Do free online tools make money and if so, how? Have had a few ideas but worried about profitability.
Hi there, I had an idea for awhile now to create an assortment of free tools. An example of what I had in mind is http://ezgif.com
Do sites like these earn much money without charging? Are they a viable business for indie hackers?
Any information is appreciated as I've had a lot of interest making tools like these.
Any free tools will have 4 business model
I have been building the Flake tools website, which offers free online tools, as a hobby project for nearly a year. Through this experience, I have learned that there are many similar tools available. It is challenging to surpass them and rank higher on search engine results pages.
Since it is a free tool, paying for traffic is not an option. The only way to generate profit is by achieving top positions in organic search results on Google. However, this is quite difficult because other tools already have numerous backlinks, which cannot be easily obtained for the same tool or a slightly improved version.
Therefore, lot of time needs to be invested in SEO. Having a good tool alone is not enough. It is essential to establish topical relevance, ensure a fast website speed, create high-quality texts and tutorials, and more.
Even if you manage to fulfill all these requirements, it still takes time to rank for specific keywords. It could take years to reach the top positions on Google unless you find a way to quickly acquire quality backlinks for your site.
However, if you come across an interesting tool idea that is not oversaturated, and you can quickly rank and gain backlinks, you can start earning money easily.
If you manage to rank for highly searched keywords, with tens of thousands of searches per month, you can earn a few hundred bucks a month. Nevertheless, discovering these keywords will likely take more time than actually building the website.
Once you achieve a high ranking for certain keywords, these types of sites become money-making machines. I have previously built such a site, which is currently generating a few hundred dollars a month, and I haven't made any updates to it for two years.
They can make money through ads. This is, of course, dependent on traffic. B2B has higher ad values. Traffic in 1,000+ page views per day may get you in the low hundreds per month.
The greater benefit is likely in the audience it helps to build to either sell a related product or more advanced version to.
I'm also interested in the business plans behind sites like this, or tools that do one really specific thing for free - like https://cssgradient.io/ or https://www.lipsum.com/
Hey!.
Yes, I believe that site would make money from advertisements they have displayed on the website.You could monetize though ad sense, but you would need to work on getting traffic to your site for someone to pay for advertising.
You could do a freemium model- offer some free tools on a $0 plan, and then an option for the customer to upgrade if they want to.
If depends what your business idea is, are you thinking a gif editor like that website?.
Be laser focused on your proposition and work out if your customer would pay for this, why they would pay for this, can they already get this for free somewhere else etc.
Hope that helps.
Good luck.
Sophie