Launched a free developer tools site after 30 years in IT — here is what the first month actually looks like
Background: I spent 30 years in enterprise IT watching developers make expensive infrastructure decisions based on bad information — outdated pricing guides, comparison articles written by marketers, and tools that require an email address before showing you a number. So I built infratally.com, a suite of free developer tools with no accounts, no paywalls, and no hidden affiliate bias.
What is live right now:
Seven tools including cloud hosting cost calculators, a DNS propagation checker, an SSL certificate checker, a PaaS cost calculator, and an object storage calculator. Eight articles covering cloud cost comparisons and infrastructure decisions. Full AWS stack — S3, CloudFront, Lambda for the backend tools.
The interesting engineering problem I ran into: building the DNS checker required raw UDP socket queries to bypass Lambda’s internal resolver. Standard Python DNS libraries inside Lambda always hit AWS’s cached resolver regardless of which IP you specify. The EDNS0 fix for large TXT record sets was its own rabbit hole — wrote about it here if you are curious: https://dev.to/infratally/why-your-dns-checker-returns-empty-results-for-large-txt-records-3cnp
Honest numbers after the first month:
213 total impressions in Google Search Console. One click. 25 views on the first Dev.to article. Zero revenue. Vultr, DigitalOcean and Railway affiliates live.
What is working: the S3 alternatives article is already ranking positions 2 to 6 for specific pricing queries. Not converting to clicks yet but the rankings are real for a brand new domain.
What is not working yet: everything else. Traffic is essentially zero outside of Google Search Console impressions.
Next steps: more content in the S3 cluster since that is what Google has decided this site is about. HN Show HN post once account karma is high enough.
Happy to answer questions about the AWS architecture, the affiliate strategy, or anything else.
Hi! 👋
Infratally.com is an excellent resource for developers, and I believe it deserves more attention. We can help you get more traffic through targeted social media campaigns and developer communities.
Let’s talk about how we can promote your site and drive more users to it!