How fly.pieter.com reached $30,000 a month with AI
Originally posted on LinkedIn, March 4, 2025.
Pieter Levels created fly.pieter.com, a simple flight simulator that anyone can play in a browser. In less than a month, it became a hit and started generating tens of thousands of dollars.
Levels is a talented developer, but what happened here is still unusual. He built a complete multiplayer flight simulator in Python, almost without writing a single line of code. Cursor AI handled the development, while Grok 3 handled the WebSocket server. Working alone, he quickly created a game where people could fly with other players in real time.
Once a huge number of players joined, he started making money from it:
- Advertising space, including balloons with company logos, the moon, and planets
- Airplanes sold as player skins
- Virtual ad space sold to large advertisers
He later reported that revenue had passed $30,000 per month after selling Jupiter to SoftgenAI.
I would not call this an exit in the usual sense. But relative to the time and investment involved, it is hard to ignore. A simple game built with AI tools turned into a meaningful business in less than a month.
The model reminds me of the Million Dollar Homepage. When the internet was still young, a student looking for a way to pay for his studies created a website with one million pixels and sold each pixel for $1. The site received international coverage, quickly sold every pixel, and gave buyers a chance to own a piece of internet history.
The same dynamic is at work with Levels' flight simulator. Enter a new trend early, and you can get enormous exposure with little effort. There are countless AI companies and no clear market leader. Google cannot index them fast enough, which gives those companies a chance to stand out through relatively cheap virtual advertising.
The pixel website has returned as a flight simulator. When a market is just getting started, there are more opportunities to enter early and become the first product to capture its audience.
