Ask HN: Why did my free tools site with 600 tools make almost $0 after 2 years?

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.

This may be a situation where less is more. It might sound good to say there are 600 tools, but no one wants to scroll through a list of 600 things to find what they may want to use. I see that you have a search, but if people are going to search anyway, they’re going to use a search engine. People tend to search for the thing they want to convert, and just pick the first or second result. The URL and SEO are going to matter a lot for this. The most popular things are also being built right into search engines, eating everyone’s lunch.

Sites with hundreds of tools are ones I bookmark, but then never go back to, because I usually just search for what I need in the moment, it’s faster than finding a bookmark and hunting to see if a site I have as a tool for it. The only time this might change is if a site has an exceptional design or does things the basic top results don’t have that I really want/need, and it’s something I do often enough for it to matter.

I read a story not long ago about a guy who does pretty well with his converter site. It has a single tool, the URL is specific to that tool so it ranks high in the results, and it is something businesses need. This means they are willing to pay, because it saves them enough time to make it worth it, and they are coming back again and again. It wasn’t low hanging fruit though. If I remember correctly it could take in bank statements from bunch of different banks and parse them to pull out the details for some specific business purpose. When the banks changed their format, he’d have to tweak his code to account for it.

I see the age calculator is at the top of the popularity list, but a million sites can calculate an age. I just stick date it Wolfram Alpha myself. Most people probably also do this in their head when precision isn’t needed. I think you want to find what other sites don’t do, or do poorly, focus on that, and optimize to show up in search results for people looking for those things. If it’s something a business is willing to pay for, even better. You’d have to be hugely popular to make ads generate enough to matter, and it’s hard to stand out in the converter website market at this stage of the game.

Well there are lots of sites that are basically a compendium of tools like the ones you have and almost all of them are free to use. The one that comes to mind as being the best is CyberChef, but that was developed by a British intelligence agency.

I think the easiest way to increase revenue is to focus on SEO ranking and putting up more non-intrusive ads. You could also turn it into a phone and desktop app and charge people for offline access.

Thank you so much for your suggestions, really appreciate it!

seems focusing on quality and SEO is definitely the way forward.