Rumored.ai: Revenue, sale and how it was built

Team of 2 to 10 · 19 months after launch, revenue falling

Said 500+ paying agenciesRecords 207 subscriptionsDid not hold

The founder had an audience before the product existed: a daily YouTube show about SEO since 2023 and an X account that has 62,000 followers today, so the first customers cost nothing. A developer co-founder built the software with AI coding tools. The product started as one plain rank tracker at US$19 a month, grew into a bundle at US$57 to US$2,997 a month, and by July 2025 the first payment of a new customer from a paid ad covered the cost of that ad.

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

Four owners of marketing agencies built it for their own clients, who asked whether AI recommended them. They launched it with plans made for agencies and a 30% lifetime commission for agencies that resell it. The average subscription now pays about US$206 a month, close to the price of the agency plans.

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

One co-founder, Paul Vengeons, had worked as an SEO consultant in France since 2020 and had more than 10,000 followers on X, and the agents follow his method. The answers come from the customer's own Search Console data, the price is a fraction of Semrush or an agency, and the co-founders post free SEO guides every day that send readers to a 7-day free trial.

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.

Team of 2 to 10 · 20 months after launch, revenue falling

Two Brussels founders with past SEO and sales software companies built a narrow product: one plan, one website, articles on a schedule, no setup. The payment processor shows that it earned US$9,271 in 20 months, but also that monthly revenue fell from US$821 in May 2026 to US$138 in September 2026, and the founders listed it for sale in June 2026.

Started small, grew after funding · 15 months after launch, revenue growing

Three founders who met in an Antler cohort in Berlin launched it in February 2025, in a category that, as The Next Web wrote in May 2026, "barely existed 18 months ago". With self-serve plans and unlimited users it signed 1,300 brands and agencies in about nine months, the company said, and two funding rounds within ten months paid for a large sales and engineering team in Berlin and New York.

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, when 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 · 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.

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 · 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.

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.

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 · 31 months after launch, revenue growing

It shipped five days after the ChatGPT API appeared, when the official interface logged people out, typed slowly and had no search. It charged from the first day and raised the price with every update. Then a Team version for companies turned one-time sales into subscriptions.

Solo founder · 33 months after launch, revenue growing

It was built in two to three weeks as a side feature for an existing product and launched with a paywall on day one, one month after the ChatGPT API appeared. It reached US$10,000 a month in 25 days, then lost half of it to churn. What kept it alive for three years was cheap customer acquisition: more than 50 free web tools that rank on Google and send visitors to the paid product.

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, 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 · 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.

Team of 2 to 10 · sold 17 months after launch

Four founders, two of whom had built the drinks-delivery start-up Winelivery, looked for a profession that works with a large, fast-changing body of rules and had not yet adopted AI, and chose Italian accountants and labour consultants. They tested a first version with practitioners and sold monthly subscriptions. In October 2025 TeamSystem, an Italian maker of software for accountants, bought the majority of the company; its press release said Normo.ai had €1.3 million of revenue in 2025.