How I got my AI Tarot Reading App built & launched with users in < 1 week

I'm definitely a software hacker and tend to dive right into building things when I have an idea. I had some surgeries in the past few weeks and during recovery have had limited energy to be up and about so I've been at my computer tinkering with some fun concepts, one of which was a tarot reading app!

I really didn't want to have to bother with the boilerplate of most subscription web apps: Auth, Payments, User / Data management, etc. so I started looking for something out of the box. I found a few and ended up settling on MakerKit. It has a React + Firebase solution optimized for SSR with NextJS. I was new to some of it, but it was really easy to pick up and the docs / Discord community made it a slam dunk.

In a day I had a really simple web app that let people log in, hit the [get a tarot reading] button, and then receive back a customized AI-written response. Fast-forward a week and I've implemented a bunch of different types of tarot readings, customs decks (generated with Midjourney!), some educational resources (helpful for SEO), and more.

The final tech stack was basically just MakerKit deployed on Vercel (well worth the $250 one time fee and the creator of it, Giancarlo, has no idea I'm writing this post), but I had to do a bit of a custom queue/worker implementation on AWS. To reduce load times and make the experience really thorough, there ends up being a lot of simultaneous calls to OpenAI. Rather than run them sequentially or in a Promise.all(), I ended up putting together a queue and workers to make it all scalable and error resilient. I'm sure there are other solutions too.

If you're interested in having some fun and getting some life advice / guidance, please check it out! There are free readings available: https://readmy.cards.

And throw a like on this post if this was a helpful point in the right direction for getting started quickly! 🙏