I built a site that will never make a dollar, and I did the math on why it's worth it
Indie Hackers is a site about revenue, so here is my revenue report: zero. Planned revenue: zero. Monetization roadmap: there isn't one. This is a post about why I built something with no business model on purpose, and why I think the math still works out.
The project is pickpokemon.xyz, a free Pokémon fan site. Random generator with filters, a team randomizer, some calculators, a name inventor, four little browser games. No ads, no accounts, no premium tier, no email capture. It covers all 1,025 Pokémon across nine generations, and it is an unofficial fan project, which is also the first honest reason there's no business model: building a paid product on someone else's IP is how you get a very educational letter from a lawyer. The ceiling on monetizing this responsibly is close to the floor.
But I want to be truthful here: the legal angle is a convenient excuse, not the real reason. The real reason is that I didn't want this one to be a business. I wanted one project in my life where the only stakeholder is a ten-year-old version of me.
The cost side of the ledger
Let me do the accounting like a proper indie hacker, because the costs are real even when the revenue isn't.
Cash costs: a domain and hosting on a free-tier-friendly stack. Rounds to almost nothing per month. This is the boring part of the ledger.
Time costs: this is the interesting part, because it's where the last couple of years quietly changed the equation. I build nights and weekends, and I build with Claude Code, Anthropic's agentic coding tool. I describe what a feature should do, it writes, I review and correct. I'm still the product owner, the taste, and the QA — but the sheer typing-hours between "I want a daily Wordle-style Pokémon puzzle" and "it works" have collapsed.
I want to be precise about what that means, because "AI built my app" discourse gets sloppy. Claude Code didn't decide anything. Every feature on the site is a decision I made and a review I did. What it changed is the scope a hobbyist can finish. A site with this many toys — generators, calculators, minigames with their own logic — was previously a multi-year weekend grind, which in practice means an abandoned repo with three finished features. Now it's an evening hobby that actually ships. The graveyard of side projects is mostly filled with things that died of scope. That's the specific disease this tooling treats.
The revenue side, redefined
So what do I get back? Not money, not a portfolio piece (my day-job résumé does not urgently need "randomizes Pokémon" on it), and I refuse to pretend it's "learning" — I could learn on something monetizable.
What I get is this: as a kid I filled notebook margins with Pokémon stuff, and the machine those games ran on could do exactly what the cartridge said and nothing more. The dream toybox — pick me a random one, quiz me, invent a fake one, track my collection — was technically impossible for a child with a pencil. Now I'm an adult who can summon that toybox into existence, and other people who were once that kid can just... use it. For free. Forever, or as long as I pay for the domain.
There's a name for this in normal human accounting: it's a gift. Gifts are allowed to cost you something. That's roughly what makes them gifts.
Why I'd argue this belongs on Indie Hackers anyway
Because the zero-revenue project fixed something in my relationship with building. When every side project is a lottery ticket, every slow week feels like failure, and you start optimizing for metrics before you've made anything worth measuring. This site has no metric that can disappoint me. The only KPI is "would the kid with the notebook think this is cool," and that KPI was hit at launch.
And here's the twist I didn't expect: with zero revenue pressure, I polish more, not less. Nobody's paying, so nothing is owed — every detail I get right is voluntary, which turns out to be a much better fuel than obligation.
I'll keep the honest books going forward. Revenue: zero. Costs: a domain, some evenings. Return: a debt to a ten-year-old, paid in full, with interest.
Not every project should be this. But I'd argue every builder should have one.
