Base44: $10,000 side project to $80m Wix sale in six months

Maor Shlomo started Base44 in January 2025 as a side project, after reserve duty with the Israeli Intelligence Corps. He was 31.

He put in roughly $10,000 to $20,000 of his own money, most of it spent on bills for large language model APIs. There were no investors and no co-founder. He owned the company outright.

Base44 takes a plain-language description of an app and builds the working thing: interface, database, user logins and hosting. The bet was that the backend was the barrier, so the product would own the infrastructure and the user would never see a server or an API key.

The target was never a developer. It was the operator or small business owner who wanted a CRM, a client portal or a booking tool and had no way to build one.

Growth came from users showing what they had made, according to SaaStr's account. The product did the marketing.

The numbers, as reported by SaaStr: $1m ARR and 10,000 users within three weeks of launch. Around 250,000 users and about $3.5m ARR by the time Wix came calling, roughly six months in. May 2025 produced $189,000 of profit, its best month before the sale — the company was profitable, not burning.

Wix paid $80m in cash in June 2025, plus earn-outs running to 2029. The team at that point was eight people, and about $25m of the price was set aside to retain them. SaaStr reports that milestone payments have already pushed Shlomo's total proceeds above $150m.

Wix was not buying $3.5m of ARR. It was buying a product for the 250 million users it already had, and tying the founder in until 2029.

The run-rate inside Wix, on SaaStr's figures: roughly $50m ARR by the end of 2025, $100m by March 2026, $150m by May, and a reported $200m by August 2026, with about 2 million users. Wix ran a Base44 advertisement in the Super Bowl in February 2026. In June 2026 the company launched Base1, its own model for app building, trained on tens of millions of user interactions. Customers reportedly include eToro and Similarweb.

Pricing is deliberately low. There is a free tier, then plans at $16, $40, $80 and $160 a month billed annually, run on a credit system. Code export starts at the $40 Builder plan.

The limits are the category's. Complex custom products outgrow these tools, credit costs can surprise heavy users, and researchers have flagged security vulnerabilities across AI builders including Base44's stack, since patched. Anything built on it now sits on Wix's platform.

For a founder, the useful part is not "raise nothing". It is the sequence: a product cheap enough to build alone, priced to sell itself, then sold to the company that already owned the audience. Shlomo kept 100% of the equity until the day he had proof, which is why an $80m cheque and an earn-out to 2029 were his to negotiate.

More: Base44 · its published plans