Photopea
👤 Ivan Kutskir (A graphics-engine specialist who hand-coded a PSD reader and Photoshop's UI in JavaScript, solo — a skill moat few can match.)🌐 siteivank.net𝕏
Ivan Kutskir rebuilt Photoshop in a browser tab, solo, and kept it free. A zero-cost app plus ads prints $100K a month.
Will it work? · our read
Zero-cost machine. Copy the code and you still lack his decade of graphics-engine depth — and the nerve to stay solo, free, and cheap while a funded team would bloat the margin away.
01How the money moves
Free in-browser Photoshop loads, no signup
→
Users' own devices do the editing — near-$0 cost to him
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Ads bill about 6c per user-hour, about $100K/mo
02The numbers
$100K
monthly ad revenue
founder
about $66
total yearly cost
founder
10M
visits per month
founder
Founder-stated in 2020-21 interviews; not audited. Failory
About $100K/mo, roughly 90% from ads; about $1M in 2020 (founder-stated).
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(demo: preview the full teardown)Sourcesupdated · daily
Failory — Ivan Kutskir interview: about $100K/mo from adsHacker News — Ivan Kutskir AMA (about $1M in 2020)Photopea blog — Creating Photopea (build story)Wikipedia — Photopea (monetization, timeline)
Revenue is founder-stated, not audited: Ivan Kutskir quoted about $100K/month from ads in his Failory interview and about $1M for 2020 in his Hacker News AMA (first-party). Later third-party figures claiming $3M+/yr (GetLatka, blog posts) are unverified estimates I did not rely on. The roughly 90% ads / 10% premium-plus-licensing split and the about-$66/yr running cost are also his own numbers. No invented drama — the win is genuine technical depth and a zero-marginal-cost model, not one dramatic pivot. We never score you.