Nomad List calls its own revenue page verified, not audited

The workload

Nomad List, built and run by Pieter Levels, publishes a page at nomadlist.com/open that the site describes as continuously updating. As of this entry's retrieval on 16 September 2026, the live page showed only a short maintenance note from its founder, will be back in a few days while I clean up the code, signed P, so this entry relies on an archived snapshot captured 18 January 2021 for what the page ordinarily shows, treated explicitly as a historical capture, not a current figure. The workload the page describes is maintaining a live financial dashboard, wired to payment and analytics tools, as a permanent feature of running the product itself.

What the documents show

Self-reported and unaudited: the archived page states its own methodology: Nomad List is an Open Startup, which means it operates fully transparent and shares its metrics, like revenue and traffic. Revenue is verified by Stripe and Indiehackers, traffic by Simple Analytics, uptime by Uptimerobot. That is the page's own description of its checks, not an independent audit, and this entry does not treat verified by Stripe as equivalent to a certified financial statement. The same 2021 snapshot displays a net profit margin of 80.55%, trailing 12-month revenue of $338,827, and an estimated next-12-month figure of $345,604, all self-reported and specific to that one archived moment. Separately, self-reported: a 30 May 2019 post by Levels states Nomad List and Remote OK combined reached $83,333-plus a month in revenue, run on one VPS with zero funding, after four years, a figure covering two products together, not Nomad List alone, and this entry does not split it.

The operating cost

Self-reported: the archived page's numbers imply costs are small relative to revenue, since it states an 80.55% net profit margin at that snapshot date, but does not itemize what the remaining 19.45% covers; hosting, payment fees, taxes or the founder's own labor are not broken out in the captured text. Self-reported: the 2019 post states an average payment of $115 across 740 payments a month, again for the combined products. No cited document gives a current 2026 figure, since the live page is unavailable at retrieval.

The stop condition

No cited document states a stop condition for the open-metrics practice itself. Editorially, this entry notes the practical one implied by the page's current state: a continuously updating dashboard stops functioning as a live record the moment the underlying page goes down, as it had at retrieval, and a reader relying on it for a current figure cannot distinguish planned maintenance from permanent discontinuation without a separate announcement.

• Does verified by Stripe mean an auditor checked the figures, or only that a payment processor's dashboard was the data source?
• Is a combined two-product revenue figure being read as if it described one product alone?
• What does a live financial dashboard's downtime say about how current any cited figure actually is?

The open-page format Nomad List popularized invites exactly this scrutiny: a number captured at one moment, described by the operator's own methodology note, gone from view when the page itself is not running.