The founder writes that it changed everything: slow, but able to solve hard problems in one pass when given enough context. - **12 January 2025** (grade C [4]): The archived site is still donation-only. - **February 2025** (grade C [2]): Claude Code ships. The founder writes that his more manual workflow still saved him time and kept bug counts low as the user base grew. - **7 May 2025** (grade C [9]): Nathan Lands' Lore Brief newsletter publishes a podcast episode titled "Inside RepoPrompt: The Secret AI Prompt Tool Silicon Valley Engineers Are Using", with the founder as guest. - **12 June 2025** (grade C [3]): The archived home page lists a free tier and Pro plans: US$14.99 a month, US$149 a year, or US$219 buy-to-own as a June special, with checkout through Polar. - **By 5 July 2025** (grade D [1, 12]): The Indie Hackers interview "Hitting a 5-figure MRR within a year by giving his AI coding tool away for free" is online. Startup Founder Stories' summary: US$10,000 a month within a year of the first tester build, and the founder left his full-time job. This is the headline figure, grade D. - **8 October 2025** (grade C [11]): Repo Bench, a public leaderboard of model scores built from runs that Repo Prompt users submit. - **4 November 2025** (grade C [10]): Blog post "Context Over Convenience" describes the context builder agent, which connects to Claude Code or Codex, and the use of GPT-5 Pro for architectural plans. - **January 2026** (grade C [8]): Product Hunt launch: 277 points, 4th of its day. - **27 May 2026** (grade C [2]): The founder announces that he has joined OpenAI's developer experience team. All subscriptions are cancelled and the licensing restrictions removed with update 2.1.32. - **13 June 2026** (grade C [5, 6]): Repo Prompt Community Edition goes live on GitHub under the Apache-2.0 license. The original app is archived as Repo Prompt Classic. ## Why did Repo Prompt work? ### Free first, with a community that shaped the product The first testers came from one Reddit post and a TestFlight link, and a Discord server followed. Startup Founder Stories' summary of the interview says thousands of passionate users shaped the product, and that the founder had made about US$5,000 from donations before he charged anything, which proved that people valued it but not enough to sustain it. ### A paid boundary that kept a free tier According to the same summary, he weighed raising money, lifetime licenses and monthly subscriptions, then kept a free tier, gave discounts to early testers and donors, and doubled the free-tier limits after users pushed back. The archived page of June 2025 listed the result: a free tier with a 32k token limit, and a Pro plan at US$14.99 a month with no token limit, CodeMaps and three machines. ### A workflow the big tools did not offer The founder describes a middle path between typing code by hand and fully agentic coding: curate the context by hand, let a reasoning model write targeted edits, and review them without being overwhelmed. His own codebase, he writes, stayed maintainable because every task went through a context builder agent that planned from the relevant files. ### Built on the model providers, not against them The app never paid for a model: users bring their own API keys or, later, their Claude Code and Codex subscriptions. When those agents matured, the app became an MCP server that they call. That is also why the end was an offer from OpenAI rather than a shutdown. ## How it was built These details come from the founder's blog, the archived site, the public repository and the Startup Founder Stories summary of his interview. They are grade C unless stated. - A macOS-native app. Startup Founder Stories' summary says the first prototype was an Electron app built over a weekend when Claude 3.5 Sonnet made code generation reliable; the Community Edition published in June 2026 is written in Swift, uses SwiftUI macros that need Xcode 26, and builds from the command line without opening Xcode (grade B, from the repository). - Distributed first through Apple's TestFlight, with a Ko-fi donation link on the site until at least January 2025. - Users connect their own API keys for OpenAI, Anthropic and other providers, so the app pays for no model usage; the June 2025 site linked to the OpenAI and Anthropic consoles and to Google AI Studio. - Payments through Polar, a merchant of record for developers, from the paid launch in 2025 until the subscriptions were cancelled in May 2026. - An MCP server inside the app, which the founder calls the primary agent, with the CLI harnesses such as Claude Code and Codex swapped underneath it. A context builder agent assembles the prompt; the founder writes that most problems fit into about 120k tokens of relevant context. - A Discord community for users and, since June 2026, for contributors; former customers who opt in are whitelisted as approved contributors. - Repo Bench, a public leaderboard refreshed from runs that users submit, published in October 2025. Sources: [2, 5, 6, 3, 1, 4] ## Who tried this before Repo Prompt, and why did they fail? Five companies in our database of failed startups sold tools to make programmers faster and could not turn free users into enough paying ones. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified. The failed startups come from our database of dead startups, retold here in our own words; Its entries are AI-assisted summaries of public sources, so they carry no evidence grade. ### Kite DevTool (2014 to 2024; funding US$21M; cause: Competition) - Promise: AI code completion inside the editor, seven years before GitHub Copilot. - Why it died: The free users did not pay, and GitHub Copilot arrived with better models and distribution inside the editors developers already used. - Record: ### CodeSee (2020 to 2024; funding US$10M; cause: No Market Need) - Promise: Automatic maps of a codebase so that developers understand it faster. - Why it died: Engineering leaders saw a nice-to-have and would not pay for it against free alternatives. - Record: ### Light Table/Eve (2012 to 2015; funding US$3M; cause: Competition) - Promise: An editor with live feedback on running code, then a new way to program without code. - Why it died: Developers stayed with the editors they had, and the free editors kept improving. - Record: ### Fig DevTool (2020 to 2024; funding US$2.4M; cause: Unit Economics) - Promise: Autocomplete and visual command builders for the terminal. - Why it died: Low willingness to pay in a market of free tools; AWS acquired it in 2024 and the product was closed. - Record: ### Nitrous.io (2012 to 2016; funding US$8M; cause: Competition) - Promise: A cloud development environment: code anywhere, no local setup. - Why it died: AWS bought the competitor Cloud9 and gave it away, while Nitrous tried to sell what the giants bundled for free. - Record: ## What changed Each predecessor sold a convenience to programmers who already had free tools, and each found that developers used the free version and did not pay, or that a larger platform bundled the feature. Repo Prompt met the same forces: the founder wrote in May 2026 that it was increasingly hard to convince someone to pay him US$15 a month when a coding agent "just works", and that the volume of well-funded competition kept growing. Two things differ. The product had no capital to lose: one person, no investors, the model paid for by the user's own key, and a free tier served from a desktop app that cost the founder nothing to run. And the tool was built on the model providers' own APIs and agents rather than against them, which is why the end was a job offer from OpenAI and a free open-source release rather than a shutdown. The founder's own words are that every subscription might disappear the next month, and in May 2026 he cancelled them himself. ## Can one person copy Repo Prompt now? **Verdict: The structure, yes; the ending shows the limit.** A free, well-made tool for a workflow that the big products ignore can gather a community that later pays, by the founder's account, five figures a month, with no capital. But a convenience for programmers sits between free open-source tools and the platforms' own agents, and the founder's own post says the pressure to justify US$15 a month grew as the agents improved. 1. Build the tool for your own daily work and give the first builds away where the people with the same problem already talk, as the founder did with a Reddit post and TestFlight. 2. Let users bring their own API keys so the model never becomes your cost, and serve the free tier from a desktop app so it costs nothing to run. 3. Charge only after the community exists: keep a free tier with a visible limit, give early testers and donors a discount, and change the limits when users push back. 4. Expose the tool to the coding agents through MCP so the product stays useful as the agents improve, instead of competing with them. **What is still open.** Any repeated workflow around the model providers' tools that they do not yet automate: context for documents that are not code, agent orchestration for data work, and review tools for model-written changes. ## What could go wrong for Repo Prompt? - **What is not verified.** The headline figure, US$10,000 of monthly recurring revenue, rests on one source: the Indie Hackers interview of mid-2025 titled "Hitting a 5-figure MRR within a year by giving his AI coding tool away for free", stated by the founder, Eric Provencher, and read here only through the summary that Startup Founder Stories published on 21 July 2026, which gives the figure as "$10K MRR in 1 year". The interview itself could not be read, because Indie Hackers does not allow this site's crawler; the Wayback Machine's index shows it online by 5 July 2025, which is the date used on this page. No payment-processor profile, journalist or buyer confirms the figure, no later figure was ever published, and the donation total of about US$5,000 comes from the same summary. A reader could look for a Polar or TrustMRR revenue page, a second interview or podcast in which the founder gives a dated figure, or a statement from OpenAI about the terms on which he joined. - **Why it closed.** The paid business closed on 27 May 2026. In his post of that day the founder wrote that OpenAI's head of developer experience had approached him a couple of months earlier and that he had joined OpenAI's developer experience team; with update 2.1.32 the licensing restrictions were removed and all current subscriptions cancelled. He also wrote that it was increasingly hard to convince someone to pay him US$15 a month when a coding agent "just works", and that being a bootstrapped founder is relentless because every subscription might disappear the next month. No source reports a sale of the company or a price, so this page treats it as a closure, not an exit. The code lives on as the free Community Edition, published on 13 June 2026, which the founder says he will not steward day to day. Startup Founder Stories notes that no updated revenue figure was ever published. - **The platforms built the same thing.** Cursor, Claude Code and Codex read codebases themselves, and the founder wrote that naive prompting is convenient and needs no manual, while his tool needed one. His answer was to turn the app into tools that those agents call; the final answer was to join one of the platforms. - **Mac only, one person.** The app ran only on macOS, and the founder wrote that users had asked for a Windows port and a mobile app that he could not build alone. Everything on this page depended on one engineer's time. - **Two accounts of the first version differ.** Startup Founder Stories' summary says the first prototype was an Electron app; the code published in June 2026 is a Swift app that needs Xcode. Both can be true across two years, but no source describes the rewrite. ## Sources 1. Startup Founder Stories, 21 July 2026: How Eric Provencher built Repo Prompt to $10K MRR in 1 year — https://startupfounderstories.com/stories/eric-provencher-repo-prompt-10k-mrr-ai-coding-context (grade D). Read in full. A summary of the Indie Hackers interview, which this site may not fetch. Source for the headline figure, the donation total, the free-tier decisions, the solo founder in Canada and the Electron prototype. 2. Repo Prompt blog, 27 May 2026: Repo Prompt's Next Chapter — https://repoprompt.com/blog/repo-prompt-next-chapter/ (grade C). Read in full. Founder's own post. Source for the 16 July 2024 first build, the Reddit and TestFlight start, the model timeline, the US$15 a month remark, the OpenAI move and the cancelled subscriptions. 3. Wayback Machine snapshot of repoprompt.com, 12 June 2025, with its JavaScript bundle main.cb3ed249.js — http://web.archive.org/web/20250612214125/https://repoprompt.com/ (grade C). Read the pricing, free-tier, terms and checkout strings in the page's script bundle, because the page renders by script. Source for the prices, the token limit, the three-machine rule and the Polar checkout links. 4. Wayback Machine snapshots of repoprompt.com, 19 November 2024 and 12 January 2025, with their JavaScript bundles — http://web.archive.org/web/20241119200546/https://repoprompt.com/ (grade C). Read the link and button strings in both script bundles. Both show a TestFlight link and a Ko-fi Donate button and no paid plan. 5. Repo Prompt blog, 13 June 2026: Repo Prompt Community Edition is Live! — https://repoprompt.com/blog/repo-prompt-community-edition/ (grade C). Read in full. Source for the open-source release, the MCP-server-as-primary-agent design, the contributor whitelist and the Classic archive. 6. GitHub repository repoprompt/repoprompt-ce, read 23 October 2026 — https://github.com/repoprompt/repoprompt-ce (grade B). Read the repository page and README. Source for the star, fork and commit counts, the Apache-2.0 license, Swift, the Xcode 26 requirement and the command-line build. 7. GitHub profile of Eric Provencher (provencher), read 23 October 2026 — https://github.com/provencher (grade C). Read the profile header. Gives Canada and the line "building Repo Prompt | prev Staff Eng working on XR at Unity". 8. Product Hunt: Repo Prompt, product page and forum thread "Repo Prompt is now free and soon to be open source" — https://www.producthunt.com/products/repo-prompt (grade C). Read the product page and the forum thread. Source for the January 2026 launch, the points and day rank and the founder's shutdown announcement as reposted there. 9. Lore Brief newsletter by Nathan Lands, 7 May 2025: Inside RepoPrompt: The Secret AI Prompt Tool Silicon Valley Engineers Are Using — https://news.lore.com/p/inside-repoprompt-the-secret-ai-prompt-tool-silicon-valley-engineers-are-using-287f49fc9cdce3a6 (grade C). Read in full. Podcast show notes with the founder as guest; names his X account and the Context Builder and CodeMaps features. 10. Repo Prompt blog, 4 November 2025: Context Over Convenience — https://repoprompt.com/blog/context-over-convenience/ (grade C). Read the sections on the context builder, the Pro Edit workflow and planning with GPT-5 Pro. 11. Repo Prompt blog, 8 October 2025: Building Repo Bench — https://repoprompt.com/blog/building-repo-bench/ (grade C). Read the sections on the leaderboard and the community-submitted runs. 12. Wayback Machine availability record for the Indie Hackers interview URL — http://archive.org/wayback/available?url=indiehackers.com/post/tech/hitting-a-5-figure-mrr-within-a-year-by-giving-his-ai-coding-tool-away-for-free-xRJqBpXUMxlHQQ01axeK (grade D). Read the JSON index record only, which gives a first snapshot of 5 July 2025. The interview page itself was not fetched, because Indie Hackers disallows this site's crawler. 13. repoprompt.com home page and its script bundle, read 23 and 31 October 2026 — https://repoprompt.com/ (grade C). Read the link strings in the script bundle on 23 October and the page again on 31 October 2026. It offers the Community Edition and the Classic app as downloads and lists no prices. 14. Database of failed startups, local export — /method/#dead (grade C). Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors.