Honest write up on what shipped, what the stack looks like, what surprised me, and what is open. Pre-revenue at the time of writing this. Posting because I am genuinely curious what to fix.
I needed a status page for another project and almost paid StatusPage.io £79 a month. Spent a Saturday building a basic one instead. Realised it was the kind of thing where the price has not moved in years even though the underlying compute now costs almost nothing.
Played out the same exercise for eight other categories. URL shortener, uptime monitor, screenshot API, changelog tool, QR generator, broken link checker, email signature generator, waitlist builder. Each one a tool someone could build solo, each one with an incumbent charging $20 to $80 a month for what is mostly a database with a UI.
Decided to ship all nine. The infra is shared so the marginal cost per product is near zero. The hard part is not the building, it is figuring out which one anybody actually wants to pay for.
Same stack for every service.
Each service is its own Fly app. Independent deploys. No monorepo, no shared library. Some duplication, no coordination overhead. For a solo developer I think that is the right trade.
The HTML is server rendered template literals. No React, no Next.js, no build step. Page load is fast and the source is readable.
SQLite is fine for more than people think. I genuinely did not need Postgres for any of these. Backups via Fly volume snapshots and a nightly export.
Shared infra is the unlock. Every service reuses the same auth middleware, the same Stripe webhook handler, the same SQLite migration pattern. New product = copy a directory, swap the domain logic. The marginal cost per product is small once the first one exists.
Pricing is harder than building. The maths for "what should this cost" is unsettled at every price point under $30. I cribbed from the closest competitor in each category and divided by four.
RapidAPI distribution is real. Devs genuinely search there for APIs to integrate. Took me a day to list all nine. Worth it.
Free tiers need to actually be useful. Bitly killed its free tier last year and got mocked for it. The free tier is the funnel, not a gate.
One line each. Click through if you want to poke at the API.
Every one has a free tier, a public REST API, an OpenAPI spec, and a /blog post explaining how to use it.
Genuinely asking, not rhetorical.
Zero paying users at the time of writing this. A handful of free tier signups from sharing it with a few friends. The whole suite is built but the marketing has not started yet. This post is part of figuring out where the demand actually is.
Happy to answer anything, including the awkward questions about whether nine products is delusional or whether the maths actually works.