Ask HN: Examples of profitable little free web tools?

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.

Google easily answers a lot of these questions. for ex: When will the sun rise today in city X. it works even for a small village in India

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

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.

Balsamiq, Tarsnap are not in the same category as Bingo Card Creator.

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.

I do run small website called Notation Training http://notationtraining.com it is up and running for about three years and is doing quite good. I do run AdSense there, making around 200 USD/month and then I am selling premium version for $4 which quite some people buys as well. I guess I could be more aggressive with selling the premium version, but I am quite ok with it. There is very little maintenance going to this product and it makes quite nice extra money for me.

Did you try bitcoin donations instead of ads?

I have built a few free products too. I use them to advertise my sisterly paid products. A few of my free products: https://getsimpleform.com/, http://redirectapp.com/

You could try accepting donations or use it to build your portfolio for consultancy projects.

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

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

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).

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.

    If you're smart enough to build something that 50k web
    developers use every month then turning that into six
    figures is straightforward.

    BCC's for loop and random number generator

Perhaps instead of assuming that they don't offer enough value to charge, you could spend some time figuring out who would value them enough to pay for them.

e.g., when will the sun rise in city x -> send me an email 5 minutes before the sun rises in city x (because I told my girlfriend who's working overseas that I'd call her when the sun came up).

There is probably value in what you're doing. The trick is to find out who values it, for how much, and how can they pay you a possibly tiny amount with low payment overhead.

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.

Could you offer api's to your tools or offer them as widgets for other websites to use and charge for that?

I have a history of sites like that too. None of them ever made any money. I finally bit the bullet and started working on one site that does something that I charge money for: http://www.liberwriter.com

It's not perfect in a lot of ways - no recurring revenue - but it's done way better than any of those fun projects ever have, in terms of making money. I've also learned a lot more because I have real customers that get angry if things go wrong, or are very happy when things go right because I'm solving something that's a real problem for them.

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.

FYI If you haven't seen it check out this github list & discussion about web business models: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8073732

If the tools are useful enough to attract backlinks, you might want to find a company that's audience would find value in your tools, and sell it to them as an seo strategy. Here's the simple formula...

1. Content Development: Build a linkable asset (content or tools that people are compelled to share). 2. Outreach: Develop a targeting list of people who would likely link to your tool, and nurture a relationship with them. 3. Get Rich.

Packaged right, to the right company, you can probably charge $5k-$20k for the tool and another $5k/Month for outreach.

Without any experience doing what you're doing, I would say listen to what your users tell you. Review their emails and they'll tell you all you need to know about what they are looking for (enhancements maybe)? Learn to build a premium model after what they are asking for.

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.

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.

I run http://LaunchSoon.com for more than 7 years. It's a simple script that allows site owners to easily create a coming soon page. It made about $50k since I've created it.

Ask for donations and see what happens? You might be shocked by the money that comes in.