My side project makes $0. Here's the math for when it won't.

Everyone asks how much my JSON tools site makes. Honest answer: $0.

It launched a month ago with 0 visitors. Obviously.

Here are the real numbers:

  • Domain: $10/year. That's the entire cash investment
  • Hosting: $0. Vercel free tier
  • Ads: none yet. Google won't even approve AdSense with no content
  • Traffic: tens of organic visitors a day, from Google

Now the math. This is my rough estimate, not a promise:

1,000 UV/day is achievable for a tools site — honestly, most sites took 6-18 months to get there, not 3-6. The traffic is already growing, so we'll see.

Dev tools have a decent AdSense RPM: $1-5 per 1,000 impressions, depending on where your visitors live. US/EU traffic pays 5-10x more than India or Southeast Asia.

So at 1,000 UV/day: $30-150/month. Not life-changing. But it's passive, and it compounds.

The elephant in the room: AI. People now ask ChatGPT to format their JSON instead of opening a website.

So I checked Google Trends — the last 5 years, worldwide:

  • Search interest for "json formatter" averaged 53 before ChatGPT (2021-2022) and 79 after (2023-2026). Up 49%. 2024 was the all-time peak year.
  • But the last 8 months are down ~37% from the 2025 average. That could be AI substitution finally showing up — or just noise. I'll know in a few months.

Either way, the tools were never the business. They're the funnel. The money is in the paid products.

How I'm going to get there:

  1. Build a toolbox, not a tool. Every tool is its own landing page. They link to each other. It's a link wheel that builds itself.
  2. SEO is the whole game. 90% of dev tool traffic is search. Unique titles, real content, FAQ structured data, internal links.
  3. Ops > tech. Ship the tool at 80% and spend the rest of the time writing and distributing. Perfect code doesn't rank.
  4. Free tools buy traffic. Paid products make money. The tools bring people in. The paid product (I'm building an AI headshot app now) is where the revenue comes from.

The site costs me nothing to run. I can wait forever. That's the whole advantage of bootstrapping: patience is free.

jsonprocess.app → · Building the next one in public on X: @nico_built

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