I launched a free AI tool portfolio for tradespeople 15 days ago — here's what actually happened
I'm a 5th-generation electrician in Central Texas. I build estimates in my truck, write review responses at 10 pm, and post job listings on my phone between jobs. I got tired of it, so I built tools to do it for me — then put them on the internet for free.
That was 15 days ago. Here's the honest update.
What I built
Tradeskit.ai is a portfolio of free AI tools for tradespeople and local service businesses — roofers, painters, HVAC, landscapers, cleaners, pest control, fencing, dog groomers. Six tools live:
Estimate generator (the workhorse — 75% of all usage)
Invoice generator
Review response generator
Job description writer
Follow-up text generator
Agent-readiness scan (new — more on this below)
The free tier is 5 uses/day, no account. Pro is $19/month for unlimited use and a saved rate card that builds send-ready exact-price quotes instead of ballpark estimates.
The numbers after 15 days
472 total visits, 213 unique visitors
32 tool runs (15% run rate — the number I'm working to improve)
1 paying Pro subscriber
3 email subscribers
27 Google impressions, 4 clicks — all branded so far, no keyword rankings yet
45+ trade-specific landing pages indexed
What's working
Facebook groups. One post in a painting contractor's group hit 33 comments and generated 3 warm leads in a single afternoon. That's been the only real distribution so far — organic, no ads, no budget.
The posting is inconsistent because I'm running an active electrical business at the same time. That's the honest constraint.
What I'm building next
The agent-readiness scan is the thing I'm most excited about. It scores any local business website 0–100 on whether AI assistants (ChatGPT, Siri, Perplexity, Google AI) can find, trust, and book them. I ran it on local HVAC shops near me:
One shop: 0/100
Another: 15/100
Another: 23/100
The offer is $750 to fix it + $99/month monitoring. I'm going to sell it myself to land the first 10 customers. That's the branch from the original "fully hands-off" plan — but we built something worth selling, so I'm selling it.
What I haven't figured out yet
Consistent distribution without burning out. SEO is a waiting game (3–6 months minimum for a new domain). Facebook group posting is manual and falls apart on long workdays. The real answer is probably getting the first few agent-ready clients and letting word-of-mouth do more of the work while the SEO compounds.
Happy to answer questions — especially from anyone who's done the free-tool-to-paid-service motion before. How did you bridge the gap between "people love the free thing" and "people pay for the service"?
What stood out to me wasn't the traffic or the conversion numbers.
It was the shift from "fully hands-off" to personally selling the agent-readiness service.
Those can look like the same business from the outside while quietly optimizing for very different things underneath.
That's the part I'd be most curious about.
You caught the real thing, and I'm not going to pretend you didn't.
The free tools are the hands-off play — SEO that compounds, automated upsell, eventually sellable. But that's a slow burn; it won't pay for months. Selling the agent-readiness service by hand is the opposite of hands-off, and yeah — a hand-sold service carries a worse multiple and isn't passive. I know that going in.
I'm doing it on purpose anyway, because right now I'm optimizing for two things the tools can't give me yet: cash while the SEO ranks, and face time with the exact customers (small HVAC shops) so I learn what they'll actually pay for instead of guessing from a dashboard.
What keeps it from just being "I built myself a job": the service is a beachhead, not the product. Every one I sell by hand I'm trying to productize — onboarding a client should become inserting a row, not a custom build — and it's the on-ramp to the thing that's actually recurring and ownable, an AI receptionist. If that productizing stalls and I'm still hand-building these one at a time in a year, then you're right and I've drifted into a services business I said I didn't want.
So, underneath: I'm optimizing for information and cash now, passivity later. Hand-selling is how I'm buying the information. Ask me again in 90 days whether I turned it into a product or just talked myself into a job.
That's actually the part I'd be least confident projecting 90 days forward.
Not because the plan sounds unreasonable.
Because "this service is a beachhead" and "this service is the business" can often look almost identical for a surprisingly long time.
The thing that interests me isn't whether the service can be productized.
It's what evidence would actually justify concluding that it already deserves to be treated as a beachhead rather than the destination.
I've got a few thoughts on that, but it's probably more than I'd try to unpack properly in a thread.
What's the best email to reach you on?