German coder's useless app in 3 hours earns him millions

29-year-old German developer Jonathan Wilke built the site Outbid.lol in his spare time — a bare-bones leaderboard of companies where ranking is determined purely by how much you pay. The project, conceived as an experiment that was supposed to cost a couple of dollars, has already earned him around $250,000 (roughly 5.3 million crowns).

The idea came about by accident: while Wilke was making dinner, his AI coding assistant Cursor put together a simple site in a couple of hours — a leaderboard tied to a payment service. Companies compete for the top spots in the ranking, and whoever is willing to pay more wins. No likes, reviews or recommendation algorithms — just the size of the payment.

Just two days after launch, Wilke's account had an extra $132,000 (about 2.8 million crowns) in it. The turning point came when the project Trycomp.ai paid $10,000 (roughly 210,000 crowns) just to sit at the top of the list. The absurdity of that deal sparked a storm of discussion on social media, and Outbid.lol turned into a viral sensation.

The minimum price to appear in the ranking is now $10, and to overtake the leader you need to bid at least $5 more. Fighting for first place right now are the platform see.io (a vibe-coding service for quickly generating websites and apps) with $17,001, and the marketplace Tutti, which connects brands with influencers, with $16,000.

This isn't Wilke's first online business — he has worked as a freelance programmer since age 16 and previously earned most of his money from Supastarter, a developer template that brought in about $10,000 a month. When sales started to slow down, he looked for extra income and found inspiration in the site TrustMRR, where companies pay for the right to publicly display their profits — and came up with his own, even simpler version of that game on brands' vanity.