Thank you! I really appreciate the kind words regarding performance.
Yes, it is fully self-sustaining. In fact, for the last 5 years, it has been my main full-time source of income, running entirely as a bootstrapped project from Croatia.
The revenue comes primarily from ads, plus a smaller portion from Premium ad-free subscriptions. Since I focus heavily on keeping infrastructure costs low (optimized .NET code + moving storage from S3 to Wasabi), the margins are healthy enough to be a very viable, bootstrapped full-time business.
That’s really awesome to have a viable self bootstrapped project! Did you have to spend a lot of time maintaining it or deal with customer support after the initial launch? A low maintenance yet viable business would truly be the dream!
It is pretty close to that dream scenario now, yes.
Because the tech stack is stable (and fully matured), I almost never have to deal with 'emergency' technical support or bug fixes. The servers just hum along.
I do handle customer support myself, but the volume is very low relative to the traffic. 90% of the tickets are just non-technical questions about billing or ad-free subscriptions.
This low-maintenance overhead is exactly what allows me to work on new features or experiment with new projects (like my upcoming AI drawing school) without burning out.
Yes, it is fully self-sustaining. In fact, for the last 5 years, it has been my main full-time source of income, running entirely as a bootstrapped project from Croatia.
The revenue comes primarily from ads, plus a smaller portion from Premium ad-free subscriptions. Since I focus heavily on keeping infrastructure costs low (optimized .NET code + moving storage from S3 to Wasabi), the margins are healthy enough to be a very viable, bootstrapped full-time business.