How to Make
Money on X in 2026:
The levelsio Breakdown

The Four Ways Money Actually Flows on X

Before the mechanics, the map. Money reaches you on X through four separate channels, and most people who earn well use more than one.

• Creator revenue sharing. X pays you a share based on engagement your posts get from other Premium (paying) subscribers. This is the one people mean when they say "X pays creators."
• Paid subscriptions. Followers pay a monthly fee for extra access to you. Recurring, and it rewards a genuine audience rather than raw reach.
• Your own products. The account becomes distribution for something you sell: software, a book, a course, merch. This is usually where the real money is.
• Affiliate and sponsored posts. You get paid to feature someone else's product, or take a cut of sales you refer.

Levels' own screenshot is a clean worked example of the mix:

Add it up and $14,856 of the $21,547 (about 69%) is paid straight from X through the revenue share and subscriptions. The book and merch make up the rest, and in his words they are "directly linked to X" too, because the audience that buys them was built by posting. So even the parts X does not pay for are still powered by the account. That is the pattern worth internalising: the platform payment is real, but the account is the asset.

What X Actually Pays For in 2026

The revenue share is the stream most people ask about, and it changed in a way that trips up older guides. It used to pay out based on ads shown in the replies under your posts. Since late 2024 it is engagement-based: what counts now is engagement and impressions from other verified, Premium users, not the general public.

That single change rewires the incentive. A post that goes viral with non-paying accounts earns you far less than one that gets replies, reposts, and dwell from Premium subscribers. In practice the paying users cluster in specific niches (tech, finance, building in public, crypto), which is part of why those niches monetise better than, say, general meme accounts with bigger raw numbers.

The eligibility gate

To switch the revenue share on, you currently need all of the following:

• An active X Premium subscription.
• A verified account.
• At least 500 followers.
• Roughly 5 million post impressions across the previous three months.

Payouts run on a bi-weekly cycle through Stripe, with a $30 minimum before anything is released. Anything under that rolls into the next cycle. Exact thresholds and the payout formula are set by X and do change, so treat the official X monetization docs as the source of truth rather than any third-party number, including this one.

That 5 million impressions figure is the honest barrier to entry. It is not enormous for an established account, and it is a real climb from zero. Everything else in this guide is about how people cross it.

Who levelsio Is, and Why His Numbers Are Believable

It is worth knowing whose data this is, because the backstory explains both why the numbers are credible and why you should not expect to match them next quarter.

Pieter Levels left the Netherlands in 2013 with a laptop and a backpack. In 2014 he set himself a public challenge: 12 startups in 12 months, shipping fast and learning in the open. Most of them failed. By his own telling there were dozens of dead projects before anything stuck, and the count of failures over the years runs to around 70. The roughly seventh attempt, Nomad List, was the one that broke through, followed by Remote OK in 2015. (Starter Story, Indie Hackers.)

Today he runs a portfolio of products solo, no employees, no co-founders, no outside funding, reportedly around $3M a year in total. His AI headshot tool Photo AI alone has been reported at roughly $100K to $132K per month. (levels.io.) His own public revenue breakdown lists levelsio.com and X together at about $14K a month, which lines up almost exactly with the direct-from-X figure in the screenshot above. When a creator's self-reported number matches third-party reporting, you can trust the receipt.

So the honest framing: the $21k month is real, but it sits on top of a decade of shipping and a following built over years. That is the context. The useful part is what he does day to day, because that is copyable.

What levelsio Actually Does All Day (From the Data)

We pulled his last two weeks of public posts and replies and counted. The playbook that comes out is not the one most "grow on X" threads sell you.

He posts a lot, and most of it is reaction

Across about 14 days he published 107 posts, roughly 7.8 a day, on top of a reply stream dense enough that a sample of his replies covered barely two days before filling up (a floor of around 36 replies a day). But the striking number is this: 78% of his posts were quote-tweets or replies to other people's content, not standalone essays. His main engine is fast, opinionated reaction to whatever the timeline is already talking about, not original threads written from a blank page.

Opinion beats promotion, by a mile

Those 107 posts pulled about 26 million views between them, averaging roughly 245,000 each. But the average hides the shape. His biggest posts in the window were:

• A blunt take on middle-aged men's fitness: ~4.1M views.
• An observation that indie-hacker revenue is declining industry-wide: ~2.3M.
• "The West underestimates China's speed": ~1.5M.
• Telling people to actually visit China: ~1.4M.
• Noting that popular SaaS tools were being reverse-engineered and open-sourced: ~1.2M.

Every one is a clear, slightly provocative opinion or a build-in-public observation. None is an engagement-bait question, and none is a "buy my thing" post. His actual revenue announcement, by contrast, was one of his lower-performing posts of the fortnight. The account earns its reach by having a point of view, then monetises quietly underneath it.

His replies are short and human

The replies are not mini-essays. The median is about 39 characters, and a good chunk are one or two words: "100%", "Yep", "Lmfao". He is not writing value-bombs in the reply tab; he is being present and fast in conversations, which keeps him visible without eating the whole day. The long-form thinking goes into posts. The replies keep the account warm.

The Long Game That Makes It Compound

One honest note so the screenshots do not mislead: this compounds, it does not switch on overnight, and that is the good news.

Levels' lifetime X payouts, visible on his own dashboards, are $188,008.68 from revenue sharing and $30,130.88 from subscriptions. That is more than $218,000 paid by the platform, built up over years of showing up and still growing. In his own words the $21k month was the "highest X payout since January this year and steadily growing." It compounds: every month of posting adds to an audience that makes the next month pay a little more.

Underneath the money is 7 to 8 posts a day and dozens of replies, sustained indefinitely. The reason he can keep that up is the thing most people miss, and he said it himself in the revenue post:

"I'm not really letting it affect what I tweet, I just post what I normally do and I'd do it if I didn't get paid anyway, it's fun for me to express myself."

That is the whole trick, stated out loud. He is not producing content to hit a payout threshold. He is documenting a life and a business he would be living anyway, and the volume is sustainable because the material is free. This is why building in public and X monetisation fit together so well: when the work is the content, you never run out of things to post.

How to Start From Zero (the Achievable Version)

You are not going to reproduce a decade of audience this year. You do not need to. The revenue share turns on at 500 followers and 5 million quarterly impressions, which is a real but crossable bar. From a standing start the impressions are the hard part, and the fastest way to clear them is a reply-led sprint, covered in full in how to get monetized on X fast. What follows is the version of the playbook that works before you are famous, and that sets you up to graduate into everything above once your posts start carrying themselves.

1. Pick a lane where the paying users live. Because only Premium-user engagement counts, niche into a topic those users care about: building, a specific tech, finance, a trade you know. A smaller engaged audience of subscribers beats a big passive one.
2. Have an actual opinion. The levels data is unambiguous: takes and specific observations travel, bland questions do not. Post what you genuinely think, with the reasoning attached.
3. Build in public as your fuel supply. If you are making something, the decisions, failures, and numbers are an endless content source, which is exactly what makes daily posting survivable. Our guide to building in public on X covers what to share and what to keep back.
4. Use quote-tweets and replies to borrow reach. You do not need a viral original every day. Reacting well to posts already getting attention is how levels spends most of his output, and it is far easier than manufacturing hits from nothing. Reply-led growth is covered in how to grow on X with replies.
5. Show up daily for long enough to compound. The unglamorous one. Impressions accumulate over three-month windows, followers compound, and almost everyone who quits does it before the curve bends. Getting to your first 1,000 followers is the real early milestone.

None of that requires talent you do not have. It requires consistency most people cannot sustain, which is both the bad news and, if you can sustain it, the entire opportunity.

The Tools That Make the Volume Doable

The barrier is never day one. It is day forty, when you have said the obvious things, a week got busy, and posting eight times a day sounds like a second job. levelsio sustains that pace because the work is his material and he would post anyway. Most people need help holding it. A realistic stack, sorted by the job it does:

• Turning real work into posts, in your voice. The hardest part of daily volume is having something to say without staring at a blank box. Ghosti is a Chrome extension built for this: its GitHub Tweets feature reads your latest commits and drafts a build-in-public post from what you actually shipped, Thread Studio turns one idea into a multi-part thread, and Hunt Mode plus Reply Guy keep the reply habit going inside the feed rather than a separate dashboard. Ghost DNA learns your voice from your own examples, which matters because generic AI-flavoured content is the fastest way to earn nothing here. It runs on your own AI key, so you choose the model and pay the provider directly.
• Scheduling the baseline posts. A scheduler such as X Pro (formerly TweetDeck) keeps a steady daily cadence so your feed does not go quiet on a busy week.
• Tracking impressions and payouts. X's own analytics shows the impression and follower trend the revenue share depends on, so you can see what is genuinely working rather than guessing from likes.

Ghosti handles the part that eats the day, the drafting, and keeps it sounding like you; the rest of the stack just keeps you consistent. It does not post for you or promise a payout. It lowers the cost of the daily consistency that the payout actually depends on. Plan details are on the homepage.