Balsamiq Revenue: The $6.58M Number Peldi Publishes Every Year

Quick answer (2026): Balsamiq, the bootstrapped wireframing company Peldi Guilizzoni started in 2008, reported $6.58 million in revenue for 2024, a 6% decline from its $6,994,596 in 2023 (both figures the company published itself). Revenue has now slipped three years running, and management calls it deliberate: the 2024 review guides to "another slight, intentional dip with profitability intact" for 2025 as Balsamiq sunsets its Desktop product and concentrates on Balsamiq Cloud. The company is unusual twice over. It publishes an exact revenue figure every single year, and that figure is going down on purpose. The number itself is the least interesting thing about it.

Balsamiq is a low-fidelity wireframing tool: a deliberately rough, sketch-style app for drawing interface mockups fast. Peldi Guilizzoni, a former Adobe senior software engineer, launched it in June 2008 and never took venture funding. Eighteen years later it is still private, still profitable, and still run by a small team spread across San Francisco, Sacramento, Chicago, Bologna, Paris, and Bremen.

A note on the numbers. Balsamiq is one of the very few software companies that publishes its own revenue, in writing, every year, on its blog. So this piece leans on the company's primary figures first and treats third-party trackers as what they are: guesses. Where the trackers and the founder disagree, the founder's own written figure wins, and the gap between them turns out to be the most useful part of the story.

What is Balsamiq's revenue in 2026?

The most recent figure the company has published is $6.58 million for 2024 (Balsamiq, "Looking back at 2024"). The year before, 2023, it was $6,994,596 exactly, itself a 3.6% dip from 2022 (Balsamiq, "Looking back at 2023," February 9, 2024). Work backward from that 3.6% and 2022 lands around $7.25 million, which appears to be the company's recent high-water mark.

So the honest shape of "Balsamiq revenue" is not a hockey stick. It is a gentle downhill from roughly $7.25M in 2022 to $6.99M in 2023 to $6.58M in 2024, with management guiding to a further slight dip in 2025. For most venture-backed companies that chart would be a crisis. Balsamiq frames it as a plan.

Revenue has slipped three years in a row. The company describes every step of that slide as a choice.

The 2008 arc: from $4,432 to $2 million

The decline reads very differently once you see how fast the number climbed in the first place.

Guilizzoni documented the early months in real time on the Balsamiq blog. His first month of sales was $4,432, as he recounted later on Mixergy. Six weeks in, he posted "$10,000 in revenue in the first 6 weeks" (July 30, 2008). Less than five months after launch he crossed $100,000. And roughly 18 months in, Balsamiq passed the $2 million mark, all from one product, sold mostly as a cheap desktop download, with no funding and a tiny team.

By 2011 the company was doing "almost $5 million in sales," and by 2015 about $6.4 million (per Wikipedia, citing Balsamiq). In a 2021 interview the ARR was $6.7 million. In other words, Balsamiq reached roughly its current revenue level a decade ago and has essentially held there ever since. The story of the last ten years is not growth. It is durability.

Why is Balsamiq's revenue going down on purpose?

Three forces are pulling the top-line number down, and the company chose all three.

First, product sunsets. Balsamiq is deliberately retiring its legacy lines. Sales of Balsamiq for Desktop stop on December 31, 2026, with support continuing through December 31, 2027 (Balsamiq), and it has already wound down the Google Drive version. Each retirement removes revenue on purpose to shrink the surface area the team has to maintain.

Second, the Cloud transition. The company is concentrating on Balsamiq Cloud and its Atlassian integrations for Jira and Confluence. Migrating a base of one-time desktop buyers onto subscriptions is slow work and, in the near term, shrinks reported revenue before it compounds.

Third, and most telling, the stated philosophy. The 2024 review is explicit that the dips are "intentional" and paired with "profitability intact." Guilizzoni's line for the year was "Growth isn't about doing more, it's about doing what matters." A funded company cannot say that. A bootstrapped, profitable one can.

The number the data brokers get wrong

Here is the part every operator should internalize. Search "balsamiq revenue" and you get numbers that are confidently, wildly wrong in both directions.

• GetLatka lists Balsamiq's 2024 revenue as $10.6 million with 38 employees (GetLatka, December 2024). That is roughly 60% higher than the $6.58M the company itself published for the same year.
• ZoomInfo pegs it at under $5 million.
• CB Insights has claimed "over $14 million in annual revenue with just one full-time employee," a figure that is both far too high and obviously garbled.

One company. Same year. Four "revenue" numbers ranging from under $5M to over $14M. The only one actually sourced to the business is the smallest credible figure, $6.58M, because the founder wrote it down himself.

If you are sizing a competitor, a partner, or an acquisition off one of these tracker numbers, you could be off by two to three times. The lesson is not "trackers are useless." It is that a public revenue number is a claim, and claims have sources. The founder's dated, first-party figure beats an algorithm's guess every time.

What operators should actually take from Balsamiq

The revenue-per-head math alone is worth sitting with. At $6.58M across a team of roughly 33 to 38 people, Balsamiq runs near $175,000 to $200,000 of revenue per employee, bootstrapped, profitable, with no growth pressure from investors. That is the quiet luxury the number buys.

• A shrinking top line is not automatically a failing business. Balsamiq's revenue has fallen three years running and the company is healthier for it, because the declines came from cutting maintenance load, not from losing the market. Direction matters less than the reason behind it.
• Publishing your number is a moat of its own. Eighteen years of honest year-in-review posts made Balsamiq one of the most trusted names in bootstrapping. Transparency compounds into authority, and authority compounds into durable demand.
• Trust first-party figures over trackers, always. The "balsamiq revenue" estimates online disagree by three times. Only the founder's own posts are sourced. Apply that filter to every competitor number you read.
• "Enough" is a strategy. Balsamiq found a revenue level that funds a profitable, sane company and chose to defend it instead of inflate it. Not every business owes the market a bigger number next year.

Balsamiq's revenue is not remarkable because of its size. It is remarkable because, in a market full of estimates, one founder keeps telling you the truth, and the truth is that he decided this was enough.

Keep reading

If the operator lens on Balsamiq resonated, these first-person OperatorBook diaries wrestle with the same "how much is enough" question from the inside: why we killed our SaaS at $12K MRR on walking away from a working number, the month my SaaS finally covered my rent on treating profitability as the real milestone, and burnout at $15K MRR on the cost of chasing a bigger one. For more founders who published their numbers, see our profiles of Carrd's revenue and the HeadshotPro number nobody confirmed.