TypingMind — Tony Dinh's one-person product portfolio, rebuilt after Twitter's API price killed Black Magic

01The full story

Tony Dinh is a solo developer from Vietnam. He was a senior engineer on a comfortable salary — one source calls it a safe six-figure job at a big tech company, the other puts it at ₩150 million a year — and he left it to ship small products in public, where the whole internet could watch him win or fail. The side project that worked first was Black Magic, a Twitter analytics browser extension. Two years took it to $14,000 a month. Then, in May 2023, Twitter repriced API access at $42,000 a month and the business was underwater immediately. He did not fight it. He sold Black Magic to Hypefury for $128,000, paid in one lump sum. What he did next is the reason this entry exists. Instead of replacing one product with one product, he built three at once: TypingMind, a faster and cleaner interface for AI chat aimed at people who live in it all day; DevUtils, a macOS utility belt for developers; and Xnapper, a macOS app that makes screenshots look good. The Korean analyst reports the three together at over $30,000 a month as of May 2026. Four months later, a second source reports TypingMind alone at over $130,000 a month, run with no employees, no office and no team, frequently from the road, and adds the detail that matters for credibility: he posts his exact numbers publicly, so anyone can check. The two figures cannot both describe the same moment, and we report both with their dates rather than picking one.