I built the first version of Drawize back in late 2016 specifically for a Samsung Tizen OS app contest. I crunched and built the whole thing (including the real-time multiplayer engine) in under 4 weeks.
It didn’t win anything in the contest.
Since it was built with web tech anyway, I published it on the open web in early 2017 just to see what would happen. It started living its own life, and today — 8 years later — the database processed the 100,000,000th drawing.
On the busiest days it’s been 30k+ active users, and storing 100M drawings currently sits at ~3.16 TB.
The milestone moment: I was watching live logs today, terrified the 100Mth drawing would be NSFW. Luckily, the RNG gods smiled and it turned out to be a Red Balloon (You can see the 100Mth drawing here: https://www.drawize.com/blog/100-million-drawings-milestone)
Tech stack (boring but fast):
Backend: .NET + WebSockets (real-time sync)
Frontend: hand-coded HTML/JS + jQuery (no React, no bundlers)
Data: PostgreSQL & MongoDB
Storage: Wasabi Cloud (moved there to save on S3 costs)
Scaling as a solo dev: real-time lobbies + reconnection edge cases + moderation/content filtering. I use content classification models trained in 2021 to filter bad content, and the real-time multiplayer side is mostly highly optimized .NET code.
Happy to answer questions about the “failed” Tizen origin, real-time multiplayer on the web, moderation, or how .NET handles the load.
barbegal•3h ago
Does it generate enough revenue to be self sustaining?
lombarovic•3h ago
Yes, it is fully self-sustaining. In fact, for the last 5 years, it has been my main full-time source of income, running entirely as a bootstrapped project from Croatia.
The revenue comes primarily from ads, plus a smaller portion from Premium ad-free subscriptions. Since I focus heavily on keeping infrastructure costs low (optimized .NET code + moving storage from S3 to Wasabi), the margins are healthy enough to be a very viable, bootstrapped full-time business.