Anthropic's S-1: $16.3B in six months
Anthropic filed to go public and founders read the filing as a scoreboard: 900% net revenue retention, where a good SaaS brags about 120%. Meanwhile levelsio told everyone running software to buy Big AI stock instead.
Real money
Marc Lou says MailCheap hit four-figure MRR in 10 days
Marc Lou says MailCheap is in the four-figure MRR club ten days after going on sale. For contrast he says DataFast took three months to reach $1K MRR, making the newsletter tool nine times faster off the line. He said earlier in the week that DataFast needed eight months to clear $3K MRR and has since plateaued around $30K MRR on roughly 220M page views a month.
It's a great reminder that building a SaaS is hard and takes time.
Anthropic files S-1, founders read 900% revenue retention
Anthropic filed an S-1 with the SEC and founders went straight to the figures. Dan Shipper reads revenue up 1,300% year over year in the first half of 2026, 85% gross margin, 900% revenue retention, GAAP operating profitable, and 80% of revenue from models shipped in the last six months.
Good SaaS companies brag about 120%.
Stolen playbooks
Steinberger moved a frontend off Lit in about 600 agent PRs
Peter Steinberger says an agent loop he started two weeks earlier moved OpenClaw's Lit frontend to Solid 2.0, taking about six days to remove Lit and another week to make the patterns idiomatic. Astra did the planning, Sol 6.1 did the coding, and a second agent challenged the first to keep it on track; he checked in every other day.
I found that the workflow of prompting Astra to run codex cli in worktrees works FAR better than relying on subagents.
What changed under us
levelsio pulled every site offline to wait out a PHP patch
levelsio says he disconnected all his sites and VPS servers from the web ahead of a PHP patch landing at 2 PM UTC, telling anyone running PHP to do the same. Everything went back up once Ubuntu shipped the backported fix, which he says came fast.
A new era of cybersecurity has begun
Founder fights
levelsio tells software founders to buy Big Tech stock instead
Jack Ellis said someone clones Beehiv for being too expensive, then gets cloned, then that gets released for free, and he can't stop laughing about it. levelsio agreed and went further, saying only Big AI and Big Tech win and the rest of software is a race to the bottom, so become a co-owner and live off dividends.
It's a race to the bottom for anyone else in software
Frequently asked questions
How fast did MailCheap reach $1,000 monthly recurring revenue?
MailCheap hit four-figure MRR in ten days after launch, compared to Marc Lou's previous product DataFast which took three months to reach the same milestone.
What are Anthropic's key financial metrics?
Anthropic reported 1,300% revenue growth year over year in the first half of 2026, 85% gross margin, 900% revenue retention (meaning customers increased spending), and is GAAP operating profitable (making a profit under standard accounting rules).
How long did it take to rewrite a frontend from Lit to Solid 2.0 using AI agents?
An agent loop completed the migration in about two weeks total, with roughly six days to remove Lit and another week to rewrite the code in idiomatic patterns.
Why did levelsio take his websites offline?
He disconnected all his sites ahead of a PHP security patch landing at a specific time, as a precautionary measure to protect against potential vulnerabilities.
What did levelsio say about profitability in the software business?
He argued that only major AI and Big Tech companies can win profitably, and that the rest of the software market is experiencing a race to the bottom with downward pricing pressure.