Eighty-seven comments, and nobody answered the question (external link)
Somebody on r/vibecoding asked the only question that matters about the genre:
I keep seeing people on X and Reddit claiming they're making $10k, $20k, sometimes even $50k+ a month from apps they built with AI tools. I'm curious how common this actually is outside of the posts that go viral.
They asked well, too — what the product does, how long it took, how you got the first users, where growth came from, how long before real money. That is a survey instrument, not a rant.
Eighty-seven comments. I read the thread. Nobody produced the story.
What is there instead: someone $1,600 out of pocket on an app they intend to give away free next year, funded by maxing out a Claude Max plan and an OpenAI plan every week, cheerfully, as a passion project. Someone two years and $400 in who is "not taking payments yet". Someone who has subscribed to AI tools for two years and says plainly, "I've never made a penny, but that might change, and if it doesn't, I build things that matter to me." A brief argument about whether $1,600 buys more from a model or from a developer. And the original poster, who sells digital products on Etsy full time, clarifying that of course they do not believe the viral numbers — they want to know what the people who do make money actually solve.
Nobody stepped forward.
I want to be careful about what that is and is not. It is one thread on one subreddit over nine hours, self-selected, and absence of evidence in a Reddit thread is not evidence of absence. Successful founders are notoriously bad at hanging around in hobbyist subreddits describing their revenue. I would bet real money that people are making real money this way.
But the shape of the silence is informative, because this is the room where you would expect the answer to be. r/vibecoding is not a general programming forum where the question would be off-topic. It is the enthusiast community, several hundred thousand people who have chosen to identify with the practice, asked a direct commercial question by one of their own — and the replies are dominated by people spending money they do not expect to recover, and saying so without embarrassment.
Which points at something I think is true and under-discussed: most vibe coding is not a business activity at all. It is hobbyist making. The person self- funding a photo-blog platform because Pixelpost shipped its last release in 2009 is not failing at a startup. They are doing what people did with woodworking and model railways, in a medium where the tools recently got good enough that one person can finish something.
That is a genuinely nice thing, and it is being sold as a get-rich scheme by people whose actual revenue comes from telling you it is one.
The best comment in the thread has nothing to do with AI:
You have a problem that you know a lot about, that bothers you enough to find a solution for it. Then if you're lucky, there are people with the same problem, not bothered enough to come up with a solution on their own but bothered enough to be willing to pay you. Doesn't matter if the software is generated by AI or written by human.
That was true in 2005 and the tooling has not touched it. Generation got cheap. Distribution, and knowing what to build, did not.