Ask HN: Why did my free tools site with 600 tools make almost $0 after 2 years?

[KodyBerns99]

I launched a free tools site called Kody Tools (https://www.kodytools.com/) almost two years ago as a side hustle. It features over 600 tools, a clean and responsive design, and I invested a lot of effort into promotion. I assumed monetizing with ads or selling ad space would be straightforward.

But despite all that, it only pulls in about 7-10k visitors a month, and the revenue is practically zero. Hosting costs me around $20-$40 monthly, making me seriously reconsider my approach.

I’m curious to hear how you’d tackle this kind of situation. What worked for you when monetizing a free tools site without driving away users or ruining the experience?

Any tips or strategies would be hugely appreciated!

[al_borland]

This may be a situation where less is more. It might sound good to say there are 600 tools, but no one wants to scroll through a list of 600 things to find what they may want to use. I see that you have a search, but if people are going to search anyway, they’re going to use a search engine. People tend to search for the thing they want to convert, and just pick the first or second result. The URL and SEO are going to matter a lot for this. The most popular things are also being built right into search engines, eating everyone’s lunch.

Sites with hundreds of tools are ones I bookmark, but then never go back to, because I usually just search for what I need in the moment, it’s faster than finding a bookmark and hunting to see if a site I have as a tool for it. The only time this might change is if a site has an exceptional design or does things the basic top results don’t have that I really want/need, and it’s something I do often enough for it to matter.

I read a story not long ago about a guy who does pretty well with his converter site. It has a single tool, the URL is specific to that tool so it ranks high in the results, and it is something businesses need. This means they are willing to pay, because it saves them enough time to make it worth it, and they are coming back again and again. It wasn’t low hanging fruit though. If I remember correctly it could take in bank statements from bunch of different banks and parse them to pull out the details for some specific business purpose. When the banks changed their format, he’d have to tweak his code to account for it.

I see the age calculator is at the top of the popularity list, but a million sites can calculate an age. I just stick date it Wolfram Alpha myself. Most people probably also do this in their head when precision isn’t needed. I think you want to find what other sites don’t do, or do poorly, focus on that, and optimize to show up in search results for people looking for those things. If it’s something a business is willing to pay for, even better. You’d have to be hugely popular to make ads generate enough to matter, and it’s hard to stand out in the converter website market at this stage of the game.

[KodyBerns99]

seems focusing on quality and SEO is definitely the way forward.

[tacostakohashi]

I think online tools is not a bad idea, but a lot of the tools there are low quality and gimmicky, like anything that can be done in your head, or using a pocket calculator / trivial spreadsheet:

https://www.kodytools.com/commission-calculator https://www.kodytools.com/half-your-age-plus-seven-calculato... etc...

Perhaps it would be better to split out the financial tools (bonds, cagr, interest) from the programmer/text tools stuff.

I do actually think online / browser based tools that people hit via search for very occasional / niche uses is a good idea, e.g.:

https://everytimezone.com/ http://gc.kls2.com/

For these, they do non-trivial things, and are also a combination of a tool / logic plus some embedded reference data (timezones / DST, airport locations, etc) - I think that's the key. Maybe try fewer, higher quality tools with dedicated domain names instead of quantity.

[KodyBerns99]

Thanks for the great advice! I’ll focus on quality and niche tools.

[lordkrandel]

1) What kind of business would advertise on your site? What kind of ad would you click if you were a visitor? 2) Are you relying on ad space on a website in 2025? Google and social media own the space. You wanna ad where everybody's at 3) Make premium tools 4) these kind of tools are one off, you almost never come back 5) it's almost as hard to find a tool you need than solving the original problem yourself. Maybe an AI/tags searching tools for problems could help. "Hey, do you have something for x?" "Yes here: y"

[speedylight]

Well there are lots of sites that are basically a compendium of tools like the ones you have and almost all of them are free to use. The one that comes to mind as being the best is CyberChef, but that was developed by a British intelligence agency.

I think the easiest way to increase revenue is to focus on SEO ranking and putting up more non-intrusive ads. You could also turn it into a phone and desktop app and charge people for offline access.

[gchq-7703]

CyberChef has been around for many years now, which definitely helps. It also has no plans for monetization and runs entirely locally, so there's no chance of a 'rug pull'. It was a long journey to the current ~800k monthly users though. I suspect it was just time and place, as opposed to any technical reasons.

[KodyBerns99]

Thanks for sharin that, it's clear that timing and steady growth are key to lasting success.

[KodyBerns99]

Thank you so much for your suggestions, really appreciate it!

[benoau]

Make an app-version of the website with ads + pay-to-remove-ads and focus the website on promoting that.

Make it easier to share results with people so they visit your website too, this would need presentation changes to emphasize the result like looking at your amortization calculator the answer is just a plain number tucked over to the side of the page even if I could share my calculation with someone I'd probably have to tell them where to look.

[giantg2]

I don't think this will work. There are plenty of free tool apps already established. You'd need to find a unique one and heavily market it. Even that has a low chance of success. The most money I made on apps was the $250 settlement money Google paid as part of that class action.

[KodyBerns99]

Thanks for that idea, i really appreciate that.

[benoau]

Also allow customization, most people probably want specific tools repeatedly nobody will want everything or to wade through it all. You could do this through browser storage mechanisms pretty easily but it also gives you a reason to provide accounts, then you could offer groups shared space for the tools they need and the answers/results they need, and charge subscriptions too.

[bhag2066]

Cool site. Have you considered building your own paid tools that align with the problem customers are solving with your free tools, and keeping all the advertising slots for yourself?

For example, you would own Focus Flux (the advertiser I see on the site) and use Kody Tools as lead gen for it.

[KodyBerns99]

Thanks for the idea! I'll definitely consider building some paid tools and using that site as medium for marketing.

[dotcoma]

What kind of ‘ads’ are you trying to use to monetise it ?

[KodyBerns99]

adsene and affiliate banners

[dotcoma]

That’s why!

[dotcoma]

Have you not learned from Google and Facebook?

You need to sell space as “promoted tool” for a week.

You also need more traffic. Do you have returning users or not ?

[747-8F]

www.kodytools.com is neat. Could you please have a 'daylight' background as well?

[KodyBerns99]

sure, i am just planning to upgrade it and surely keep that in mind.

[AznHisoka]

Imagine if you owned a business and you had to pay $1000 to advertise on your site. What type of business would you need to own to make it worthwhile for you?