Hello there!

2025 was a wild year for iximiuz Labs! The platform's growth - signups, usage, revenue, all of it - has exceeded my highest expectations. I'm incredibly proud of the amount, quality, and technical depth of what shipped this year, and grateful for the immense support of the iximiuz Labs community.

Below is a recap of the most important developments, some key usage and sales numbers (yay, it's bragging o'clock), and my plans for iximiuz Labs in 2026.

Features shipped in 2025

Playgrounds 2.0

2025 was the year of Playgrounds.

In June, a massive architectural upgrade unlocked an entire class of new use cases:

• Playgrounds with arbitrary sets of machines
• Playgrounds with multiple, isolated networks
• VMs with multiple drives and filesystems (ext4, XFS, Btrfs)
• "Bring your own VM rootfs" and host it as a regular container image in your favorite registry
• Linux kernel 6.1 with significantly improved eBPF support

Persistent Playgrounds

In November, one of the most requested features finally landed - playground persistence:

• Stop a running playground while preserving all your progress
• Restart later from the exact same rootfs state
• Instantly clone stopped playground runs
• Save stopped playgrounds as reusable custom templates​

Playgrounds as Shareable Units of Experience

You can now share playgrounds on social media, embed them in blog posts, or send them to teammates. Including a well-crafted playground in your resume turned out to be a surprisingly strong signal of something hiring managers really value: clear technical communication.

"Coding agent base" playground​
​A ready-to-use sandbox dev environment with a diverse set of pre-installed coding agents was a very timely addition mid-2025, and it continues to gain traction. The sandbox makes it safe to run your favorite coding agent in YOLO mode and protects you from accidental (or intentional) damage to your primary system and/or global secret leakage.

​

Infrastructure upgrades

• The AP (Asia Pacific) region, introduced in late 2024, tripled in size and usage
• Following a series of incidents, the EU (Europe) region was almost entirely migrated from auctioned servers to more reliable bare-metal machines (still at Hetzner)
• Even bigger playgrounds: after doubling the default VM sizes in late 2024, 2025 brought even more generous limits - with noticeably beefier CPUs, more memory, and larger disks on both Free and Premium tiers
• Most playgrounds now boot nearly twice as fast thanks to SSH-over-VSOCK magic

iximiuz Labs for Creators

2025 also marked a big step toward making iximiuz Labs a proper platform for authors, not just readers:

• A friendlier and more robust content editing UX ("author experience")
• Content-level RBAC
• ​Documentation for authors (yes, finally!)

iximiuz Labs for Trainers

Instructor-led training officially became a first-class citizen on the platform.

• Almost 50 training events have been conducted
• Two dozen active trainers
• Around 300 students participated
• At least four real university courses were delivered using iximiuz Labs (possibly more - I'm not keeping up with all the developments)

Seeing the platform used in formal education was especially rewarding.

Affordability

One of my personal goals for 2025 was to make iximiuz Labs more accessible - without compromising on infrastructure quality and/or accidentally allowing bots (ab)using the platform.

It has become possible to boost your free account without spending a penny:

• Inviting a friend adds 30 minutes of daily free time
• Each accepted challenge solution adds 5 minutes to the daily limit
• Solving 3 challenges unlocks unlimited Internet access
• Solving 10 challenges grants a full month of Premium access

This had a huge impact: the average monthly number of solved challenges more than doubled.

Premium access became significantly cheaper, too:

• VAT is now included in the final price (which effectively reduced prices in many countries by 10-20%: NL −21%, UK −20%, DE −19%, IN −18%, CA −5%)
• ​PPP-based discounts are now applied automatically 🎉

Miscellaneous

The web UI received countless small but meaningful improvements:

• Split view for the web terminal
• Built-in HTTP/HTTPS tabs in playgrounds
• Improved tutorial page layout (sidebar, wide mode)
• Quick playground constructor

And there's more coming: better inner/outer content navigation, improved content discoverability, author profiles, and more.

And I finally started documenting the fundamentals:

• ​What playgrounds are and how to use them​
• ​How to get started on iximiuz Labs as a DevOps beginner​
• ​How to author content on iximiuz Labs​

The plan is now to consolidate the above disjoint pieces in a new Documentation section on the site.

Content published in 2025

Tutorials

• By me​
  5 tutorials, including my most researched and most read piece to date - a ~5,000-word "opus" on how container filesystems are built from scratch
• By Márk Sági-Kazár​
  ​7 tutorials on Kubernetes, Vault/OpenBao, and Dagger
• By Rory McCune​
  ​2 tutorials on container security
• By Teodor Podobnik​
  A whopping 10 tutorials on eBPF programming​
• Product tutorials​
  A 5-part tutorial series on KubeBlocks by Bryce Yu and a very promising intro to Uncloud by Anton Ovchinnikov and Pasha Sviderski

Challenges

• I prepared ~40 new challenges, mainly for the hands-on Docker roadmap (more on it below) and its prerequisites (Linux and networking)
• All official challenges were augmented with editorial solutions that don't just list commands, but explain why they work and link to relevant theory
• Around 10 challenges were contributed by community authors
• …and 50+ additional challenges were created for internal or private use (I'd love to publish more of them someday, but that requires author consent)

Hands-On Roadmaps (new content format)

In February, I introduced a new content format - hands-on roadmaps - and the very first of the kind, the Docker roadmap, immediately became a hit. It combines:

• A carefully curated learning path
• Dozens of progressively more complex challenges
• Just-enough theory at exactly the right moments

This format turned out to be exactly what many learners were looking for.

Skill Paths

• ​5 skill paths on running, building, and interconnecting containers
• ​2 eBPF programming skill paths published by Teodor

Usage numbers and (mind-blowing) sales figures

Over 21K students have joined iximiuz Labs in 2025, almost doubling the previous record (12K in 2024):

Around 160K VMs were fired up (vs 70K last year), and countless hours of "play time" followed. A mind-blowing fact: roughly half of the platform's total lifetime usage happened in just the last 3 months of this year.

830 custom playgrounds were created:

• 30 published in the community catalog
• ~800 kept for private and/or internal use

31K challenge solutions were submitted, with 18K accepted as correct:

Revenue

After almost three years of burning my personal savings, I can't describe how happy I am to say this:

2025 is the first net-positive year for iximiuz Labs.

• 2022: −$5.5K / +$1.6K (the good old blog days, pre-labs)
• 2023: −$7K / +$6.8K (labs development, Patreon + main job)
• 2024: −$10K / +$47K (labs sales start, partial employment)
• 2025: −$16K / +$185K (labs sales, partial employment → funemployment)

There are now 3,000 Premium members on iximiuz Labs, and 2,000 of them opted into lifetime Premium access.

Creem (my new favorite payment processor) only shows a partial picture since I migrated from Gumroad mid-year, but the numbers are close enough - and the dashboard video below is too good not to share.

iximiuz Labs plans for 2026: content, content, content!

My main resolution for 2026 is to spend at least 60% of my time on content creation - and on "hunting" more great authors for the platform.

On my personal roadmap:

• Finish the Docker Roadmap (I estimate ~100–150 more challenges and a dozen tutorials needed)
• Prepare two hands-on Kubernetes roadmaps, Docker-style: Kubernetes for developers and Kubernetes for admins (with the only prerequisites being solid Linux skills + understanding of containers)
• A new module for my networking fundamentals course - focused on L3 (IP and routing).

I also hope to add several new sections to the site:

• Docs - how and why to use playgrounds, how to publish content on iximiuz Labs, etc.)
• Remote homelab ideas - a curated collection of setups to build on iximiuz Labs - from hierarchical networks to unusual Kubernetes clusters to classic 3-tier apps
• Gallery - all technical diagrams, finally gathered in one place

Before all that, there's still some foundational work to finish:

• Redesign content catalogs and navigation
• Improve content discoverability
• Add proper author profiles
• Replace the all-inclusive Premium plan with more focused Tinkerer and Learner plans (motivation, what to expect)
• Enable independent authors to monetize their content

Yep - that's a lot.

Why do I believe it's all doable?

• No "yet another core engine rewrite" on the horizon - Playgrounds 2.0 and persistence made the engine largely feature-complete
• I have a ton of semi-finished content waiting to be published
• Independent authors will finally have strong incentives to publish on iximiuz Labs
• With growing revenue, I may even be able to bring in another pair (or two!) of hands
• And honestly, when I look back at everything that shipped in 2025, it feels like we've built enough momentum to make 2026 truly exceptional 🚀

Thanks for being part of this journey 💛

Happy New Year!

Ivan

P.S. I'm lagging behind with the pricing rework, meaning the all-inclusive Premium plan will be available for a week or two longer than initially expected.