Background
Last year, when NocoBase 1.0 was released, we published an article titled “How much revenue can an unknown open-source project get” sharing what we had earned over the previous 12 months.
Another year has passed. The world has changed dramatically - ChatGPT became a household name, DeepSeek pushed costs to almost nothing, and Cursor and Claude are in a fierce race. The whole world is talking about AI, as if it’s ready to take over everything. Stock markets have surged to historic highs on that belief.
Amid this wave of enthusiasm, NocoBase has remained quietly focused on its original mission - building a “no-code platform”.
While continuously improving our 1.X versions, we often get asked:
“Now that AI can write code so well, does your kind of product still make sense?”
Where We Stand
It’s been more than four years since our first commit on GitHub. We’ve just started the third stage of our two-year roadmap. Over the past 12 months, our team grew from 10 to 14 people.
We still have no sales team, and we still haven’t spent a single dollar on marketing. There has been almost no media coverage. Apart from some basic SEO, every bit of our effort has gone into product development.
Here’s where we stand today. Compared with last year, NocoBase has grown steadily - not explosively, but meaningfully. Compared with AI projects pulling in hundreds of thousands of GitHub stars, calling NocoBase a product from a bygone era wouldn’t be much of a stretch.
- GitHub Stars: 17K
- Contributors: 94
- NPM package downloads in the past 12 months: 240K
- Docker image pulls in the past 12 months: 250K
- Git clones: 1.5K per day
Revenue
In the past 12 months, we received orders from more than 400 companies across 57 countries, with total revenue reaching 1.45 million USD (converted at current exchange rates).
Top 20 countries by number of commercial customers:
- China
- United States
- Brazil
- Japan
- Germany
- Vietnam
- Indonesia
- Russia
- France
- India
- United Kingdom
- Italy
- Malaysia
- United Arab Emirates
- Turkey
- South Korea
- Switzerland
- Poland
- Portugal
- Australia
Top 20 countries by total revenue:
- China
- United States
- Japan
- Russia
- Vietnam
- United Kingdom
- India
- Vanuatu
- Poland
- Malaysia
- Brazil
- Indonesia
- Germany
- France
- Turkey
- Thailand
- Netherlands
- Tunisia
- Kazakhstan
- Colombia
Compared with the previous period, our paying users now include many large enterprises. Global brands in traditional and new-energy vehicles, smartphones, chip design and manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and medical devices, consumer drones, renewable energy, consulting, advertising, banking, and higher education - NocoBase has quietly entered all of these sectors.
The Life We’re Living
In early 2024, a few months before the release of NocoBase 1.0, I felt it was time to bring in someone to handle marketing.
To be honest, I wasn’t sure what kind of person we needed. Our product is highly technical, and our users are all from technical backgrounds. People with both technical depth and international marketing experience rarely choose to work for small open source projects like ours.
Then I came across Lijia’s profile. An energetic, outdoors-loving girl with a bright smile and white teeth - and I knew right away she was the right one.
She had never worked in tech, never used a no-code platform, and never done global marketing. But within a few months, she was ready. When we launched 1.0, NocoBase reached the GitHub Trending Top 10 for several consecutive days and #2 on Product Hunt.
Over the following year or so, website traffic increased fivefold, GitHub stars rose from 5.7K to 17K, and revenue quadrupled.
None of this came from all-nighters or burnout.
Lijia spends dozens of hours every week in the gym, on the badminton court, or hiking at altitudes above 4,000 meters. One month she might be writing copy in a café in a small European town; the next, holding a morning meeting at the foot of Mount Fuji. This freedom of work and life keeps her energy and happiness high - and that shows in her work.
Just last week, she single-handedly prepared everything for the NocoBase 2.0 launch, edited dozens of product videos, and arranged a week-long tropical retreat for the entire team.
As for me - I’m a husband and father of two elementary-school-aged children. My wife and I have been together since university. She has a passion for life, and almost every morning and evening, our family sits down together for home-cooked meals. Our kids get to enjoy their mother’s cooking every day. We also have a cat, a bird, and a large tank full of fish and shrimp.
Weekends are family days - hiking, cycling, camping, playing soccer, or wading into rivers to catch small fish and shrimp for the aquarium.
Every year, we spend about three months traveling - across different countries, cities, forests, grasslands, deserts, and seas. Since they were born, the kids have experienced more than 150,000 kilometers of road trips. They can recognize many plants and animals, and most crops - rice, wheat, corn, potatoes, soybeans, and fruit trees. We’ve planted, cared for, and harvested vegetables and fruits with our own hands. Whether at the dinner table or on the road, we have long conversations - about school, books, their thoughts, and sometimes about our products, team, and customers. They love reading, play sports, eat everything, and solve problems calmly.
Including NocoBase, I run three companies in different fields. But this doesn’t drain me - it gives me more time with my family. Together, we’ve built a life that keeps getting better.
Being with my children gives me endless inspiration and reflection on both work and life. Like Lijia, I keep my energy and happiness at a high level. I’m in work mode almost all year round - even when traveling or waking up at night - yet I never feel tired, only deeply connected to what we’re creating.
Several members of the NocoBase team are also fathers. Some go camping and fishing every week; others always travel with their laptops because developing NocoBase is their favorite hobby.
Over the past year, two teammates got married, two welcomed babies, and two bought new cars. Behind NocoBase are a dozen ordinary lives - Although we live in different cities and even different time zones, we organize a team gathering and trip every six months. Everyone, without exception, brings incredible energy — and it’s this energy that flows into NocoBase, making it a little better every single day.
Will AI Kill NocoBase?
That’s the question I’ve been asked most often lately - and perhaps the real theme of this article.
As an ordinary person, I can’t predict whether AI will reshape humanity or burst like a bubble one day. But I can share our experience.
Before version 2.0, NocoBase 1.X had nothing to do with AI at the product level. Yet in practice, our team has long benefited from it - for writing documents, coding, fixing bugs, translating, and reviewing contracts. GPT, Gemini, Claude, and others have been our daily assistants.
Through frequent use, we’ve come to understand both the power and the limits of AI. Based on that understanding, we began designing and developing NocoBase 2.0 six months ago.
Compared with 1.X, version 2.0 introduces many refactors and new features - most notably two things: adding AI Employees, and restructuring core modules to support them.
We use NocoBase to build our own CRM and customer service system, serving hundreds of companies across dozens of countries. During the 1.X period, we ran into two recurring problems.
Problem 1: We used the Email Manager plugin to sync Gmail into our CRM, so every customer record displayed the full email history. But when conversations span months and dozens of messages, reviewing them to understand a customer’s tone or intent took too much time.
Problem 2: We often receive inquiries from unfamiliar companies in different countries. Before replying, we want to know who they are - what they do, their size, and which edition might fit them.
Before AI, we manually copied email content into Google to search for background information. When AI gained web access, we started pasting emails into ChatGPT to get background summaries - more efficient, but still disconnected from our CRM.
Now, in NocoBase 2.0, we have an AI Employee named Ellis right next to the email list.
When I open a customer record and want to know how my teammates have communicated with them - their satisfaction, interest in paid plans, and so on - I just click to summon Ellis. She automatically reads all related emails, summarizes the key points, and presents the insights - no typing, no copy-paste, no switching windows.
Next to each lead, another AI Employee, Vera, gathers background information. She reads the lead’s data - email domain, content, and signature - searches the web for relevant company and contact info, compiles a background report, and fills it into the CRM automatically. Again, no manual input or switching needed.
Orin builds data models. Vix analyzes data insights. Lexi translates across languages. Nathan writes frontend code.
Each AI Employee works directly inside our system, understanding context from data and UI, calling tools and workflows automatically. They’re not flashy “AI Agents” that promise to build an entire business system from a few prompts. They’re more like specialized, dependable coworkers - with defined skills and boundaries, working tirelessly wherever they’re needed.
So, will AI kill NocoBase?
If AI ever becomes powerful enough to kill NocoBase, it won’t stop there - it would change life itself, in ways far more serious than one project disappearing. If it doesn’t, then the stronger AI becomes, the more NocoBase will benefit.
Enterprises don’t ultimately need “AI,” “BI,” or “CI,” nor do they care how many lines of code are written. They need systems that keep operations running smoothly, reduce costs, and increase profits.
In business systems, code may account for only one-third of the real work. The rest - understanding, planning, communication, implementation, iteration - still relies on humans.
With today’s AI, achieving full, reliable automation remains extremely difficult, and demands very capable users.
NocoBase aims to be the framework where humans and AI collaborate - providing the infrastructure they both need, while defining clear boundaries so AI can assist reliably within them.
What’s Next
For a small team like ours, being alive in this era of AI is a great stroke of luck - just as the iPhone once ushered in the smartphone age, unlocking unprecedented opportunities for developers worldwide. Today, while major players and startups with vast resources create dazzling AI products, they also leave behind plenty of open space - room for small, focused teams like ours to thrive.
We’ll keep focusing on real, practical problems - helping AI employees blend naturally into enterprise workflows, solving one real problem at a time.
Right now, AI accounts for less than 10% of what NocoBase 2.0 can do.
Over the coming year, we hope to keep raising that percentage.
When it reaches 50%, that may be the moment we release NocoBase 3.0.
The Finale
We’re ready. It’s time to officially introduce NocoBase 2.0 - and invite you to meet your AI Employees.