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Vibe-coding platform · 2025
A six-month-old, bootstrapped vibe-coding platform sold to Wix for $80M in cash
Maor Shlomo grew Base44 on LinkedIn and X, reported $189K in profit for May 2025, and sold to Wix with a team of eight.
Evidence: HighTechCrunch confirms the price, cash terms and headcount with Wix. Profit and user numbers are the founder's.
$80Mcash price from Wix, 18 Jun 2025Confirmed to TechCrunch
$189Kprofit in May 2025Founder's posts
8employeesConfirmed by Wix
250Kusers in six monthsReported
At a glance
- Builder
- Maor Shlomo, 31, an Israeli developer who previously co-founded Explorium.
- Built with
- Anthropic's Claude via AWS, chosen mainly for cost-performance (per TechCrunch).
- Product
- Users describe an app in text and Base44 builds it with database, storage, authentication, analytics and integrations.
- Distribution
- Build-in-public on LinkedIn and X, word of mouth. Reported partnerships include eToro and Similarweb.
- Exit
- $80M cash; $25M of it is a retention pool for employees.
Timeline
- ~Dec 2024Starts as a side project; Shlomo calls it a "moonshot experiment". TechCrunch only says "six months old" in June 2025.
- May 2025Reports $189K profit after covering LLM token costs. Invited to demo at an AWS event in Tel Aviv.
- 18 Jun 2025Wix announces the acquisition for $80M in cash.
- Mar 2026Calcalist and Wix's Q4 2025 call: about $100M ARR nine months after the acquisition.
How it was built
- 1A prompt-to-app platform on top of Claude through AWS.
- 2The founder chose Claude over OpenAI models on cost-performance grounds.
- 3Roadmap included more enterprise-grade security.
Why it took off
- 1The founder posted his journey publicly and users shared it.
- 2A profitable product with high AI costs absorbed from day one.
- 3Reaching scale alone was hard, so selling brought resources and speed. Shlomo said the scale needed was not something they could grow into organically.
Be careful with
Read the numbers with these caveats.
- Shlomo was not truly solo: Wix confirmed eight employees.
- Retention-pool terms and vesting length were not disclosed.
- TechCrunch says the deal "wasn't a billion dollars".
- Later figures ($100M ARR, earnouts above $150M, $200M ARR in Aug 2026) are as reported by Calcalist and Globes.
§ EvidenceWhat the sources say
Confirmed by a source we read
- TechCrunch (18 Jun 2025, Julie Bort): $80M cash, eight employees, $25M retention pool.
- Globes (18 Jun 2025, Shiri Habib-Valdhorn): an initial $80M payment plus milestone payments in 2029, and no outside funding raised.
Reported figures
- $189K May profit, 10,000 users in three weeks, 250,000 users.
- Profitable already in March 2025 on a founder investment of NIS 30,000: Shlomo's own words to Geektime, relayed by Globes.
- $100M ARR nine months after the deal; earnouts totalling more than $150M.
Sources disagree
- TechCrunch mentions no earnout, while later reports describe large earnout payments.
- Other outlets cite 400,000+ users versus TechCrunch's 250,000.
- Headcount: TechCrunch, citing Wix, says eight employees. Globes says six, all hired the month before the deal.
§ Check it yourselfWith AdRadar
Don’t take the headline on faith. Watch Base44 yourself.
See what Base44 is doing in public: its ads, the pages they lead to, how its site changes and what people say about it.
Strong fit. Base44 competes for the same buyers as Lovable and other builders, and ad tracking was tried on both.
Reads the pages its active ads link to and flags headline, offer and price changes.
Track pricing and headline changes on the pages its ads link to.
Reads the public sitemap: new and updated pages, page types, publishing rhythm.
Follow its sitemap for new template, pricing and docs pages.
Collects Trustpilot reviews and Reddit mentions, and can summarise the complaints.
Read Trustpilot and Reddit for complaints about credits and generated-app quality.
You can repeat this.
The parts that do not depend on a famous founder.
- 1Document the build publicly and let early users share it.
- 2Reach profitability early and show the number.
- 3Pick one model provider on cost-performance and design pricing around token cost.
- 4Decide early whether you scale alone or sell.
Sources
- TechCrunch, 18 Jun 2025techcrunch.com
- Globes: Wix pays $38M earnout (cited, unread)en.globes.co.il
- Calcalist: Base44 coverage (cited, unread)www.calcalistech.com