Trends Podcast

Its code is free, yet the app Postiz makes over three hundred thousand dollars a month.

On New Year's Day, Postiz made about seventeen K in monthly revenue. Its founder, Nevo David, hoped to end the year near thirty K. This week TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue straight from a founder's payment account, showed almost eleven times that.

Postiz schedules posts to X, LinkedIn, Instagram and dozens of other networks. Anyone can download its code from GitHub and run it free on a server they rent.

This week's Trends dot V C report studied fifty-nine apps like this: free, open-source rebuilds of software people pay for.

Before Postiz, Nevo grew open-source projects for a living. He helped grow an open-source startup called Novu to thirty thousand GitHub stars. Then he ran a consultancy teaching open-source companies how to grow. It paid him about twelve K a month.

His first product flopped anyway.

He built a tool called Gitroom for open-source projects planning a launch week. He posted it on Reddit's self-hosting forum and the comments tore it apart. One person told him he was deaf to his market. Another wrote "please stop."

So he kept the code, renamed it Postiz and posted it again as a free alternative to Buffer and Hootsuite. Same code, same features, same forum.

This time the comments asked how to install it.

The title changed and the code stayed the same. Strangers went from telling him to stop to asking for a copy.

That free download is how people find him.

On April fourth, at seventy-seven K a month, he wrote: "People think an app can't make money because it's open-source. Postiz makes money because it's open-source."

The free version is the advertisement. Running it yourself means renting a server, installing updates and fixing posts that break each time a network changes its rules.

A creator with five accounts pays Postiz twenty-nine dollars a month to skip all of that.

So Nevo spent his time making the hosted version reliable. Late in twenty twenty-five he stopped adding features for a month or two. He rebuilt each part of the app to post faster and fail less, because a scheduler that drops a post loses the customer who trusted it.

By March, Postiz was past fifty K a month.

On March eleventh, at fifty-five K a month, Nevo told other founders to build for AI agents. His words were "less U I, more C L I and M C P." M C P is a connector that lets an AI assistant like Claude or ChatGPT use an app for you.

Nevo stopped building for the person clicking buttons. He started building for the assistant doing the clicking.

A founder types one line to Claude: schedule this week's posts. Claude does it through Postiz.

The founder never opens the dashboard.

Each Postiz plan now includes an M C P server. In October he added official connectors for Claude and ChatGPT.

Postiz made twenty-one K a month in February. On June eighth it hit a hundred and twenty K. Nevo wrote that he never imagined his app could grow that much in four months.

He called selling to agents the biggest opportunity of twenty twenty-six.

In August, Postiz brought in a hundred and eighty-two K. In September Nevo wrote that he now earned in one week what used to take him more than two months to earn. On October fifteenth Postiz had more than eight thousand customers.

On the night of October twenty-first, a breach hit Railway, the company that hosts Postiz's servers. Nevo got emails from Anthropic and Stripe saying his keys were compromised.

He took Postiz offline and spent the night rotating one hundred forty keys, with Claude writing the tool that tracked them. He sat in the kitchen of an Airbnb until morning.

Postiz was down for seventeen hours.

Its revenue went up overnight, from three hundred K a month to three hundred and three K.

Five days later, Nevo asked people to build Postiz alternatives and launch them.

Each launch tags him and sends more people his way. He even pointed at an open-source repository they could start from.

When we mapped this market for Trends dot V C, the free rebuilds that made money changed the price or the user of the tool they copied.

Postiz changed the user.

A solo founder plans her week's work in Claude: the posts, the newsletter, the follow-ups. Each of those jobs lives in a different app with a separate login and dashboard. Since the other choice is opening each app and doing the work by hand, she'll pay for the app her assistant can run.

Pick a kind of software people pay for each month, like scheduling, email or analytics. Put the code on GitHub for free, so people can find it and trust it.

Then add an M C P server, so an AI assistant can run it end to end. Sell the hosted version to the people who'd rather type one sentence to Claude than open a dashboard for each job.

TryPost and Postbase sell posting that an AI assistant runs.

TryPost charges a flat nineteen dollars a month and lets Claude or Cursor post for you. Postbase charges twenty-nine dollars a month for five channels, with an M C P server on each plan.

Free code brought Postiz its users. Selling to their AI assistants brought it over three hundred K a month.

Nevo says selling to AI assistants grew Postiz more than fifteen times in eight months. Visit trends dot V C and join more than fifty thousand founders to get the next opportunity.