Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I quit my job to make free web tools

nslookup.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 105 posts

Re: I quit my job to make free web tools

#61

Post by tppiotrowski »

andris9 wrote: post #42
hwers wrote: post #22

I'm always curious how many visitors you have to get to reach $500 per month numbers from ads. I understand the author probably can't reveal exact numbers here but if anyone knows rough but real life numbers I'd be curious to hear (I haven't ever done ad based revenue myself and I don't trust CPM numbers I'd read by googling, or the spread is just too broad).

Just to compare, https://nodemailer.com had 194k pageviews (42k “active users” as reported by Google Analytics, whatever that means) in January and the BuySellAds payout was $156.45

I've used nodemailer. Thanks for building it. I have similar stats on my personal project and those earnings are discouraging. Any luck with donations? I've used ko-fi with limited success.

Thanks for putting some numbers out there.

Re: I quit my job to make free web tools

#62

Post by mathgladiator »

pul wrote: post #2

Hi HN! Ruurtjan here, from NsLookup.io. I've read plenty of these kinds of blog posts, and they've been a big motivator for me to take the jump. So I thought I'd share my story here as well. Thanks everyone, for giving me the confidence to give entrepreneurship a try. I'll hang around today to answer any questions, so ask me anything :)

Welcome to the club!

Re: I quit my job to make free web tools

#63

Post by kingcharles »

pul wrote: post #4

Someone on Reddit asked how I make a living. Might be interesting for folks here too. Right now, we're living off our savings and my wife's salary. Both sites are already profitable, though. I've recently launched an API for NsLookup, which now generates around 100 USD / month, and both sites have ads that generate income. Not enough to replace my salary yet, but I'm confident I can increase it over time. Ads have a…

I broke nslookup.io when I entered one of my emoji domains :)

Re: I quit my job to make free web tools

#64

Post by pul »

kingcharles wrote: post #63
pul wrote: post #4

Someone on Reddit asked how I make a living. Might be interesting for folks here too. Right now, we're living off our savings and my wife's salary. Both sites are already profitable, though. I've recently launched an API for NsLookup, which now generates around 100 USD / month, and both sites have ads that generate income. Not enough to replace my salary yet, but I'm confident I can increase it over time. Ads have a…

I broke nslookup.io when I entered one of my emoji domains :)

Which one? Because I explicitly added support for that and tested it.

Re: I quit my job to make free web tools

#65

Post by iRobbery »

gazelle-kopen.nl

Would have expected this could rake in some SEO traffic though, but surprised that didnt work for you. Or maybe surprised isnt the right word, maybe i have the initial high hope for it when you registered it and tried it :)

Re: I quit my job to make free web tools

#66

Post by pul »

stanislavb wrote: post #26
pul wrote: post #4

Someone on Reddit asked how I make a living. Might be interesting for folks here too. Right now, we're living off our savings and my wife's salary. Both sites are already profitable, though. I've recently launched an API for NsLookup, which now generates around 100 USD / month, and both sites have ads that generate income. Not enough to replace my salary yet, but I'm confident I can increase it over time. Ads have a…

Good luck, mate! If you bother to verify NsLookup.io on SaaSHub, I can get it on its weekly newsletter. That could help you a bit. (just ping me by email/twitter once done). Cheers!

Thanks for the offer :) I already submitted it a while ago: https://www.saashub.com/nslookup-io-alternatives

Re: I quit my job to make free web tools

#67

Post by pul »

waffle_maniac wrote: post #32
pul wrote: post #4

Someone on Reddit asked how I make a living. Might be interesting for folks here too. Right now, we're living off our savings and my wife's salary. Both sites are already profitable, though. I've recently launched an API for NsLookup, which now generates around 100 USD / month, and both sites have ads that generate income. Not enough to replace my salary yet, but I'm confident I can increase it over time. Ads have a…

Have you considered signing up as a Brave creator? Could generate more income from those that have auto contribute turned on.

I have. In fact, you can check this for any site using nslookup.io ;) (so meta) See the TXT records at https://www.nslookup.io/dns-records/nslookup.io

Re: I quit my job to make free web tools

#68

Post by collaborative »

tppiotrowski wrote: post #61
andris9 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to compare, https://nodemailer.com had 194k pageviews (42k “active users” as reported by Google Analytics, whatever that means) in January and the BuySellAds payout was $156.45

I've used nodemailer. Thanks for building it. I have similar stats on my personal project and those earnings are discouraging. Any luck with donations? I've used ko-fi with limited success. Thanks for putting some numbers out there.

Very discouraging indeed. I gave ads a try on 6groups.com and quickly ran away from them. As an advertiser (because of some other online shops I run), I also know how much it costs to get your ads clicked on. The payout offered to affiliated sites by ad networks is a disgrace and definitely not worth the space and distraction they add

Re: I quit my job to make free web tools

#69

Post by pul »

dudus wrote: post #45
osrec wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do enough people use that browser to make it worthwhile?

No.

I can confirm. I earn about 2-3 BAT (€1.5 - €2) each month for nslookup.io (without serving Brave ads) and whoismyisp.org (with Brave ads) combined. That's ~1M page views across all browsers. Not lucrative at all ;)

Re: I quit my job to make free web tools

#70

Post by pul »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #41
teh_klev wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no privacy issue here, there aren't source IP addresses attached, you can't tell who's looking these up. It's up there with Amazon's (for example) "other people bought" recommendations, you can't tell who did the looking up. They're just domain names which are effectively public records. And even if you thought you registered a super secret domain name (no such thing), maybe the registrar looked it up, or so…

I do understand all of that, still it feels weird to me. If I'm looking up a staging domain I'm not trying to broadcast that to the world, for example You know the Qualsys SSL Tester tool? That has a checkbox about making the result public or not and that is because by default people wouldn't expect the domain to be leaked (even though it's already public information that doesn't really matter)

It's a fair point, and I've thought about this when making the stats public. There are plenty domain enumeration tools out there. DNS data is inherently public, so I don't think one should rely on it for their security model.
Post reply on HN