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I launched a free tools site called Kody Tools (https://www.kodytools.com/) almost two years ago as a side hustle. It features over 600 tools, a clean and responsive design, and I invested a lot of effort into promotion. I assumed monetizing with ads or selling ad space would be straightforward.

But despite all that, it only pulls in about 7-10k visitors a month, and the revenue is practically zero. Hosting costs me around $20-$40 monthly, making me seriously reconsider my approach.

I’m curious to hear how you’d tackle this kind of situation. What worked for you when monetizing a free tools site without driving away users or ruining the experience?

Any tips or strategies would be hugely appreciated!

Comments (12)

tacostakohashi · 6h ago

I think online tools is not a bad idea, but a lot of the tools there are low quality and gimmicky, like anything that can be done in your head, or using a pocket calculator / trivial spreadsheet:

https://www.kodytools.com/commission-calculator https://www.kodytools.com/half-your-age-plus-seven-calculato... etc...

Perhaps it would be better to split out the financial tools (bonds, cagr, interest) from the programmer/text tools stuff.

I do actually think online / browser based tools that people hit via search for very occasional / niche uses is a good idea, e.g.:

https://everytimezone.com/ http://gc.kls2.com/

For these, they do non-trivial things, and are also a combination of a tool / logic plus some embedded reference data (timezones / DST, airport locations, etc) - I think that's the key. Maybe try fewer, higher quality tools with dedicated domain names instead of quantity.

bhag2066 · 2h ago

Cool site. Have you considered building your own paid tools that align with the problem customers are solving with your free tools, and keeping all the advertising slots for yourself?

For example, you would own Focus Flux (the advertiser I see on the site) and use Kody Tools as lead gen for it.

lordkrandel · 8h ago

1) What kind of business would advertise on your site? What kind of ad would you click if you were a visitor? 2) Are you relying on ad space on a website in 2025? Google and social media own the space. You wanna ad where everybody's at 3) Make premium tools 4) these kind of tools are one off, you almost never come back 5) it's almost as hard to find a tool you need than solving the original problem yourself. Maybe an AI/tags searching tools for problems could help. "Hey, do you have something for x?" "Yes here: y"

benoau · 9h ago

Make an app-version of the website with ads + pay-to-remove-ads and focus the website on promoting that.

Make it easier to share results with people so they visit your website too, this would need presentation changes to emphasize the result like looking at your amortization calculator the answer is just a plain number tucked over to the side of the page even if I could share my calculation with someone I'd probably have to tell them where to look.

KodyBerns99 · 9h ago

Thanks for that idea, i really appreciate that.

benoau · 9h ago

Also allow customization, most people probably want specific tools repeatedly nobody will want everything or to wade through it all. You could do this through browser storage mechanisms pretty easily but it also gives you a reason to provide accounts, then you could offer groups shared space for the tools they need and the answers/results they need, and charge subscriptions too.

dotcoma · 9h ago

What kind of ‘ads’ are you trying to use to monetise it ?

KodyBerns99 · 9h ago

adsene and affiliate banners

dotcoma · 9h ago

That’s why!

dotcoma · 9h ago

Have you not learned from Google and Facebook?

You need to sell space as “promoted tool” for a week.

You also need more traffic. Do you have returning users or not ?

747-8F · 8h ago

www.kodytools.com is neat. Could you please have a 'daylight' background as well?

AznHisoka · 9h ago

Imagine if you owned a business and you had to pay $1000 to advertise on your site. What type of business would you need to own to make it worthwhile for you?