The state of AI businesses, October 2026

1. The typical AI business is small

Of 202 listed businesses, 148 have a verified MRR figure (read from a payment provider or a public revenue dashboard). Their median is $2,920 a month; the mean is $8,320, pulled up by a few large earners. The middle half sits between $639 and $11,486. The top 10 earn 36% of the combined verified MRR.

Bars: number of businesses. Method: verified MRR = latest tier-A MRR in USD for listings not excluded from totals (overlaps and fundraisers excluded). Founder-reported MRR ($192,433 across 6 listings) is left out of every number on this page unless stated.

2. MRR by category

Median verified MRR for categories with at least 3 verified businesses.

Method: our category label per listing; median of verified MRR. Small categories are noisy. Browse the full board by category.

3. Which payment providers they use

Share of the 160 listings whose headline figure is read from a payment-provider API. Stripe dominates; RevenueCat is the mobile-app default.

Verified MRR by provider: Stripe $906,813 · RevenueCat $96,927 · Dodo Payments $38,130 · Polar $2,376 · Lemon Squeezy $2,257.

Method: the provider named in the listing's provider-synced source (one per listing; listings connecting two count the first named). Baremetrics is an analytics layer that itself reads Stripe. 4 more listings publish their own public revenue dashboard. This reflects which providers verification services can connect to, so it is not a market share of all AI startups.

4. What they're built with

Most common technologies among the 91 listings where we could detect a stack.

Method: technologies detected from each site's public HTML and headers, plus any stack the founder published. Detection misses back-end tools, so shares are lower bounds. See built with.

5. Solo founders vs teams

Only 36 verified businesses publish a team size, so treat this as a small sample. In it, solo businesses have a median of $3,720 versus $17,835 for teams.

Method: team size as published by the founder or company (about pages, profiles, founder posts); revenue per team member = verified MRR ÷ team size.

6. Growth leaders, Aug 2026 → Sep 2026

55 of 113 businesses with at least $1,000 of revenue in Aug 2026 grew in Sep 2026. The biggest gains in dollars:

Method: complete calendar-month revenue from payment-provider syncs only. Revenue, not MRR, so one-off sales count. All movers →

7. How fast they reach $10K a month

40 businesses have verified MRR of $10K or more. For 30 of them we can see the month their payment-provider revenue first crossed $10K, and they also list a founding month:

Median: 10 months from founding to the first $10K month.

Method: the first complete month at or above $10,000 in provider revenue, counted only when the calendar month before it is also in the data and below $10,000 (so the crossing is observed, not assumed). Founding months are mostly founder-entered on their verification profile. Provider history covers about 12 months, so older businesses that crossed earlier are not in this table.

8. Where they are, and who runs them

Country is known for 132 listings.

Of 35 businesses with a public funding status, 33 are bootstrapped and 2 are VC-backed. 14 listings are ⚡ run day to day by AI agents; most are experiments with small revenue.

Method: country as listed on the founder's verification profile or company site. Funding counts only public statements or announcements; no funding databases.

About this data

RunsBy.ai lists AI businesses that publish revenue. That is a self-selected group: founders who share numbers, mostly on X and through verification services. It is not a random sample of AI startups. Figures are dated; this page rebuilds with the site. Cite as “RunsBy.ai, The state of AI businesses, October 2026”, linking to this page. How we verify →