The archive · Small Business & Money · Product decision · 2012–2024
Photopea: one developer's free browser Photoshop earns $200K a month — then $3M a year
Since 2012 Ivan Kuckir has built Photopea, a free Photoshop-style editor in the browser; ads plus premium turned a hobby into about $3M in 2024 revenue.
Photopea
What it had to solve
In 2012 Kuckir, a student, wanted a quick way to view Photoshop PSD files online. Full-featured image editors were desktop software costing hundreds of dollars, and no free browser equivalent existed.
How it works
Photopea is a Photoshop-compatible image editor that runs entirely in a browser, and it is the work of one person. Ivan Kuckir started it in 2012 as a two-week project to view Photoshop PSD files, kept developing it for fun at about 10 hours a month while still a student, and only added advertising in 2017.
The delivery is the idea: no downloads, no installs, no uploads — the editor runs locally in the page and opens PSD, XD, Sketch, RAW and dozens of other formats. Free users see ads; a premium tier adds extras. A 2025 Indie Hackers interview reports that after 13 years the hobby project is used by about one million people a day and generated $3 million in revenue in 2024, with annual costs around $20 for the domain.
The numbers were already visible earlier: a November 2023 Indie Hackers interview reported roughly $200K in monthly revenue and 3 million unique visitors a month in the project's 10th year. Photopea went from a student's side experiment to one of the most-used free design tools on the web, monetized without a sales team, funding round or app store.
Why it lands
- It removed the two big frictions of photo editing — price and installation — by running the whole editor in a browser page.
- The founder built it openly for years before monetizing, which earned trust and users before a single ad appeared.
- Ad support let the product stay free for everyone, so the tool kept compounding its audience instead of gating it.
- One developer with tiny costs (a domain and servers) could keep almost all of a seven-figure revenue stream.
What it did
By 2023 Photopea was generating about $200K a month from ads with 3 million unique visitors monthly; in 2024 it generated about $3 million in revenue with roughly one million daily users, while annual running costs stayed tiny — about $20 for the .COM domain, per the founder.
What you can take
One developer can beat big suites by changing delivery, not features: a free browser editor removes download friction, and ads keep the product free while the author earns.
Since then
Photopea kept growing after the $3M-2024 figure: the founder's other projects (Vectorpea, web games) remain small by comparison, and Photopea added AI-powered background removal and text-based image editing while staying free with ads. The case became a standard reference in indie-developer income threads — a proof that a free, browser-based tool built by one person can be both beloved and profitable.
Sources
- Generating $200K monthly revenue with an online photo editor
- Making $3M+ per year with a free product
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