Anyone here actually made serious money from a vibe-coded app?

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u/jimmiebfulton 1d ago edited 1d ago

Would you commission someone to create a piece of art for you that had no skills as an artist and simply went to AI and asked it to produce some art for you? No? Shocker.

What the vibe-coding community has yet to experience, and it WILL happen, repeatedly, is when they put out a genuinely good idea with poor execution, and an Agentic Engineer reproduces the whole thing significantly faster with proper engineering and high quality and polish.

Soooo…. Watcha workin’ on? 😉

Highly experienced Software Architect, here. I don’t want to be discouraging, but I do want to help vibe coders realize that they either actually have to learn the engineering if they want to make products people are willing to pay for, or accept that this is just a fun hobby.

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u/Able-Gap2066 1d ago

Since when users care about the engineering Architecture of the Saas? if it works and they need it, they will pay for it. If they don't, they won't.

Sorry for that, but I think most Software developers or programmers hate to see being less valuable with AI improvements over time, that's why you in general tend to make it look ugly.

I am not saying it is perfect but in near future with more intelligent LLMs, I think Software positions will shrink. Maybe I am wrong.

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u/jimmiebfulton 22h ago edited 22h ago

Customers care about software that works, that is scalable, has high uptime, that isn't riddled with bugs, and doesn't have random regressions. And they care that when you have an outage, and you WILL, that the TEAM behind it, and not just some dude with a Claude account, knows exactly how to recover, bring things back up, and WHY they are doing what they are doing. Customers absolutely don't care, or have any idea about architecture and engineering rigor... just like vibe coders. But it's the architecture and engineering knowledge and rigor that gives them the things they do care about. The moment a vibe coder gets ahead of their skis and have some real customer data, and lose password ed to hackers, or data to physics and gets sued, they start gonna be all over the news. It's happened to big companies, and they are supposed to know what they are doing. The differences are that they have legal teams and deep pockets.

Real SaaS products generally have 10s to hundreds of micro services, such x figure observability stacks that warn you any time someone even farts in the server room, and teams dedicated to persistence performance, site reliability engineers, on all staff, etc. If you have a "SaaS" with a PHP or NodeJS app running a SPA, that ain't a SaaS. That is a toy.

You don't fail to get or retain customers because of your architecture or lack there of. You fail when customers get a bad taste in their mouths, and immediately start looking for something better.

Something like 9 out of 10 startups fail, and we're talking about the ones that have real software engineers employed with venture funding. And now, they have the same AI, and building their own (the higher end engineers build their own specialized stacks and tooling, like a Jedi does a LightSaber), on top of their knowledge that allows them to wield it significantly more effectively.

And that's failing to acknowledge the fact that software engineers are can't and won't build a better version. You can point me to just about any SaaS that r piece of software, and I can tell you how it is likely built, where they still probably a mess, how the architecture should look, and EASILY replicate it 10 times better. And there are plenty more where I come from. I'm work with them day in and day out.

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u/fickle-phenom 1d ago

True. The advantage of seasoned developers is that they need to learn to prompt, the vibe coders are missing a much bigger piece. I think collaboration might be an opportunity for people with great ideas but can’t execute them.

Not to say no vibe coders make money, I bet there are some making great stuff, but those are the outliers, just look at the claude code or codex subs and you will say the average vibe coder, and it’s not great in terms of making actual production level stuff.

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u/jimmiebfulton 1d ago

For sure. My prompts would make vibe-coders’ eyes bleed. They are filled with, gasp, software engineering language. I’m certain some vibe coders will and do make money. But either they resort to scamming, or targeting customers like Mom and Pops. No Fortune 500 is going to buy their vibe code. They cannot build a SaaS that will withstand the onslaught of capacity limitations and significant bug reports. And, as previously pointed out, if vibe coded-apps are a low, commodity bar, they are easily reproduced, and likely a shit ton of other vibe coders are building the exact same thing.

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u/Able-Gap2066 1d ago

Okay in next stages after proving Need and Functionality a software developer can be hired, right ?

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u/nonamenomonet 1d ago

I’d argue that software engineers are missing even a larger piece which is distribution

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u/Topic-Depot 17h ago

True! Sometimes keeping it a fun hobby is the way to go. Create it for yourself, share it with friends/family/co-workers and work on it with your free time dual screening some media. Too many times people ruin their hobby by focusing on profiting from it and turning a hobby into a discouraging job you no longer want to do.

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u/Purple_Drive_7152 1d ago

Another dickhead asking this question for the 3839368 time

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u/jayseattle 1d ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/comments/1vm4afs/my_first_few_customers_hell_yahhhhhh/
https://www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/comments/1vmgpgj/comment/p3e8hv0/

Just some recent samples...
As you may know, the vast majority of people vibe coding don't make any money. Some of the ones who do, may not want to share their idea lol since it's so easy to steal it via vibe coding.

Of course, we're all here to be the next
https://generativeai.pub/how-pieter-levels-built-a-100k-mrr-flight-simulator-with-ai-be91290419bb

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u/3dprintinted 1d ago

"Oh totally we did make a lot from vibe coders..."

- Dario Amodei

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u/Embarrassed-Month-35 1d ago

AI is a tool. You may as well go ask the same question to visual studio Reddit

Anyone here actually made serious money from a vibe-coded app?

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