How I got to $9 MRR in 3 months building a free video tool suite as a side project

I want to be honest upfront: $9 MRR is not an impressive number. But the trajectory is, and this post is about the trajectory.

What I built

VidClean is a free browser-based video and audio toolkit at vidclean.net. 28 tools plus a full timeline editor. No account, no watermark, no monthly cap. Available in English, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese.

The tools include AI silence removal, background noise removal, transcription, subtitle generation, video stabilization, audio repair, and standard editing utilities. The editor lets you remove silences automatically, edit video by editing the transcript, generate and edit captions, and export in 16:9 or 9:16 for Shorts and Reels.

I work a day job. This is a side project I build in the evenings and weekends.

The playbook I followed

I modeled this on iLovePDF. Their approach: build genuinely free tools with no account required, no watermark, and monetize at volume through a Pro tier. The free tier is not a demo. It is the actual product. People use it, trust it, and some of them eventually pay for more.

The economics only work if your costs scale slowly with usage. I structured the backend so that marginal cost per job stays very low, which is what makes a genuinely uncapped free tier sustainable. This is the part I am deliberately vague about because it is the only real moat I have.

Month 1 and 2

Built the core tools and focused entirely on SEO surface area. More tool pages, localization into Spanish and Portuguese, comparison pages against competitors, blog posts targeting tool-specific queries. No monetization at all during this period. The plan was to build trust and traffic first.

Traffic grew slowly. Around 30 visitors per day at the start. By the end of month 2 it was around 90 per day. Not exciting but the direction was right.

Month 3

Things accelerated. Traffic compounded as more pages ranked and positions improved.

Toward the end of month 2 I posted on Product Hunt and Hacker News. Both drove spikes but nothing that stuck long term. The organic SEO was the engine that kept compounding after those spikes faded.

By July 13 we hit 205 organic visitors in a single day. That was a milestone I had set for October 31. Hit it 3.5 months early.

I launched a Pro tier with a launch offer: $4.99 per month for life before July 30, $8.99 per month standard after. Pro adds larger file uploads, longer exports, styled captions, background music in the editor, and permanent project storage.

There was a bug in the checkout where the promo code was not auto-applying, which I fixed around July 10. Three weeks into having a working checkout, the first paying customer converted on July 15. The second converted July 17.

One cancelled today. So I am at $4.99 MRR with one customer as I write this.

What the numbers actually look like

3 months old
4,376 visitors last 30 days, up 125% month over month
Record single day: 246 visitors
Google Search Console: 2.3K clicks, 49.5K impressions, average position 18.8 (was 62 at launch)
100+ countries sending traffic
$4.99 MRR
Around $200 per month in infrastructure costs
Net: still losing money every month

What I learned

The hardest part was not building. Building became the comfort zone. The harder part was distribution.

My Reddit account got banned after posting about VidClean. LinkedIn is off limits because of my day job. So I relied almost entirely on organic SEO for 3 months. That worked, but it does not build backlinks on its own and it is slow.

The thing I would do differently: start the off-site distribution work in month 1. Review site listings, responding to journalist source requests, reaching out to small creator YouTubers with free access. Links take 2-3 months to show up in rankings. My domain rating is 2.9 after 3 months because I did not start that work until now.

What is next

The full timeline editor launched in the nav 2 days ago. It is now the flagship product. I am focused on getting the right people to find it: podcasters and talking-head YouTubers who spend hours cutting dead air every week.

The day job stays for now. The monthly burn is manageable against a salary and means I can run a generous free tier without pressure to monetize prematurely. That patience is actually a competitive advantage in a market where funded competitors are adding watermarks and paywalls.

If you are building something similar or have questions about the SEO approach or the iLovePDF playbook, happy to answer in the comments.