When you are PROFITABLE (but not as profitable as your investors would like) you can run FOREVER without anyone "bankrolling" you. It's a foreign concept in the AI world (and sometimes it feels like it's foreign to the tech startup world) but quite effective.
So firstly, it would depend if they are doing remote-job/offshoring directly to a dev or if they are contacting a consultancy instead.
A consultancy can seriously bloat the amount of cost but usually non tech are the ones going to a consultancy but in a consultancy very few (like 5%-10%) goes to the actual workers and they are paid from a fresh dev very low amount of money and I would be going on the high end if I said that they paid something like 16k usd for a complete junior and 40k usd would actually put you at a seriously senior level
Though even the 16k can make a very decent living in India.
My brother works at a company (he freelances as well but parents want security so doesn't do it full time) and he earns around 16k usd from the company but 4x the amount of money through freelancing directly
My cousin works at a company and he's working for 4 years now and he could be considered as maybe senior in just a few years and his salary is 30k USD
my brother actually works at one such consultancy and he mentions that most of the companies are actually non-tech which go to consultancies so I am assuming that since replit is a tech company they are doing remote-job
Now I know that my brother has been approached by companies to do full time but its just risky to work in a startup with the current hiring freeze and he manages to do both somehow I would consider that something like 40-60k (60k as an higher end for a great developer), as always things can even reach 70k sometimes but I am talking on a more average basis of sorts.
Off topic but as someone genuinely interested in this craft, (well I am not sure about coding itself, I have coded but I like golang and sys-admin right now, I want to do so much in this software craft and sometimes I am overwhelmed but its so exciting but I genuinely like tinkering/using linux and making software like alternative frontends for some website which blocked me (doubtnut -> doubt.nanotimestamps.org for my own usecase, I code / use LLM's to solve problems I am facing right now or I am curious about and also recently built a custom liveiso for cachy)
Gotta go hand copy some papers oof. Have a nice day!
I can only speak for my brother's company in that sense that if he works there for many years, their chain of ranking would make him a partner in the company (sort of like how layer firms get) and then he would get a flat huge commission on every project he takes and there are some 10 lakhs inr or 12 grand usd as an example and so like it isn't hard to get some really juicy money later down the pipeline.
Though like what I am saying 70k is for like genuinely the most top like 0.0001% or almost never unless for the extremely top official with shit ton of experience like 10-15-20 years
On the other hand, its rather comparatively easy to take a remote job from US and do it from india to get the same 70k which I have seen a hella lot more people do/ is the more practical approach for many.
I don't know but internally speaking 12 grand a year and even 60 grand seems small but its shit boat ton of money but still my mind compared it to the 120k salary guys of the beautiful united states and maybe that's why I overinflated some numbers.
if you have any questions, feel free to ask, I can uh refer to you to my brother if you have any doubts since I am currently in high school.