He Built a Flight Simulator in Three Hours and Hit $1M a Year in 17 Days. Then It Went to Zero.
Pieter Levels hit $1M ARR in 17 days with a flight sim built in three hours. His bio now lists it at $0/m. The durable money was always the boring app.
Reviewed by Agnel Nieves
Read in Am Puck's voice, synthesized.AI voice
In February 2025, Pieter Levels typed a sentence into Cursor. "Make a 3d flying game in browser with skyscrapers." Three hours later he had a working flight simulator. He had never made a game in his life.
I went through his last couple hundred posts so you do not have to, and I want to show you both ends of this. The part where it printed money, and the part where it stopped.
The setup
Levels is the indie hacker other indie hackers quote. Dutch, self-taught, builds everything solo in old PHP and runs it on a Hetzner box. His flagship is Photo AI, which trains a model on your selfies and spits out studio-grade portraits.
He posts his revenue. Constantly. That is the unusual thing about him. Most founders post a cropped Stripe screenshot once and disappear. Levels treats his Stripe dashboard like a public weather report.
The moment something worked, fast
The flight sim, fly.pieter.com, was a lark. He shipped it, tagged it as built with Cursor in about three hours, and posted the prompt.
"Today I thought what if I ask Cursor to build a flight simulator So I asked 'make a 3d flying game in browser with skyscrapers' And after many questions and comments from me I now have the official [ Pieter.com Flight Simulator ] in vanilla HTML and JS"
It went off. Elon Musk reposted it. The game was free, so the money came from in-game ad slots, branded blimps, and a $29.99 F-16 upgrade. Thirteen days in he posted $67,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Then this.
"fly.pieter.com has now gone from $0 to $1 million ARR in just 17 days! Revenue update: $87,000 MRR (which is $1M ARR) My first project ever to go up this fast"
Read that last line carefully, because he did. In the same post he wrote, "Whether the MRR is truly sustainable for a year we can only guess." He flagged the risk himself, in the victory tweet. The rest of the internet ignored that sentence and ran "1M ARR in 17 days" headlines for weeks.
The moment something broke, quietly
Here is the number the headlines never followed up on. As of his live X bio in mid-2026, the flight sim line reads "Pieter.com $0/m."
Zero. The thing that hit $1M ARR in 17 days makes nothing now.
That is not a scandal. It is the actual nature of the revenue. Sponsor slots and one-time jet purchases are not subscriptions that renew. Once the viral moment passed and the ad slots lapsed, the money left with the attention. Levels basically said as much at the peak. The crowd just preferred the clean version.
The product that actually pays the bills
So ignore the game. The durable story is Photo AI, and it is more impressive precisely because it is boring.
In September 2025 he posted a record month.
"Photo AI just reached a new record of $150,000/mo. 2,573 active subscribers. 87% profit margin. 100% bootstrapped + $0 funding. Employees: 1 = just me on my laptop. Tech: PHP + jQuery + SQLite on a Hetzner VPS with Nginx and Ubuntu"
One person. An 87% margin. A tech stack that working developers openly mock. When he posted that his code was "almost 14,000 lines of raw PHP mixed with inline HTML," the post pulled millions of views and a small civil war in the replies.
His current X bio lists the portfolio: Photo AI at $100K/m, RemoteOK at $44K/m, Vibej.am at $39K/m, InteriorAI at $35K/m, and a few smaller lines, which puts him in the neighborhood of $245,000 a month across everything as of mid-2026. Notice Photo AI is at $100K there, down from that $150K record. These numbers move around. He is honest that records are usually one good day, not a new floor.
The verdict
Here is the part the "one person, $150K a month" posts leave out, and Levels does not. He did not build an audience in 2025. He built it for a decade. His launches land because hundreds of thousands of people already trust his Stripe screenshots. After the Lex Fridman podcast he posted that sign-ups and revenue across almost all his sites doubled overnight, +93%, and in his $420K-record post he put Photo AI's bump specifically at 3x. That is an input you do not have.
So the copyable lesson is not the three-hour build. AI genuinely compressed that, and that is real. The lesson is the boring middle. Charge from day one. He told PPC Land, "pay me money, pay $10, $20, $40. I would ask more than $10 per month." Ship the fix in two minutes, not two weeks. And know the difference between revenue that renews and revenue that visited once, took a selfie in an F-16, and never came back.
Sources
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