FeeCalculate

Over the past month I built FeeCalculate — free fee/payout calculators for Etsy, eBay, Amazon, Shopify sellers and Upwork/Fiverr freelancers.

My assumption going in was that the "big" calculators (Amazon FBA, PayPal, Stripe) would drive the most traffic. Turns out that market is saturated with dedicated competitors who've had comparison tools live for years.

What actually got my first real organic click was a calculator for Swappa — a small, low-competition marketplace nobody else had built a dedicated tool for. One search query, one click, but it was proof the "small niche, low competition" approach works better than competing head-on with established players.

Lesson so far: for a solo project with zero marketing budget, picking underserved niches beats going after high-volume keywords that are already owned by well-funded competitors.

Curious if others building tools/directories have seen the same pattern — go niche first, expand once you have proof of demand?