How Repl.It 25x'ed ARR to $100m in <1year

And why it might be a better business than Cursor

When we talk of “vibe coding movement” success stories, Repl.It is not mentioned enough. Its CEO just announced its ARR grew from $4m/yr to $100m/yr since its mid 2024, when it launched Replit Agents - which is used by many as vercel v0 + cursor, but for building full stack.

So how did Repl.It pull this off?

When people think of “vibe coding” market, they treat it like it’s some one big monolith. But that’s wrong.

In reality, there’s many different customer personas within “vibe coding”, and one of the most profitable segment are the “learn to code” or “build a SaaS side hustle” audience, aka people who want to build apps but don’t know a darned thing (or care) about DevOps, deployment, migrations, etc. They don’t care if AI wrote all their backend, or where it’s deployed.

And Repl.It is the king of that world. Not Cursor. Repl.It spent 7 years (2016-2023) building a massive “learn to code” audience, especially education. It’s penetrated into 80%+ of CS departments and coding bootcamps in the U.S. It is NOT an overnight success story. It had plenty of gasoline fuel, and vibe coding was the match that lit the fire.

So in this post, I’ll cover Repl.It from a competitive lens..

• The exact product sequence that drove ACV expansion and user base growth

• The game Replit is playing—and why it’s nothing like Cursor’s

• The risk factors I see on Replit’s horizon, despite the momentum