Recap 2025

Last day of the year, it's time for me to write the full recap of the year to prepare for 2026. Today, I'm going through everything that happened to me this year, including my figures and other random stuff.

I know that most people in our field don't share their incomes, and I can understand why. But I always did it, and this way you can see how I grew up since I started doing bug bounty. Doing it in public helped people, as it helped me a few years ago, watching videos and dreaming about being a full-time hunter.

This year, I also travelled a bit less than in 2024, but I managed to visit 7 different countries,s which is amazing. I also moved out to a nice flat in Paris that cost me a lot, but we will cover it later.

Goals

Let's start with the goals I had for the year. If I come back to my post from last year, we will see what is done :

• I want to double my earnings and reach 100k next year -> done
• Come back on the Paris Marathon and reach my initial goal -> done, ran in 3:50:00
• Specialize in a topic and be good at it for bug bounty -> still not done, figuring out what it can be
• Do some freelance in Pentest -> done, we will cover it later
• Visit New York -> done
• Do more LHE -> not done yet

So pretty good, isn't it? But I need to manage some stuff for the next year. Let's dig a little bit now.

Incomes

Talking about incomes, I said I managed to achieve my goal of doing 100k euros this year, which is almost true, counting all the taxes our favourite country is taking. But I'm still very proud of this number as I doubled it from last year, which is pretty crazy ( Here I'm talking in euros and not in US dollars)

Here is the repartition of the incomes :

• Bug Bounty : 84 % ( around 72k )
  • YWH: ~47k
  • H1: ~25k
• Pentest : 13% ( around 12k )
• Other stuff like writing articles or giving courses : 3% ( around 3k )

This is quite good numbers, and talking about bug hunting, most of my bugs are from a few programs.

In YWH, for instance, all my income came from 3 or 4 programs, and 1 LHE that I won. This reminds me of the fact that digging into a few programs is better in my opinion than going from program to program.

In Hackerone, I mostly did collaboration. That was the first time I really pushed on hackerone which is nice as I want to be part of the LHE gang next year. So most of my income on h1 are from a few programs too.

I mostly collaborate with the goat Mizu and also my friend 0xrth on a few other programs. It was very interesting working with other people as the alchemy helped a lot in finding juicy bugs.

Also, I wanted to talk about the incomes in our field. It can be nice to get a lot of money, but it's also different from month to month. And here is the graph of my year :

And as you can see, my income went from 500 euros a month to 20k a month. If I deeply look at it, at the end of the year, I travelled a lot, so I worked less, and you can see it.

Also, after a huge month, there is a few lows before finding back the momentum. I'm not sharing my figures to show off, but to show you how it can be hard sometimes to be full-time. Sometimes, you're a goat, finding a lot of bugs, making a lot of money, and sometimes, you find nothing, thinking about your imposter syndrome.

It's the game, and you have to accept it or not do it. And I love it, it's not reliable, but it's fun as fuck.

I understand way more now why top hunters are rocking it at the LHE doing a lot of money there, and then after that, it's hard to find the momentum until the next one. And it's the same for everyone, you can't be high every day and every month.

Talking about pentest, I did a few this year, and loved it. It's a way to earn money that is reliable. You have a contract, you know how much you get for how long. And the last CTBB podcast talks about it ( I'm now part of the team, doing the HackerNotes ) : https://blog.criticalthinkingpodcast.io/p/hackernotes-ep-154-starting-a-pentesting-company-on-top-of-bug-bounty

I will talk more about my goals for 2026 in another post, but I plan to diversify my income and do more pentests during 2026.

Expenses

It's nice to earn money, but if you can't manage it, you're still poor. And I'm pretty bad at managing it. So this year, I came back at all my expenses to see where it went.

The first huge expense was renting my actual flat. It's in Paris, so it's expensive. Also, I rented it empty so I needed to buy everything, and wanted something cozy and nice so I spent a lot on it.

On average, I spent around 30k for it, including the rent, which is big to be honest. But I know that next year I won't need to buy stuff for it anymore,e which is nice.

The other big expense is for travelling, and I spent around 15k on travelling this year. It's a lot, I think, but I loved it, so it was worth it.

Next year, I will travel less than this year and manage to save some money on other stuff.

Great, we talked about money, now let's go for the other interesting parts of the year

Travel

This year, I went to different countries and cities :

• New York, was amazing, and loved it
• Stockholm, to run a half marathon
• Berlin, for fun and for nullcon
• Honk Kong, to visit a friend
• China mainland, very interesting and nice country to visit
• South Korea
• Japan as well

It was still quite nice travelling a lot, but it was different. I feel bored sometimes, now that I have a proper setup in France, with all my friends and stuff. I think the Digital Nomad life is not for me, and it was nice trying it.

But I want to travel as well, but maybe less, and more to chill out than just working.

Running

I ran a lot this year, around 230 runs for 2150 km. I also attended 9 races :

• 1 marathon
• 2 half marathon
• 5 10K
• 1 5K

I beat all my records, which is crazy, and I'm pretty proud of that.

Conferences

I also attended a few conferences this year :

• LeHack
• Nullcon
• Grehack
• Tengucon

And it's always great as I can see all my friends from bug bounty there and spend some time with them.

Bilan

To sum up a bit, this year was amazing. I took a lot of fun in every part of my life, and I'm really looking forward to the next one.

I met a lot of great people throughout the year, and found the location I love. Now, it's time to build something bigger and consolidate the foundation I made.

I hope that you guys had a great one as well, and if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me. Happy New Year!