I’ve been wanting to start a side project for months. You know how it goes — you think about it, research frameworks, bookmark tutorials, and never actually start.
Yesterday I decided to just do it. I opened up an AI coding assistant and said: “Let’s build a website with free developer tools.” Four hours later, I had a live site with 9 working tools, analytics, email capture, and a domain.
Here’s exactly what happened, step by step.
The idea
I didn’t start with some grand business plan. I started with a question: can AI actually help me build something that makes money? Not in theory — for real.
After going back and forth on ideas (SaaS tool? API service? content site?), I landed on something simple: a blog with free browser-based tools. Think JSON formatters, regex testers, color generators — stuff developers use every day. The twist: every tool runs right on the page. No backend, no sign-ups, no ads (yet).
Why this? Because free tools get shared. People bookmark them, post them on Reddit, link to them from Stack Overflow. That’s organic traffic you don’t have to pay for.
Hour 1: Setup
I told the AI to scaffold an Astro blog. I’d never used Astro before — I just knew it was good for static sites and SEO. The AI installed Node.js (I didn’t even have it on this machine), created the project, and customized the template.
Within 30 minutes I had:
- A working Astro site with a homepage, blog listing, and about page
- Custom branding and navigation
- A content schema that separates “tool” posts from regular articles
The thing that surprised me: I didn’t write a single line of config. I described what I wanted, the AI wrote it, and it worked.
Hour 2: Building the tools
This is where it got fun. I asked the AI to create interactive tools — one at a time — each as a blog post with embedded JavaScript. No React, no framework overhead. Just HTML, CSS, and vanilla JS inside Markdown files.
In about an hour, we built:
- JSON Formatter — paste, format, minify, copy
- Base64 Encoder/Decoder — with file upload support
- Regex Tester — real-time match highlighting
- Color Palette Generator — spacebar to regenerate, lock colors you like
- JWT Decoder — shows header, payload, expiration status
Each tool took about 5-10 minutes. The AI wrote the code, I tested it, we fixed bugs, moved on. The biggest issue was that Astro’s Markdown parser kept eating the JavaScript — backticks in scripts got interpreted as code blocks. Took us a few tries to figure that out.
By the end of hour 2, I had 5 working tools. All client-side, zero hosting costs.
Hour 3: More tools + going live
We kept the momentum going and added 4 more tools:
- Markdown Preview — live side-by-side editor
- Lorem Ipsum Generator — with fun modes (pirate, office jargon)
- CSS Gradient Generator — visual builder with CSS export
- URL Encoder/Decoder — with encodeURI vs encodeURIComponent explained
Then it was time to go live. I bought a domain (aimadetools.com — €12/year), pushed to GitHub, and connected to Vercel. The AI walked me through every step, including the DNS configuration.
Total deployment time: about 15 minutes.
Hour 4: The boring (important) stuff
With the site live, we set up everything you need but nobody wants to build:
- Google Search Console — so Google knows the site exists
- Google Analytics — to track visitors
- robots.txt + sitemap — SEO basics
- Email capture — connected to Kit (formerly ConvertKit), free up to 10,000 subscribers
- Custom favicon — SVG, looks sharp at any size
- AI model comparison page — a living reference page I can update with every new model release
Then we restructured the whole site into categories (Developer Tools, AI Tools, Learning Hub, Integrations, Tutorials) because I realized this thing was going to grow.
The total cost
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Domain (aimadetools.com) | €12/year |
| Hosting (Vercel) | $0 |
| AI assistant | Already had access |
| Email capture (Kit) | $0 |
| Analytics | $0 |
| Total | ~€1/month |
What I learned
AI is incredible at scaffolding. Setting up a project, writing boilerplate, configuring tools — this used to take me a full weekend. The AI did it in minutes.
AI still makes mistakes. The script/Markdown parsing issue cost us 30 minutes of debugging. The AI suggested a fix that didn’t work, then another that didn’t work, then finally got it right. You still need to understand what’s happening.
Shipping beats planning. I spent months thinking about side projects. Today I built one. The difference wasn’t skill or knowledge — it was just starting.
The hard part hasn’t started yet. Building the site was the easy part. Getting traffic, building an audience, actually making money — that’s the real challenge. I’ll share how that goes in future posts.
What’s next
I have a roadmap with 50+ content ideas. The plan is 2-3 posts per week, mixing tools with tutorials and honest write-ups like this one. I’ll publish monthly income reports with real numbers — even if those numbers are zero for a while.
If you want to follow along, subscribe to the newsletter — I’ll send updates when I publish new tools and share how the project is going.
And if you’re thinking about starting your own side project: just start. Open a terminal, talk to an AI, and ship something today. You can figure out the rest tomorrow.
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