I built a tool, how can i monetize it ?

jay_emp0

jay_emp0

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Hi everyone,
Wanted to share something I just shipped over the weekend. I built a free, open source Word & Character Counter

It supports
- plain text,
- Upload .pdf, .docx, .txt, .srt, .md
- OCR support for scanned PDFs
- Web scraping: fetch visible text from any URL using proxy fallbacks
- Repeated word analysis with stop word filtering

This project helped me get back into the joy of building. It’s been a few years wearing too many hats engineer, PM, marketing, sales for the thrill of money. Now that I'm free (unemployed), I’m returning to the basics and doing what I love. Its pretty simple to make tools like this. I just dont know how to monetize it, any ideas ?
 

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Turn it into a Chrome Extension. Add extra features in a paid version.
Free version brings users, paid version brings money.
 
jay_emp0 said:
Hi everyone,
Wanted to share something I just shipped over the weekend. I built a free, open source Word & Character Counter

It supports
- plain text,
- Upload .pdf, .docx, .txt, .srt, .md
- OCR support for scanned PDFs
- Web scraping: fetch visible text from any URL using proxy fallbacks
- Repeated word analysis with stop word filtering

This project helped me get back into the joy of building. It’s been a few years wearing too many hats engineer, PM, marketing, sales for the thrill of money. Now that I'm free (unemployed), I’m returning to the basics and doing what I love. Its pretty simple to make tools like this. I just dont know how to monetize it, any ideas ?
Click to expand...
There are manybof those but you can still monetize it. It all boils down to marketing, try to reach your target audience. Reddit might be a good place to start.
 
johnbennett said:
Turn it into a Chrome Extension. Add extra features in a paid version.
Free version brings users, paid version brings money.
Click to expand...
is chrome extentions still a thing ? i thought that market dried up years back
 
Okay so like johnbennett mentioned, a Chrome extension with a paid plan is a good idea.

But what you should be really thinking about imo, is who is your ideal customer, what features you could sell them, and how can you get their eyes on your service.

Don't solve problems for the sake of it. Your decision making process should be informed by what customers actually want/need.
 
The main question you should ask yourself is "who are those that will find this tool very useful?"

Write a list of those people.

Next question is "where do the categories of people who are interested in this tool, hang out online?".

Could be Facebook groups, subreddits, X spaces, Quora, YouTube comments, eetc.

Next line of action is to find yourself in their midst and provide your tool as their solution.

You can use ChatGPT to get this analysis done if you can't figure out yourself.

Hope that helps.
 
Upload the software download websites like softsonic. Give a trial version to users and a licenced paid version. Maybe 5-10% of users will buy paid version and you make passiive income.
 
Nice tool, looks really useful. For monetization, maybe try offering a premium version with extra features or usage limits, or add a donation option. You could also look into SEO and content marketing to drive traffic, then monetize with ads or affiliate links
 
Cool! Good marketing is what you need if you wanna sell it. Try thinking about how you would market it and what plans you can offer to the buyers.
 
Create a site like this tool and monetize with adsense :
Wordcounter.com
Another example, image compression and resizer
Imageresizer.com
 
jay_emp0 said:
Hi everyone,
Wanted to share something I just shipped over the weekend. I built a free, open source Word & Character Counter

It supports
- plain text,
- Upload .pdf, .docx, .txt, .srt, .md
- OCR support for scanned PDFs
- Web scraping: fetch visible text from any URL using proxy fallbacks
- Repeated word analysis with stop word filtering

This project helped me get back into the joy of building. It’s been a few years wearing too many hats engineer, PM, marketing, sales for the thrill of money. Now that I'm free (unemployed), I’m returning to the basics and doing what I love. Its pretty simple to make tools like this. I just dont know how to monetize it, any ideas ?
Click to expand...
You can monetize by adding upgrade options: for example, limit the number of free uses per day and charge for unlimited plans, or offer a pay-per-call API. Additionally, you can embed light advertising, open up donations via Buy Me a Coffee, or sell licenses for internal use.
 
get yourself a .tools domain
upload the project with a few more simple tools and make it an universal text-related online tools website!
 
speedji said:
get yourself a .tools domain
upload the project with a few more simple tools and make it an universal text-related online tools website!
Click to expand...
niceeee, i like it

and then ? put ads ?
 
Update an option to use the built-in AI, where you click on a paragraph and rewrite it via Deep Seek, Grok, ChatGPT, charge them for an account on 200 credits a month, and spend $5 on API credits, charge them $10 a month—something like that.
 
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