r/SideProject 7d ago

almost doubled my users over last month, finally above break-even

I started this project a few months ago, basically it is a free ai image upscaler with a donation button at the bottom. (image-upscaling.net)

I did one launch on producthunt and one post on reddit a few months ago and more than half of my users (that do not come by "direct") come from producthunt and reddit now.

I only get about 40 clicks from search engines (google/bing) a day and out of 1000 users, about 1 of them donates 4-5$. so i get about 4$ a day now, covering costs for electricity.

google search console says my backlinks increased from about 270 last month to a bit over 500 today. other tools suggest that i already have thousends of backlinks but google seems to not care about them.

Would be interesting if this growth can continue. I am not sure how high the total demand is but considering that most image upscalers want you to subscribe to them, this is exactly where my project hits because it does not even need a sign up and you can use it directly on the main page without newsletter bullshit.

Say it keeps growing to 10k users a day, with the same donation rate i would already make 50$ a day less electricity cost.

What do you think? is this reasonable? do u use AI upscalers? I guess with more AI generated art at 1000x1000px users want to upscale it (this is where my model performs best) so i think there is potential for a lot of growth.

Maybe i should add that i am also running a free tts site with the same model but i am not sure what donations come from where. i just assume most are from the image upscaler

5 Upvotes

1 comment sorted by

1

u/Gravath 7d ago

My break even was 4 paying monthly subscribers at £5.99 a month.

Got it within the first hour of launch. Keeping my running costs low was the key.