LinkedIn Roaster
Get a harsh reality check by roasting your LinkedIn Profile
So, the project is dead due to LinkedIn Law Enforcement request.
At the moment, my expenses crossed 1k USD. A friend of mine and I added some paid features to offset the costs. Combined with donations, I managed to earn ~1192 USD, when spending 1114 USD in total.
I keep the project running and aim to improve paid features to give people not just a laugh at themselves but meaningful insights and ways to improve their profiles.
In total: 62k+ page views, more than 36k profiles roasted, and only a few bucks in profit :))
While starting this project with a single HTML page was fun, it was limited by the ability to add and maintain new features like Top Roasts, New Roasts, etc.
I decided to rewrite this project to react and get the property structured backend. It took me another day, but now I am happy with the result.
It was a real surprise when I woke up this morning and found emails from Claude.ai saying that my API access was turned off and another email from linkedin api provider (because you can't use your developer account to access provide data :( )
saying the same. Then I decided to check the traffic and it was rather surprising, I got around 600 visitors and have no idea how many profiles roasted (Remember, I didn't have a db and caching was implemented in memory)
So for the next few days I was fighting traffic, aiming to reduce the costs for LinkedIn API and begging Claude to increase token limits so I can get rid of ChatGPT fallback.
At that time I got BuyMeACoffee button added to the website to somehow cover the cost of maintenance.
I wasn't careful with API provider for LinkedIn. It was expensive and I wasn't using it properly (Cost of building fast). That led to a few hundred US dollars spent in just 2 days.
Donations weren't covering this cost at the time, so I changed quite a few providers and implemented proper caching and at the time when my expenses crossed 600USD - the project finally stopped burning money
Having some experience building web apps I knew that it would take more time to setup all the frameworks and databases than building the project. I went with a single HTML file and just a few .go files for the backend which I later deployed to fly.io with the frontend deployed to Firebase Hosting https://liroast.web.app. I didn't think much about the name of the project as I wanted to share it with my friends initially.
However, I also decided to share it on Hacker News + Reddit that night.
I was watching a video on YouTube about the project called GitHub Roaster and it got me thinking that people don't flex their skills and titles on Github, while LinkedIn is a completely different story. So I decided to build it just for fun to spend my spare time developing something after my 5 to 9 job
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