Photopea: The Student Hobby That Became a Free Photoshop

Photopea is a free, browser-based image editor that opens Photoshop files. Ivan Kutskir started it in 2012 as a hobby while studying computer science in Prague. He worked on it for about 7,000 unpaid hours before it earned anything. He still runs it almost alone, and it now makes millions of dollars a year from ads.

The student with a game habit

Ivan Kutskir was born in Ukraine in 1990 and moved to the Czech Republic in 2002. In 2009 he moved to Prague to study computer science at Charles University.

Money during his bachelor’s degree came from small web games he built and filled with banner ads. They brought in between $100 and $400 a month, which was his main income as a student. That detail matters later: by the time Photopea needed a business model, he had been running ads on his own projects for years.

He was not short of ideas either. At one point he had around 20 projects going at once. Photopea was simply the one he enjoyed most, so it was the one he kept coming back to.

A PSD viewer, nothing more

In 2012 Kutskir set himself a narrow technical problem. He wanted a web page that could open a Photoshop file and let people switch its layers on and off, with no software to install.

That viewer went online in 2013. It was not a product and it had no plan behind it. In his own words on the Photopea blog, he was “just playing around.” He did not think a full image editor built by one person was realistic, and a web version of one seemed even less so.

He has also been clear that it was not coursework. When people later assumed Photopea started as a school assignment, he corrected them: it was a toy experiment he liked and kept improving in his free time.

What changed his mind was the response. People used the viewer, asked for more, and kept coming back. So he kept adding features: first editing, then filters, then support for more file formats. The viewer turned, slowly, into an editor.

7,000 hours before the first dollar

The slow part of this story is the part most people skip. Kutskir has said it took about 7,000 hours of work, roughly five hours a day for three and a half years, before Photopea made any money at all.

Those hours were fitted around his degree. He was not earning from Photopea, and he was not trying to. The project ran on the same terms as his games: free to use, built in spare time, kept alive because he liked working on it.

By the end of 2017, more than 2.5 million people had used the editor, spending a combined 120,000 hours in it. By then he had worked through around 400 bug reports and feature requests from users, and released several of the libraries he wrote along the way as open source.

From hobby to job

Kutskir graduated in 2016 and started working on Photopea full time. He has said it is the only job he has ever had.

He switched on ads in 2017. The first month brought in about $500. From there, both the user base and his income kept doubling roughly every six months. The next milestone he describes was earning what a software developer typically earns in the Czech Republic, around $5,000 a month. At that point the hobby had become a viable salary.

Ads were never a hard choice for him. He wanted the editor to stay free for people who could not afford Photoshop, and he already knew the model from his games. Users who prefer no ads can pay for a premium account, and companies can license Photopea to embed it in their own products.

Marketing that mostly failed

Photopea’s growth did not come from a launch plan. Most of what Kutskir tried to promote it did not work.

• Reddit and Hacker News: he posted about Photopea in relevant threads and under articles about Photoshop alternatives. By his count, around 90% of those posts were removed as self-promotion.
• YouTube: he asked YouTubers to review it. About 90% ignored him, and the rest asked for money he did not have.
• Product Hunt: a launch there brought no noticeable result.

What worked was slower and outside his control. People who found the editor wrote about it and made tutorials on their own. Because Photopea copies Photoshop’s layout and shortcuts, any Photoshop tutorial could be followed in it, and that made it easy to recommend.

The business today

In a 2021 interview with Failory, Kutskir put the numbers at about 10 million visits and 1.5 million hours of use a month. Ads earned around six cents per hour of use, which came to roughly $100,000 a month.

The costs were almost nothing. Photopea runs entirely in the user’s browser, with no database and no server-side code. Hosting cost about $50 a year and the domain $16.

Later reports on Indie Hackers put Photopea’s revenue at more than $3 million a year. In a 2025 interview he said about 90% of revenue comes from ads, with premium accounts and licensing making up the rest. He has since worked with a few other programmers, but still does most of the work himself.

What the Photopea story shows

• The side project ran on spare time, not on a plan. For years it competed with his studies and 20 other projects, and it survived because he enjoyed it.
• He already had a business model before he had a business. Running ads on student games taught him the model years before Photopea needed it.
• Patience did more than promotion. Most of his marketing failed. Steady improvement and word of mouth did the work instead.
• Low costs bought time. With almost no running costs, Photopea could stay free and unprofitable for years without anyone losing money.

More businesses like this one are in digital products that started as side projects, including Tailwind Labs and Font Awesome.

Sources

• Creating Photopea, Photopea Blog, December 2017
• Building a free photo editor and making $100k/mo as a solo founder, Failory, September 2021
• Ivan Kutskir’s Reddit AMA, archived on Best of AMA
• Photopea is a free Photoshop clone that works in web browser, DIY Photography
• Ukrainian single-handedly creates Photopea, AIN.UA, April 2021
• From passion project to global tool: the independent path of Ivan Kutskir, Siesta Labs
• Making $3M+ per year with a free product, Indie Hackers
• Ivan Kutskir, AI IDE List, summarising his May 2025 interview