Nomad List — from $500/month to $38K/month over 11 years: the longest-running "community subscription" case

Yen conversions in this article use a rough $1 = ¥150.

If you go looking for “the longest-surviving publicly documented recurring-revenue business built by an indie developer,” you’ll almost always land on this one. Nomad List, a city database plus community for digital nomads, started at $500/month in 2014 and, by the 2025 disclosed figure, reached $38,000/month (about ¥5.7 million) 11 years later. And even so, within the portfolio of its operator, Pieter Levels (Dutch), it still isn’t the lead product. The source, PPC Land, catalogs Levels’s per-product public revenue figures, and this piece uses that to break down “why does community subscription revenue last 11 years?” by comparing it against his other products.

The numbers, first

Going from $500 to $38,000 is a 76x increase, roughly 50% compound annual growth by simple math. But as we’ll see, this curve looks less like “steady growth” and more like “compounding as the result of not dying.”

The tool pulls people in; the community keeps them

Nomad List is a service that lets you compare cities on cost of living, internet speed, safety, and more, to answer “where should a remote worker live?” Paying members also get access to a Slack/Discord community. It’s a two-layer structure: an open-to-anyone city database on the front, a closed members-only space on the back.

The division of labor is clear. The tool (city data) works as the mechanism that pulls in new users via search and social. The community retains them by delivering something no feature can substitute, the desire to connect with people like yourself. While single-function tools grow stale within a few years, the community’s bond has proven resilient against economic swings, in contrast to how the same operator’s RemoteOK swung wildly. With just one half or the other, you’re missing either acquisition or retention.

Initial acquisition ran on Levels’s own life rather than on advertising. He built it while traveling as a nomad himself, and his own build-in-public output was itself exposure to the exact target audience. Being “a member of the lifestyle himself” simultaneously handled both the precision of the tool’s specs and the acquisition channel.

How to read the $500/month starting point

Read in isolation, the $500/month at 2014 launch looks like “failure.” But it’s another real-world example, like Plausible’s $400 MRR at day 324, of how a recurring-revenue business’s first year doesn’t predict the future. Eleven years of compounding built the $38K. If it had been folded at the initial pace, this number wouldn’t exist.

The position shifts once you view it within the portfolio

The source catalogs 2025 public revenue figures across Levels’s own products:

PhotoAI, riding the generative-AI boom, hit $132K in two years, while the job board RemoteOK dropped to one-fourteenth of its pandemic-era peak of $140K, down to $10K, before recovering. In that mix, Nomad List neither spikes nor collapses. It’s “quietly thick,” built up over 11 years to $38K. What makes this source interesting is watching, within one person’s portfolio, a controlled-experiment-style contrast between the type that spikes on a boom and the type that builds on member commitment.

Levels has built more than 70 projects and states publicly: “Only 4 became profitable and grew. Over 95% failed.” Nomad List is the oldest of those four survivors.

The “data freshness” and automation behind 11 years

A city database starts decaying the instant it’s built, prices, internet speeds, and visa requirements all keep changing. Nomad List’s longevity is underpinned by a design where the community itself handles the data updates: members add and rate information about the places they stay, which in turn attracts the next member, creating a loop where the data stays fresh even with a single operator.

Automation on the operations side is on record too. Levels runs with no VC funding and a policy of “do everything myself,” using Google Vision and GPT-4 for content moderation instead of hiring people. Running with zero employees for 11 years is the result of a system, not of willpower.

Billing design: don’t fight churn

Another pillar is the billing design. A long-term, near-one-time-purchase membership requires less churn-management overhead than monthly billing, and it fits well with solo operation. By tilting toward “get a big commitment up front” rather than “prevent monthly cancellations,” support costs stay minimal. It runs opposite to the standard playbook of continuously layering on churn-reduction tactics for monthly subscriptions, a read that prioritizes, above all, being able to keep running it solo.

What to discount

• Revenue is self-reported (his own public figure), with no third-party audit — the same caveat that applies to overseas revenue-disclosure cases in general
• Survivorship bias runs deep. 4 out of 70 — by his own account, over 90% died even with the same person using the same approach. Before the cleverness of Nomad List’s design comes sheer number of attempts
• Dependence on the nomad market itself doesn’t go away. Just as the same operator’s RemoteOK fell from $140K to $10K during the pandemic, an entire market freezing over is a scenario that can hit a community-based business too
• In 2014, “city database” was a blank space, which is how it captured search real estate. That same open seat isn’t necessarily available today

The $38K Was Drawn From the English-Speaking Nomad Population

Where the online salon ceiling cases gather people with an audience the host already had and retain them through community, Nomad List takes the search surface with a tool anyone can use (city data) and retains members in a space only they can enter. For an individual without an audience heading toward paid community, what these eleven years of records show is the order: tool first, community second.

The $38K, however, is a figure earned against the English-speaking nomad population. Building the same two-layer structure in Japanese would most naturally hit a lower ceiling. And given that the search surface was there to take in 2014 because “city databases” were empty territory, the dividing line in Japan is whether one can choose a database that exists only in Japanese, not whether one can recreate Nomad List in Japanese.

Related cases

• PhotoAI — the current flagship of the same operator’s portfolio
• RemoteOK — the same operator’s job board, a record of revenue swings