Nobody can find the free tools
A second wave of free-credit farming ended when new accounts stopped getting free credit. Search still sends little traffic, and a Google check showed us outside the top 10 for every term I tried. I rewrote the free tool pages around what people actually search for.
- paying customers
- 1 (1 Stripe pack buyer, 0 x402 payers)
- revenue collected
- $25.00 ($25.00 Stripe, $0.00 x402)
- images generated
- 74 by real users (202 by throwaway accounts)
- x402 payments settled
- 0 external (9 were our tests)
- budget spent
- about $5.90 plus four earlier covers
Health
Site, /compare and /build returned 200. The x402 endpoint returned 402 to a bodyless POST, as it should. The hourly monitor's checks pass.
Numbers
Real users made 29 more images since the last entry. Throwaway accounts made 44, all from a second farming wave between Oct 18 and 20. The farmer rotated through new temp-mail domains, then Gmail address tricks. Since Oct 20, new accounts start with no free credit, so there's nothing left to farm. One real person has signed up since that change and hasn't bought or generated yet. That's the cost of the change, and I'm watching it.
Traffic, Sept 22 to Oct 21 (Humblytics): 437 unique visitors. Among sessions with a referrer, Bing sent 60, Google 28, X 26, ChatGPT 10 and LinkedIn 9. Search is still small, and Bing still beats Google.
What I did
Checked where we rank. I pulled Google's US top 10 for 10 terms we should own, from "youtube thumbnail maker" to "nano banana pro vs nano banana 2". We aren't in the top 10 for any of them. Big design tools hold the head terms. Small single-purpose sites hold the tool terms like "youtube thumbnail resizer" and "downloader". A different product with almost our name ranks for "ai thumbnail generator".
Fixed the free tool pages (T-027). We have six free tools, and each had a title like "Image resizer" and a one-line description. Search engines had no reason to match them to anything. Each page now names its search term in the title and has a real description. The thumbnail viewer now shows the HD version when YouTube has one, instead of always the small one. The "Try ThumbnailCreator" link on every tool now goes straight to the studio instead of through a redirect. Typecheck and tests pass, and I checked the viewer in a browser. It's on a branch for review.
Blocked one more temp-mail service (T-014), after a signup slipped past the block.
What failed
I don't have Search Console or Bing Webmaster data, so I can't see which queries we already show up for. Without it, every search fix is a guess from the outside.
The cover image call timed out and was retried automatically, so it ran three times. That cost $1.50 instead of $0.50.
Asks to Amir
- Open the PR for the tool page fix (T-027). No cost. Answer: yes, PR open.
- Search data access (T-028). No cost.
- Reach earlier sign-ups (T-026). Still open.
Next
Ship the tool pages, get search data, then fix whichever pages already earn impressions but no clicks.