Graded AI income cases

John Rush (TrustMRR lists 116.6k X followers), indie hacker running a portfolio of AI tools

Built: SEO Bot (seobot.ai), an "all-in-one SEO AI agent" that automates keyword research, content writing/optimization, internal linking, and backlink building. $49/month. Founded September 2023. He also runs other AI tools such as ListingBot.

AI role: AI agents generate and optimize SEO content and run the SEO workflow autonomously.

Claimed income: TrustMRR (Stripe API key verified; last updated Oct 13, 2026, 08:14 PM): MRR $36,850 from 512 active subscriptions; all-time revenue $1,899,783. Its figures do not establish non-Stripe/invoice sales. In a Latka interview on May 15, 2025, Rush himself claimed over $100K/month for SEO Bot, roughly 3x TrustMRR MRR; this is his own unverified claim, and should not be conflated with the later TrustMRR Stripe-only snapshot or portfolio totals.

Source: getlatka.com · checked 2026-10-14

Nevo David (@wickedguro on X)

Built: Postiz, an open-source social media scheduler described on TrustMRR as "the ultimate agentic social media scheduler tool".

AI role: TrustMRR listing value proposition: "Run your social media on autopilot with AI agents". AI agents plan, generate and schedule posts across multiple platforms. Tagged AI on TrustMRR.

Claimed income: $265,825 MRR (7,770 active subscriptions); $296,526 last 30 days; $1,417,222 all-time revenue. Stripe-verified, last updated Oct 13, 2026.

Source: trustmrr.com · checked 2026-10-14

Priyam Raj (@priymrj on X)

Built: Vid.AI, a tool to "Turn any idea or script into ready-to-post videos that get views" (faceless short-form video content).

AI role: AI "generates voiceovers, visuals, and edits – all in minutes, no skills needed"; marketed as "monetizable AI videos on Autopilot".

Claimed income: $47,215 MRR (716 active subscriptions); $38,983 last 30 days (page title); $1,632,871 all-time revenue. Stripe-verified, last updated Oct 13, 2026.

Source: trustmrr.com · checked 2026-10-14

Ben Tossell, Ben's Bites

Built: Ben's Bites started as a daily AI newsletter with 100K+ subscribers. Tossell then turned it into a paid AI education portal sold on a lifetime plan. The library grew from 50 tutorials to over 300, and he says it has taught 10,000+ people to use AI to save time and automate work.

AI role: AI is the product: the newsletter covers AI news, and the paid tutorials teach AI automation, prompting, and AI tools for illustration and video. He moved away from advertising and toward selling AI education directly.

Claimed income: Claim: Ben's Bites is described as a "7-figure business" that has scaled "to $1M+". In "less than a year" it "already made more than his last exit". The portal had been running about 9 months at the time of the interview (Peter Yang's Behind the Craft, Sep 29, 2024).

Source: creatoreconomy.so · checked 2026-10-14

Keremcan Şeker (@keremcanseker_ on X)

Built: Boothie, an AI photo app for iOS and Android: pick a look, upload a selfie, and the app re-renders the photo in that style (e.g. Canon G7X digicam, Kodak Gold film).

AI role: AI image generation re-styles user selfies; "AI generations run on weekly subscriptions and credit packs". A free editor with local filters also exists. Underlying model not named.

Claimed income: $51,923 MRR (2,226 active subscriptions); $43,611 last 30 days (page title); $141,532 all-time revenue. Verified via RevenueCat API key, "Last updated: Oct 14, 2026, 12:28 AM". Also listed for sale on TrustMRR (asking $1,500,000; first listed 2026-10-09).

Source: trustmrr.com · checked 2026-10-14

Chad Vavra, cofounder of Chat Agency AI. He is a former design executive at Pixar, Meta and Google.

Built: Chat Agency AI, an AI consultancy/agency that builds custom, security-first AI systems for entrepreneurs and business leaders, working inside their existing infrastructure. It was started in January 2026.

AI role: It orchestrates multiple systems and AI tools into custom solutions for clients. The interface lets the client review and edit each AI suggestion before anything runs, treating AI as a "trusted team member".

Claimed income: Starter Story lists $10K revenue/month. Vavra says "We're at the $10K revenue mark", and the page states he "currently makes an average of $120K/year". Starter Story interview dated 15 Feb 2026; self-reported.

Source: www.starterstory.com · checked 2026-10-14

Yasser Elsaid (@yasser_elsaid_ on X)

Built: Chatbase, a platform to "Build, deploy, and optimize AI agents for customer support, sales, and product guidance across chat, email, and voice". Founded February 2023, based in Canada.

AI role: AI agents/chatbots answer customer questions and guide buyers around the clock, deployable across chat, email, voice, WhatsApp and Slack. Underlying models not named on the listing.

Claimed income: $863,632 MRR (12,424 active subscriptions); $865,869 last 30 days (page title); $19,213,227 all-time revenue. Stripe-verified, but "Stripe API key expired"; data last updated Jul 31, 2026.

Source: trustmrr.com · checked 2026-10-14

Jozef "Joseph" Gherman, founder of StealthGPT

Built: StealthGPT, a subscription web app that generates AI text designed to be undetectable by AI detectors, or rewrites ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini output to make it undetectable. He started solo with a $150 domain purchase in February 2023, and the team has since grown to 6-7 people.

AI role: The core product is LLM text generation and rewriting (OpenAI is in the listed stack), tuned by repeatedly testing outputs against AI detectors such as GPTZero.

Claimed income: "190,000 MRR recently" (Starter Story's video introduction rounds this to 200,000), about 15 months after launch, per Gherman's own statement in the interview. He also reports roughly $10K-30K monthly profit after about $100K/month in ad spend and $50-60K/month in salaries; these figures are self-reported, not independently verified.

Source: www.starterstory.com · checked 2026-10-14

Lance Junck, a 23-year-old brand strategist in Austin, Texas

Built: "ChatGPT Masterclass: A Complete ChatGPT Guide for Beginners", a Udemy course of about 7 hours and 50 lectures, priced around $20. It launched in late December 2022 and enrolled more than 15,000 students in about three months. He also gave paid talks on ChatGPT to companies.

AI role: ChatGPT is the subject of the course. It covers prompting, uses for business, students and programmers, DALL-E 2 art, plugins, and GPT-4. He taught himself ChatGPT after first using it in November 2022.

Claimed income: Claim: "$34,913 in profits so far" (headline: $35,000) in about 3 months after the late-December 2022 launch (article Apr 2023). Business Insider says it reviewed screenshots of his Udemy sales dashboard.

Source: ca.news.yahoo.com · checked 2026-10-14

Liam Ottley, founder of Morningside AI (YouTube/LinkedIn: @liamottley)

Built: Morningside AI, an AI agency that builds AI solutions for business clients. It started with paid "Exploration Milestone" discovery engagements priced at $800 to $4,000. He also runs an AI education business through a Skool community and YouTube, which is out of scope here.

AI role: The agency sells AI development and automation projects for businesses. The paid discovery milestone scopes AI use cases before the build.

Claimed income: In his own newsletter post of 12 Nov 2024, Ottley says the Exploration Milestone helped Morningside AI "break through the $20,000 - $30,000 p/m range consistently" and later reach "our first $100,000+ month". He gives no dates for either milestone. He also claims "over $3M in revenue (and counting!)" across "670+ days of building in AI", but does not split that between the agency and his other ventures. Self-reported and unverified.

Source: morningsideai.beehiiv.com · checked 2026-10-14

Luca Steeb (steebchen) and Smakosh (smakosh); TrustMRR handle llmgateway

Built: LLM Gateway, "an open-source API gateway for Large Language Models (LLMs)" that sits between applications and providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google AI Studio. Founded May 2025.

AI role: AI infrastructure: routes requests across 280+ models, centralizes API key management, tracks token usage/costs and performance metrics.

Claimed income: $78,764 MRR (1,386 active subscriptions); $259,539 last 30 days; $1,000,116 all-time revenue. Stripe-verified, but "Stripe API key expired"; data last updated Sep 7, 2026. (30-day figure well above MRR, likely usage/credit revenue — inference, not stated on page.)

Source: trustmrr.com · checked 2026-10-14

Mert Yerlikaya and Arda Ali Güçsav, founders of Monk AI / Monk AI Group (Turkey). They also run the Skool community "The Profitable AI Consultant".

Built: An AI consulting and automation agency that sells paid "AI Audits" to businesses and follows up with AI implementation projects and retainers. They say they reached this with no technical background, at age 19.

AI role: They sell AI audits that identify AI and automation opportunities, then build AI automation solutions for clients. Leads come from LinkedIn outreach and discovery calls.

Claimed income: A Liam Ottley interview video ("I Made $320,000 Selling AI Audits as a 19 Year Old", reposted 2 Sep 2025) says they "scaled their AI agency past $320,000 in revenue". No exact period is given beyond "a year of struggle" before growth. Their Skool page claims Monk AI has "generated $1M+ from 50+ projects across 20+ industries since 2023." Both are self-reported.

Source: startup.whatfinger.com · checked 2026-10-14

Nicole Cueto, a public relations consultant in New York

Built: A side business that plans personalized vacations for clients. It takes 10 to 20 hours per week.

AI role: She uses ChatGPT instead of Google or Bing to build each client's trip, for example by asking for a budget-conscious Paris guide built around historical neighborhoods. She says this halved her research time. She fact-checks the output because it is not always accurate.

Claimed income: Claim: the side hustle averages $670 per month, and she has earned this since January 2023. The figure is "according to documents" that CNBC reviewed, as reported by Business Insider on Jul 31, 2023.

Source: tech.yahoo.com · checked 2026-10-14

Pieter Levels (known as levelsio)

Built: Photo AI (photoai.com), a solo-built app that generates AI photos of the user from their uploaded selfies. Launched February 2023. He also built InteriorAI.

AI role: Stable Diffusion image generation (still v1.5 per the article), with DreamBooth fine-tuning on each user's face, hosted on Replicate. Google Vision screens outputs for NSFW content. Generation parameters are A/B tested on a share of users.

Claimed income: $132,000 in monthly revenue, per Levels' own social media disclosures as reported in an article published May 25, 2025. The article also cites an earlier milestone of $100,000/month by September 2024.

Source: ppc.land · checked 2026-10-14

Tomy (@tomymarengo on X)

Built: Rank Prompt, a SaaS that "helps users understand how their website shows up on AI Search Engines and how to improve it" — track visibility, analyze competitors, build citations, and create content from one dashboard.

AI role: Built around AI search (AEO): monitors brand visibility across major AI platforms and optimizes for AI search results; listed in the AI category. The listing does not detail which models it uses internally.

Claimed income: $43,672 MRR (212 active subscriptions); $50,335 last 30 days (page title); $289,263 all-time revenue. Stripe-verified, "Last updated: Oct 13, 2026, 10:41 PM" (fetched 2026-10-14).

Source: trustmrr.com · checked 2026-10-14

Tony Dinh, solo indie developer from Vietnam

Built: TypingMind (typingmind.com), a third-party chat interface/front end for LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.), sold as license keys, with cloud sync and team/private-deployment plans. Launched March 2023.

AI role: The product is a UI layer for LLM APIs: users chat with GPT/Claude models through TypingMind, with prompt templates, multi-session chat, and private deployments for businesses.

Claimed income: $1M in revenue over the last 12 months (about 20 months after the March 2023 launch), per his own newsletter post dated November 22, 2024. He also reports $22K in the first week after launch. About 50% of monthly revenue was one-time purchases.

Source: news.tonydinh.com · checked 2026-10-14

Aitana López (@fit_aitana), an AI-generated influencer created by Rubén Cruz, founder of The Clueless, an AI modeling agency in Barcelona, Spain

Built: A fully AI-generated virtual influencer/model with nearly 150,000 Instagram followers. She earns money through brand deals and sponsored posts.

AI role: Aitana is entirely AI-generated. The agency's design team created her look, personality and backstory, and schedules her weekly "activities", such as trips to Madrid and cosplay. Cruz said he created her because real influencers caused projects to be put on hold or cancelled.

Claimed income: Claim: she "earns an impressive $11,000 a month in brand deals" (body text). The headline says "Makes Over $10,000 a Month". Entrepreneur attributes Cruz's comments to a Euronews interview from Nov 22, 2023. Article dated Nov 28, 2023.

Source: www.entrepreneur.com · checked 2026-10-14

Ammaar Reshi, a product design manager at Brex

Built: "Alice and Sparkle", an AI-written and AI-illustrated children's book self-published on Amazon. He also made an AI-assisted animated short, which got 7M+ views on Twitter.

AI role: He used ChatGPT to write the book and Midjourney to illustrate it, finishing it in 72 hours.

Claimed income: Claim: he sold over 1,300 copies and generated $2,600 "so far" after the book went on sale in December 2022, and noted that Amazon takes a significant cut of royalties. He told this to Insider, and it was reported in a roundup dated Jan 18, 2024.

Source: tech.yahoo.com · checked 2026-10-14

Damon Chen, indie hacker (owner of PDF.ai)

Built: PDF.ai, a "chat with any PDF" tool. Launched June 6, 2023. Freemium with a $15/month paid plan and a $50/month Enterprise plan. He paid $10,000 for the PDF.ai domain.

AI role: An LLM-powered document Q&A tool: users upload PDFs and ask questions about them in chat.

Claimed income: $25,070 in revenue (described as MRR) for September 2023, with about $17,600 profit and over 1,250 paying users per month, as reported October 8, 2023.

Source: spymetrics.beehiiv.com · checked 2026-10-14

Danny Postma

Built: HeadshotPro (headshotpro.com), an AI headshot generator that turns selfies into professional headshots. He earlier built and sold Headlime (a GPT-3 copywriting tool) and built ProfilePicture.AI.

AI role: A backend pipeline of open-source and custom models: Stable Diffusion with DreamBooth-style fine-tuning, LLaVA to screen bad uploads and NSFW outputs, and CodeFormer to remove facial artifacts (per his Unite.AI interview).

Claimed income: Starter Story estimates about $300K/month (about $3.6M/year) for HeadshotPro, in a profile dated December 12, 2024. Starter Story marks the figure as "Estimated from public sources." Separately, Indie Hackers Podcast episode #278 (May 5, 2023) is titled "Growing a Portfolio of AI Products Past $300k After a 7-Figure Exit", with no period stated.

Source: www.starterstory.com · checked 2026-10-14

David Bressler, founder of Formula Bot (formerly Excel Formula Bot)

Built: Formula Bot (formulabot.com), a tool that converts plain-text instructions into Excel/Google Sheets formulas. It has a web app built on Bubble plus Excel and Google Sheets add-ons. He built it at night while holding a full-time analytics job.

AI role: OpenAI models power the core feature: turning natural-language requests into spreadsheet formulas.

Claimed income: $4.2K MRR, and over $30K cumulative revenue in the roughly three months since launch, per his No Code MBA interview (early-stage figures, around 2022-2023). Later secondary reports cite a $500K ARR self-report in an Indie Hackers interview, but that page could not be fetched.

Source: nocode.mba · checked 2026-10-14

Eyal Cohen (@eyali__ on X)

Built: PropGPT, a mobile app for sports betting analysis (player props, spreads, totals, moneylines) covering the World Cup, NFL, NBA, MLB and more.

AI role: Delivers "AI sports predictions, player prop analysis, and real-time betting insights" using AI-powered sports data and predictions.

Claimed income: $82,021 MRR (2,101 active subscriptions); $87,223 last 30 days (page title); $952,782 all-time revenue. Verified via Superwall API key, last updated Oct 13, 2026.

Source: trustmrr.com · checked 2026-10-14

Dylan (dyllan1020 on TrustMRR/X)

Built: RankAI, an autonomous SEO/content service: "Get search visitors autonomously" from Google and ChatGPT.

AI role: Iterates content "until it works" to capture Google and AI-search traffic; OpenAI is listed in its backend tech stack.

Claimed income: $56,533 MRR (155 active subscriptions); $54,910 last 30 days; $376,985 all-time revenue. Stripe-verified, but listing notes "Stripe API key expired. Data last updated Jul 30, 2026".

Source: trustmrr.com · checked 2026-10-14

Viktor Margeirsson (X: @ViktorThulin), co-founder with Gunnar Kolbeinsson

Built: A custom software studio that builds software for Icelandic companies at prices 60-80% below larger software houses. It also launched its own products, most notably Diskó, an SMS marketing tool. The company was later acquired by Replit for an undisclosed sum.

AI role: The founding rule was no employees: when more capacity was needed, they tried "AI Agents" first. They relied heavily on AI coding and agents (building on Replit), which is what allowed the low prices for client work.

Claimed income: As reported by eBiz Facts from Viktor's X posts: About $120K in year one, and over $700K total across 18 months. Client projects were roughly $20K-$60K each, with larger ones at $130K-$180K. Diskó reached about $11K MRR after 3.5 months, and later $20K-$30K/month. Self-reported.

Source: ebizfacts.com · checked 2026-10-14

Xania Monet, an AI R&B/gospel artist created by Telisha "Nikki" Jones, a designer and poet from Mississippi

Built: An AI-generated music act. Its songs charted on Billboard ("How Was I Supposed to Know" and "Let Go, Let God", which reached No. 21 on Hot Gospel Songs). It was then signed to a record deal with Hallwood Media.

AI role: Jones writes the lyrics (about 90%, per Billboard) and uses the Suno AI platform to turn them into music, including vocals and arrangements.

Claimed income: Record deal: reported as a "$3 million record deal with Hallwood Media" (The Decoder, Sep 20, 2025, citing Billboard). Billboard itself says bidding offers reportedly reached $3 million and calls the final deal "multimillion-dollar". Streaming: Billboard estimated that five of her songs generated $52,000 in just over two months (as of early Oct 2025).

Source: the-decoder.com · checked 2026-10-14

Zain Kahn (with Awais Kahn), Superhuman AI newsletter

Built: Superhuman, a daily AI newsletter about AI tools and productivity. It grew to 135K subscribers in its first three months and to over 800K subscribers by 2024. It is monetized mainly through newsletter ad sponsorships.

AI role: AI is the core content: the newsletter teaches readers about AI tools and how to use AI to be more productive. It earns money by selling ads to an AI-interested audience.

Claimed income: Claim: "Ad space in the newsletter consistently sells out, bringing in six-figure monthly revenue" (i.e. six figures per month in ad revenue). No exact figure is given. The article byline is July 17, 2023, but the article also cites 2024 subscriber numbers, so it was likely updated.

Source: www.thetilt.com · checked 2026-10-14