Formula Bot revenue: AI Excel formulas built with no code

Formula Bot did not need a team, a funding round or a line of code. David Bressler built it on Bubble while working a full-time job, connected it to OpenAI, and posted a free version on Reddit. The post collected more than 10,000 upvotes. Within months of the paid launch it had $3.3K MRR and 1,600 paying users (founder-reported, No Code Exits). It is a small number next to the giants in this library, and that is the point: it shows how cheaply an AI idea can now be validated.

Why did David Bressler build Formula Bot?

Bressler saw how many people struggle to write spreadsheet formulas and how well GPT-3 translated plain English into them. Turning a sentence into a working formula was a narrow, obvious job. The pain is universal in office work: you know what you want the spreadsheet to do, but not the syntax to make it do it.

How does Formula Bot work?

A user types what they want in plain English, for example a calculation across columns, and the app returns a working formula using OpenAI for generation. It started with Excel formulas; later it was renamed Formula Bot and expanded to data analysis.

How was Formula Bot built?

It was built without code: Bubble for the app, OpenAI for generation, Stripe for payments, Sendinblue for email and Localize.js for translation. The first version took about a month, and he built it alone (founder-reported, No Code Exits). A rough free MVP went up in July 2022. About a month later he added sign-up and subscriptions, with the paid launch in September 2022.

How did Formula Bot market and price itself?

The MVP was shared on Reddit’s r/excel and r/InternetIsBeautiful, where it collected more than 10,000 upvotes. After that came a TikTok video that went viral, a Product Hunt launch, and creators who featured it without being paid. By November 2022 the site had 1.1M visitors (founder-reported, No Code Exits).

Pricing was a free tier with limited uses, then a low-priced monthly subscription.

What challenges did Formula Bot face?

API costs came first. Before the paywall launched, the viral traffic left him with what he called a hefty bill from OpenAI (founder-reported, Starter Story). A free tool that goes viral on Reddit is expensive when every request calls a paid model.

Durability is the second challenge. A single-purpose tool is easy to copy, which is part of why it later expanded to data analysis under the Formula Bot name.

How much revenue did Formula Bot make?

In November 2022 Formula Bot had $3.3K MRR (founder-reported, No Code Exits) and 1,600 paying users (founder-reported). It had made $22K between the September launch and November 2022 (founder-reported, No Code Exits). Later figures exist in secondary sources but are not dated well enough to use, so current MRR is not disclosed.

The timeline: a free MVP on Reddit in July 2022; the paid launch in September 2022; $3.3K MRR and 1.6K paying users in November 2022; later renamed and expanded.

Why did Formula Bot work?

A narrow job (“write my formula”) is easy to explain and share. The product description fits in a Reddit title.

No-code was enough to validate an AI product. The hard part, the model, was an API; the rest was standard web plumbing that Bubble handles.

Communities like Reddit can launch a product for free, when the product is genuinely useful to that community. Gamma shows the same office-pain logic at far larger scale, and SiteGPT another quick side project that launched through communities.

What can founders learn from Formula Bot?

A narrow job is easy to explain and share. Start with one task you can describe in a sentence.

No-code is enough to validate an AI product. Build the cheapest version that proves people pay.

Communities like Reddit can launch a product for free. And plan for API costs: a viral free tier can cost real money before revenue arrives.