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Ask HN: Examples of profitable little free web tools?

223 points| xyby | 11 years ago

We all know examples of paid online services that became profitable. For example Balsamiq, Tarsnap and Bingo Card Creator.

I love to build small tools that do something useful. But they do not offer enough value to charge for them. Imagine tools like "When will the sun rise today in city X" or "How much taxes are in $X" etc. Some of them are used by tens of thousands of people a month. And I get a lot of "thank you, that's cool and useful" emails.

So far I'm not making any money from them. When I slap adsense on them, I only make a few bucks. Like $0.5 per 1000 visitors. Even if I optimized that to $2 per 1000 visitors, it still would be just around $150/month for all my websites.

But since I love doing these little, interesting projects, I will probably make more of them anyhow. Most of the projects I have in mind are little tools that cater my own curiosity. Nothing people would pay for. Like "find all xkcd comics related to a topic" and stuff like that.

Do you guys think there is a way to make a living like this? Are there any examples of profitable websites, created by one guy that have some informative value but not so much that people would pay for it?

122 comments

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[+] bensmiley|11 years ago|reply
A few years ago I was getting into iOS audio development and I started blogging about CoreAudio. My website started getting some traffic so thought I'd put together a really comprehensive tutorial on how to play MIDI files on iOS. I started selling it on my site for around $19.99 and started making a couple of hundred dollars per month. Then one of the founders of http://www.binpress.com reached out to me and asked if I'd consider putting my component on their site. I decided to go for it and with the added exposure it started bringing in around $400 - $500 per month. Then I decided to spend my spare time making components to save other developers time on common tasks. I developed a piano plugin and then a chat component (http://www.binpress.com/app/chat-messaging-sdk-for-ios/1644). The chat component did really well so over time I built it up - currently it brings in about $2k per month in sales and loads of consulting work. Because of the chat component, I was approached by the Founders of Firebase because they wanted to shut down an online chat service they had called Envolve. They asked if I'd be prepared to make an alternative service and take on their customer base. I took on the project and developed a new chat called Chatcat (http://chatcat.io). Currently, I'm making about $4 - 5k per month in passive revenue from Binpress and the chat. On top of that I can easily make another $5k in freelance work. I'd definitely recommend this as a low risk path to generating a really stable passive revenue.
[+] shanecleveland|11 years ago|reply
Great example of turning something small into bigger opportunities. Nobody is going to come knocking at your door if you don't first make yourself known, even in just a small way. And don't confuse unsuccessful with failure. It may take many unsuccessful tools to stumble onto a success. The learning along the way can also be a catalyst.
[+] splike|11 years ago|reply
When you make something like that, a framework or a small service that you want to sell, how do you get the word out to potential customers? Do you pay for some advertising? Do you rely on SEO?
[+] patio11|11 years ago|reply
I hate having to be vague here, but suffice it to say there exist a few developers-oriented web applications which did one small thing well apiece. One day, a Silicon Valley company tired of paying $500 per lead to AdWords just sent them bolt-out-of-the-blue offers. Suffice it to say that the numbers involved were fat yearly salaries for nights-and-weekends style projects.

If you want to catch a bolt out of the blue, getting together a coherent commercially valuable audience increases your chances. That said: the easiest and best way to make money is to make something people want and trade it to them for money. If you're smart enough to build something that 50k web developers use every month then turning that into six figures is straightforward.

P.S. "They do not offer enough value to charge for" is a solvable problem, either by adding value or by using equivalent engineering time to build solutions to problems that matter to people with money. I mean, it's not like BCC's for loop and random number generator are a commandingly high bar of technical prowess to justify the $29.95 price tag.

[+] xyby|11 years ago|reply 

    If you're smart enough to build something that 50k web
    developers use every month then turning that into six
    figures is straightforward.
How? I have 50k visitors interested in other topics, but wouldn't know how to turn that into any money at all.

    BCC's for loop and random number generator
What is BCC?
[+] ralphholzmann|11 years ago|reply
I created sendtodropbox.com (email attachments to Dropbox) as a side project about 3 years ago. After the initial prototype, two-ish rewrites, and monetizing it with a freemium model, it's now got 1100 paying subscribers and brought in $20k in revenue this year. I did the whole thing myself (aside from the website template design, which a buddy of mine helped out with). This doesn't technically fall under the "informative value" category, but going solo on a project to make it profitable is definitely possible.
[+] coreymaass|11 years ago|reply
The website says it's a free service. How did you earn $20k? What do subscribers pay for?
[+] swah|11 years ago|reply
Thank you for writing this - its a perfect example and proof that ones does not need to be patio11 to succeed with simple apps! Congrats on delivering!
[+] xyby|11 years ago|reply
Interesting. How do you market it?
[+] ada1981|11 years ago|reply
About 7 years ago I invented and patented CreditCovers : "skins for credit cards". They are widely regarded in marketing circles as the single most effective way to start an offline conversation about a brand - called a "new dawn in viral marketing" by BusinessWeek.

CreditCovers.com is a near fully automated business at this point. I set up a deal with a factory in Brooklyn to handle print / pack / ship and wrote software to handle batching orders to them daily and updating customers.

Also, I created a DIY tool for people to customize their own which cut down on tons of e-mails of people asking for custom covers and having to do graphic work. http://creditcovers.com/DIY

It's been cool. Ton's of press, customers include people like Google, Ben Cohen - founder of Ben & Jerry's, celebs, Obama, etc.

Because CreditCovers are so effective, our single greatest marketing tool is just to give them away which always results in a positive ROI on referrals.. So that said, anyone who wants one with their start-up logo / dog / gf / mom / whatever on it can go get one... Use code 'hackernews' to get $10 off an order and get one free. (You will have to create it yourself using our tool at creditcovers.com/DIY - there are photoshop templates as well)

Also - we have a generous affiliate program of 50% if you'd like to partner on either 1 off or bulk sales - hit us up. [email protected]

[+] bambax|11 years ago|reply
Interesting! Do you have designs for European cards that have a chip that needs to be in contact with the reader (the chip is in the upper left corner)?
[+] adventured|11 years ago|reply
As someone else mentioned, the only method I've seen work is either a niche with very high CPM rates, or to garner a lot of traffic.

On the ton of traffic side, there are a lot of examples, but Google has nuked countless of those over time.

eg: http://www.markosweb.com/

They were once one of the top ~1,000 sites in the world, and that site was generating over a million dollars per year via AdSense. They'd show up for nearly any search for a random domain / site in google. A lot of sites were using that domain info technique to spam traffic (they'd show things like pagerank, alexa rank, estimated value, blah blah).

Well that concept is still functional, just not as lucrative. Today you can find "sites like X" sites that are plentiful in the serps. There is still a lot of traffic in it.

Some presently still successful examples (some are spammy, some are less so; Google has hit some of these hard this year; if you asked most of these sites, they'd claim they're valuable tools):

http://www.semrush.com

http://www.network-tools.com

http://www.ip-adress.com

http://www.prchecker.info

http://www.intodns.com

http://who.is

http://www.aboutus.org

http://www.similarsites.com

[+] AznHisoka|11 years ago|reply
please dont put semrush in that list. I use it regularly and they probably make over 5 million in annual revenue, if not more.
[+] ginkgotree|11 years ago|reply
I just sealed a deal yesterday, making mid-3 figure /month revenue with a sponsor for a weekend project of mine: http://hacker.surf

HackerSurf launched a few days ago on HN, and sat on the front page for about 12 hours. Here's a recap on how it all went down here: http://scotthasbrouck.com/8000-uniques-from-weekend-node-js-...

A small example of a small project leading to recurring revenue. I'm writing another blog post for tomorrow on going from launch to solid revenue in 48 hours, I'll followup here with it.

[+] bbcbasic|11 years ago|reply
I read your blog post - the bit about open sourcing connects with me. It is the direction I would like to go in. Write open source but still make money.
[+] ada1981|11 years ago|reply
nice work!

I'd like to make a directory on 175g.com that lists all the jobs for Ultimate Frisbee related companies -- either owned by people who play Ultimate or that service the actual industry.

Would forking this be a useful tactic?

[+] wallflower|11 years ago|reply
The general formula is you have to nurture and build your own community. Quality over quantity. There are many examples of people aggregating and filtering content (http://iosdevweekly.com) to producing content (basically all sites from the smallest blog up to BuzzFeed). The metric if there is one is how engaged your community is. Do they open your regular cadence newsletter? Do your current readers forward your newsletters? You can game social media all you want and in the end the real thing is are you providing value to people in the community you are contributing to/part of. All those people who sell 2,000 books with a single email spent hundreds of hours growing their email list one by one. It is easy to write one blog post that goes viral. And to get them to come back and read what your write next - that is harder.

Grow your community, give back, deliver something unique that you can provide on a regular basis.

The reality is you don't own anything if you work for a company. But if you have 100 or 1000 mailing list opens - that is all yours.

The rhetorical question is do you want to make $12,000 a year or $120k/year. The catch hear is $120k is salaried and NOT geometrically scalable while the $12k refers to your own sales/ad revenue. That what you own and have built is scalable.

It is all about influence and/or providing what people want.

[+] andyidsinga|11 years ago|reply
I'm going to take the other side and say ...quantity over quality as long as two conditions are met a) fun to make (by the op ) and 2) useful to someone ( op at a minimum )

keep a close eye on what sticks and then iterate and polish.

also ...maybe structure your mini-products under companies in such a way that if an acquirer came along you could sell it for a decent chunk of change.

[+] thenomad|11 years ago|reply
Interesting. I've run a somewhat successful aggregation website in the past, and found that I hit significant scaling problems.

Can you provide a few more examples of aggregation / filtering services that have achieved reasonably high profitability? Always interesting to see what other people do that I don't!

[+] xyby|11 years ago|reply
How is iosdevweekly monetized?
[+] rk0567|11 years ago|reply
I'm making ~ $100 per month from this little tool [0] I created over weekend.

[0] http://portchecker.co/

[+] gabemart|11 years ago|reply
Does most of your traffic come from organic searches? I imagine it can be hard to rank a tool-based site that doesn't have a lot of text content
[+] palidanx|11 years ago|reply
If you don't mind me asking, do you make money off the google ads?
[+] xyby|11 years ago|reply
Interesting. How much traffic does it get?
[+] brucehart|11 years ago|reply
I'm not sure if this site qualifies as "small" enough, but I think Ken Pomeroy does pretty well with his site kenpom.com. He takes college basketball box scores, runs a cron job that does some mathematical analysis and puts the results on his site. He has built the site out in the last few years, but there are still only a handful of dyanmically generated pages on his site (rankings, team stats, player stats, game stats). A subscription to his site costs $20/year and I would guess he has several thousand subscribers (myself included).
[+] xyby|11 years ago|reply
Interesting. What do you use the data for? Why is it valuable to you? How do you estimate the site has thousands of subscribers?
[+] facepalm|11 years ago|reply
I'm not an Adsense specialist at all, but I suggest you might give it a little time. Adsense learns how to improve the value of your ads because it understands your visitors better over time. My Adsense income has increased 600% over time without me doing anything (still a small site, not enough to pay the rent, but nice extra). Of course other factors than just Adsense learning might have influenced it, too (ie more competition on ads or whatever), but still - my experience has been good.
[+] bsima|11 years ago|reply
Adam Bard's recent work is a good example: http://adambard.com

As is Kevin Lynagh's http://keminglabs.com - He also made Denizen (I think) https://getdenizen.com/

I have no idea if any of these are profitable, but at least you get some ideas. Searching "site:news.ycombinator.com microbusiness" also brings up some good examples, for instance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367243

[+] bsima|11 years ago|reply
Candy Japan is a great example, and the creator regularly posts updates on his blog/here on HN
[+] a3n|11 years ago|reply
One way to make money from an activity is to sell products and services to people doing the activity. Supply companies in Denver probably were more consistently profitable, and their owners and employees probably lived longer, than the miners who stopped in on their way into the mountains to dig for gold, silver and lead.

Use your experience with what you do to create books and other resources for people who might like to do what you do.

Create a hosting service that is structured to support that community really well.

Etc.

[+] shanecleveland|11 years ago|reply
I'm certainly nowhere near making a living, but I have a few simple tools that generate adsense income. The sites generate international shipping documents. It was something I needed myself. Targeting businesses in a small niche helps with the per-click value and organic search rankings, I believe. So I don't need a huge number of visitors.

I feel good about actually providing value. And they are useful tools for me and I make a little money (about $150/month).

I've made a few consumer-oriented tools, including a baby name site, a meat temperature guide and office football pool site. I have not generated enough traffic to make ads worthwhile, but I suspect the pay-off would be low anyway. These sites would require thousands of visitors a day, and it would take a lot of legwork to generate that sort of traffic.

A few others that I use regularly that I did not make: https://identitysafe.norton.com/password-generator/ http://www.freeformatter.com/csv-to-xml-converter.html https://www.xml-sitemaps.com

[+] Mandatum|11 years ago|reply
Put your contact information in your profile please.
[+] grimtrigger|11 years ago|reply
Since you have traffic, you could work on monetizing in other ways than adsense. Think of a product that visitors might be interested in and try to sell them that.
[+] thecolorblue|11 years ago|reply
I second this idea. Find out who are your 'power users' for each app. Is there overlap? You can focus on one type of user, find a complementary product that pays for referrals, and link to it at the bottom of each page.
[+] kyriakos|11 years ago|reply
I'm on the same boat regarding adsense you need a lot of traffic or extremely profitable keywords to make any substantial income. I read recently on a similar Ask HN that https://www.conferencebadge.com/ is making a good income, and it can be considered 'little' I presume but they actually charge for their product/service.
[+] jbrooksuk|11 years ago|reply
Off-topic, but I just wanted to let you know that your website looks beautiful! A very well done to you and a great idea too!
[+] tomek_zemla|11 years ago|reply
Some tools lend themselves to starting small and expanding through add-ons, pro features or alternative versions. The example that comes to my mind is GreenSock (http://greensock.com) which started as small, simple Flash (ActionScript) library, but evolved into a large set of animation related libraries and plug-ins covering also HTML5 (JavaScript) and offering various licences starting from free to commercial/paid.

I don't know the internal details, but I have used it on multiple occasions over the years and the impression I get is that it evolved from a free, personal side project into more professional product and company. I suspect that the creator also gets commissioned projects as additional revenue stream. And judging from its consistent evolution over the years it must bring profits that justify working on it!

[+] kiraken|11 years ago|reply
Why not gather all your products under one roof? Create a website that gathers all the other tools, choose a theme for it and everything, then start taking donations or charging small amounts of money for a monthly subscription to all your products or paid accounts that to use some extra tools
[+] ohashi|11 years ago|reply
Depends on what you think of as free/small. My startup, http://reviewsignal.com is a free service people can use to look up web hosting companies. it's automatically tracking all the tweets about major hosts and publishing the results. It's profitable and free, but was a lot of works (not sure how small it really is). I've also built a lot of tools closer to what you're describing, things like http://listmanipulator.com and http://domainling.com but none of the smaller projects come anywhere close to being a sustainable living.