To $1M a year with one-page sites

Before Carrd, AJ was already making money from website design. On HTML5 UP he gave away free website templates, and on Pixelarity he sold paid templates. Years of template work taught him which designs people liked and what they struggled with when making a site. Carrd was his next business, built on that production experience and customer understanding.

In 2015, while planning a new project, AJ noticed his own one-page templates. Simple profile designs such as Aerial and Identity were popular. He imagined a tool for building those pages directly in the browser. It started with a focus on personal profiles, then widened into a tool for many kinds of one-page sites.

Nobody had to sign up before trying Carrd. Visitors picked a design, edited the content, and only created an account when publishing. That order cut the time spent judging the product from descriptions and let people decide after seeing their own result.

Development ran through 2015. By mid-year AJ had the early site-generation structure, and by the end of the year friends received a private test version. Private and public betas followed in early 2016. His template skills carried over, but letting users edit and publish themselves still needed its own development time.

The work-in-progress site sat at the center of the editor. Selecting text or an image opened a property panel, and new elements came from a toolbar. Users edited what they saw without wandering through layered menus. Working while looking at the finished page also taught the product itself.

Publishing stayed simple inside. JSON page settings plus files such as images turned into static HTML and CSS. Nothing had to be reassembled on every visit. Serving generated files kept operating costs down and later made hosting moves easier.

After the core product worked, AJ set the paid plan. Pro launched at $19 per year as a single paid product, not tiers. He priced it low to match a one-page-site scope and chose yearly billing so users would not add one more monthly subscription.

Free and paid split on how seriously someone used a site. Publishing a simple profile worked fine for free. Connecting a custom domain, taking inquiries or signups, and removing the Carrd mark needed paid features. The basic building experience came first, and the reason to pay arrived at the brand-or-business stage.

On March 7, 2016, AJ launched Carrd on Twitter. The first users came from followers who knew his template work. On March 16 Product Hunt featured it, with over 1,000 upvotes and the top tech product of the day. That exposure brought thousands of users and hundreds of paid upgrades.

Cumulative revenue passed $1,000 around the Product Hunt feature. Reaching $10,000 took several more months. AJ answered incoming feedback actively and kept fixing the product. After the launch spike, ordinary operation began: take user reactions and improve.

The ‘Made with Carrd’ link under free sites became the next-user channel. When someone saw a published page and built their own site with the same tool, one more page advertised Carrd. In a 2018 interview AJ said he had focused on product development over separate marketing, and that free use plus word of mouth helped acquisition. A structure where free users kept publishing public results supported that approach.

In a March 2019 Indie Hackers interview, AJ put Carrd’s monthly revenue at about $30,000. Around 20,000 people joined each month and over 40,000 sites were created. Even with low yearly pricing, accumulated users and paying customers produced substantial revenue.

Growth also tested the one-page scope. Repeated requests for a separate contact page led AJ to add sections shown inside one page. Users could switch sections through links or buttons and compose something like multiple pages. It kept the existing structure while covering uses such as separating an intro from contact details.

In 2020 users surged through unexpected paths. People moving work or livelihoods online built sites during the pandemic, and activists used Carrd around protests in the United States. Kim Kardashian sharing a Carrd-made site on Twitter pushed traffic much higher. User groups the developer had never chased widened the product’s uses.

Rapid growth strained server operations. Infrastructure AJ thought would last years struggled with the new growth rate, and he judged it would hit its limit around April 2021. Beyond building features, he had to keep countless published sites stable.

Splitting operations mattered too. In roles AJ disclosed in 2021, he handled development and product while co-founder Doni handled operations and general customer support. AJ took technical inquiries such as code problems. That structure reduced the burden of one developer handling every inquiry end to end while product work continued.

In 2021 Carrd raised $2M in a round led by Rainfall Ventures. The business was already profitable; what the two needed was the experience and network of people who had operated growing services. Incorporation, hiring, and content problems around user uploads kept growing. AJ aligned expectations on product direction with investors while securing relationships for those questions.

Connections from the round brought help from AWS engineers on infrastructure. On April 6, 2021, about 2 million live user sites moved to AWS. The work kept already-published sites reachable while replacing the foundation, and he called it the tensest moment in Carrd’s operation. A publishing tool built alone years earlier now carried millions of sites.

On April 30, AJ disclosed that Carrd had passed $1M in annual recurring revenue. Users stood near 1.6 million and cumulative created sites near 2.5 million. Two people reached that scale: AJ on development and product, Doni on operations.

As of September 2026, Carrd’s Pro Standard price is still $19 per year, covering 10 sites on that plan. Users needing more sites or advanced features buy higher plans with larger site limits. AJ kept the scope of making and maintaining one-page sites quickly, while connecting growing usage and business needs to extra revenue. Keeping the low base price while expanding the business remains in the product.