Pareto 20, No. 8: Pieter Levels, for knowing when to build the tool instead of paying for it

One person, a dozen products, and a public list of fourteen paid services he cancelled after building replacements with AI coding tools. The clearest build-or-buy ledger a solo operator can read, with the caveats attached.

Seat 8 on The Pareto 20 is Pieter Levels, and it is the seat for a decision every solo operator now faces monthly: keep paying for the service, or have an AI coding tool build you a version you own.

Who he is

Levels is a Dutch solo founder who has built and run internet businesses by himself since 2013, in PHP, without staff or investors: Nomads.com, Remote OK, Photo AI, Interior AI, Hoodmaps and a long tail of experiments (he has said roughly four of seventy projects ever made real money). He sells a book, MAKE, runs an AI hackathon called Vibe Jam, and started an investment fund, levels.vc, in late 2025. He publishes on X many times a day, syndicated to levels.io and an email list his footer put at 16,554 readers in July 2026. Third-party corroboration of the business is unusual for a solo operator: Stripe's John Collison, on his own podcast in July 2025, put "Pieter Levels enterprises, broadly" at about $3.1 million a year.

What to read him for

The cancellation ledger. His September 9, 2026 thread lists fourteen paid services he dropped after building replacements with AI coding agents, with the saving on each: "Mapbox -> Vibecoded my own free replacement with OpenFreeMaps (saves ~$500/mo)"; "Scrapingbee/SerpAPI -> My own $1/mo scraper with Patchright (save ~$250/mo)"; Ghost replaced by his own blog platform; New Relic and IPHub replaced by a monitoring tool he calls error2telegram; human moderators replaced by an xAI-based moderation layer he says saves about $10,000 a month. He puts the total at roughly $25,000 a month. Whether or not you can do the same, the list is a model of the audit: name every subscription, ask what it does, price the alternative.

The setup, two months earlier. I cancelled all my SaaS subscriptions and vibecoded 100% of them myself (July 26, 2026) is the short version, with the sentence that makes it honest: "The irony of being replaced myself after I replaced everything I pay for is not lost on me."

Iteration in public. On September 4 he wrote that after weeks of trying he could not replace his scraping service and would keep paying $99 a month; on September 9 he had replaced it. Read that as process, not contradiction: the attempt, the failure, the second attempt.

A tool verdict, bluntly. August 24, 2026, on his primary coding agent: "Claude Code treats you like a child getting lootboxes so I'll probably switch to xAI." He uses xAI across his sites already, which is relevant to how you weigh the line.

What a one-person product looks like inside. Photo AI is a 40,870-line index.php (March 6, 2026) is the rare post that shows the architecture and the revenue of a solo product in the same breath.

How to read him

His revenue figures are his own dashboard counters, not audited accounts; the $420,000-a-month number that still circulates was a one-day spike in 2024 that he labelled as such. Independent analysis in August 2026 put Photo AI at roughly $80,000 a month, down about a quarter from March, and he has said himself that he has "more apps than ever but less sales than ever." His feed also carries a good deal of politics alongside the product posts. And the build-instead-of-buy arithmetic assumes his skills: he has written PHP for over a decade and runs his own servers. If you cannot build, the transferable part is the audit and the question, not the answer.

Start here

The September 9 thread, then the July 26 post.

What he sells, and what that means for you

His own products (Photo AI, Interior AI, Nomads.com, Remote OK), the MAKE book, Vibe Jam sponsorships, X creator revenue, and levels.vc, a fund whose disclosed investments include Cursor, a coding tool he may discuss. He does not sell courses or run affiliate links that we found. His verdicts on services are verdicts on things he stopped paying for, which is the most honest kind, and his enthusiasm for any particular AI vendor should be read knowing which ones he uses and which he has invested in.

Not for you if

You will not write or run code, and do not have someone who will. His answer to almost every tool question is to build it; the audit that precedes the answer is for everyone, the answer itself is for builders. Alston Antony and Mo Bitar cover the buy side.

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Part of The Pareto 20, twenty creators who get a solo operator most of the way on AI decisions. How we chose them. Facts above were checked against the creator's own pages on September 12, 2026.