KodyBerns99

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!

A few months ago, I found myself searching for a Chrome extension to help block distracting sites, not just by domain, but also if the url included certain adult keywords. Most of what I found was either paid or didn’t offer robust features.

On top of that, none of the existing solutions let me set a custom redirect URL (so I could land on my dashboard or Google instead of a generic block page), which was important for my workflow.

As a developer, I like to maintain focused work hours and wanted something to automatically prevent access to sites like Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and similar platforms during that time. However, building such an extension can get expensive because most advanced AI code tools like Cursor, Windcraft, or Claude use token pricing, and I wanted to avoid those extra costs.

Instead, I decided to keep things efficient. For just $10, I got a GitHub Copilot subscription, chose GPT-4.1 as my coding agent, and built the FocusFlux Chrome extension (now live on the Chrome Web Store).

FocusFlux Chrome Extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/focusflux-%E2%80%93...

You might be surprised at the UI/UX and functionality FocusFlux delivers. It honestly exceeded even my own expectations. Of course, it took plenty of iteration and testing, but those $10 were absolutely worth it.

What are your thoughts on it? I’d love to hear your feedback.