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AWS Community Builders profile image Saar Tochner
Saar Tochner for AWS Community Builders

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How I Used AI to Build, Name, and Ship a Privacy-First Product in One Night — for $3

Last night I had an idea: what if your webcam could catch you doing bad habits — biting your nails, slouching, picking your skin — and call you out in real-time? No servers, no cloud processing, no privacy concerns. Just AI running inside your browser.

By morning, dontdothat.click was live. Total out-of-pocket cost: $3. Here's how AI did most of the heavy lifting.

The Idea in 30 Seconds

A static website with three panels: behaviors you want to track on the left, a live camera feed in the center, and a "caught!" log on the right. The AI model runs locally in the browser using Transformers.js — specifically a CLIP vision model that compares your camera frames against text descriptions of your habits. Zero data ever leaves the user's machine.

The monetization? A single Google AdSense banner. Passive income, zero maintenance.

Claude Code as a Co-Founder

The interesting part wasn't the code — it was everything around the code. I used Claude Code (Anthropic's CLI tool) as my co-pilot for the entire journey, and the most valuable moments were the non-obvious ones.

Finding the Right Name (The Hard Part)

Naming a product is notoriously difficult. I started with "WatchMe" but quickly realized most obvious domains were taken. Here's where Claude Code got creative — I asked it to suggest alternatives and then check availability directly against the Route 53 API:

aws route53domains check-domain-availability \
    --domain-name dontdothat.click --region us-east-1
# → AVAILABLE
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Claude checked 20+ domains across .com, .help, .ai, .bot, and .click TLDs in seconds. Most were taken. But it also pulled pricing from Route 53:

TLD Register/yr Renew/yr
.ai $129 $129
.bot $71 $71
.help $16 $16
.com $15 $15
.click $3 $3

When I set a $25 total budget (including marketing), Claude immediately did the math: $3 for .click leaves room to breathe, while .ai would eat 5x the entire budget. For a side project validating an idea, that's an easy call.
And honestly? dontdothat.click is a better name than dontdothat.ai. It's funny, memorable, and the TLD is part of the joke. Sometimes the cheapest option is the best option.

Cost-Effective AWS Architecture

The full stack costs practically nothing:

Domain (Route 53):     $3/year
S3 Static Hosting:     ~$0.01/month (AWS credits)
CloudFront CDN:        ~$0.00 (free tier / credits)
ACM Certificate:       Free
────────────────────────────
Total year 1:          ~$3.12
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Claude set up the entire infrastructure in a single session — S3 bucket with static hosting, ACM certificate with DNS validation, CloudFront distribution with HTTPS (required for camera a
ccess), and Route 53 DNS records. All automated, all in one conversation.

The key commands were straightforward:

# Create bucket + enable website hosting
aws s3api create-bucket --bucket dontdothat.click
aws s3 website s3://dontdothat.click/ --index-document index.html

# Request SSL certificate
aws acm request-certificate \
    --domain-name dontdothat.click \
    --validation-method DNS

# Upload the site
aws s3 sync . s3://dontdothat.click/
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The $0 Marketing Plan

With $22 left in the budget, Claude's honest advice was: spend zero on paid marketing. At this scale, a $10 Reddit ad buys you ~200 impressions. Instead:

  • r/InternetIsBeautiful: A privacy-first AI tool is perfect for this sub. One viral post = 10-50K visits.
  • Hacker News "Show HN": "AI runs entirely in your browser" is exactly the kind of technical novelty HN loves.
  • Product Hunt: 15 minutes to set up, strong in the "Privacy" category.
  • This blog post: You're reading part of the marketing plan right now.

Free channels with high-quality traffic beat micro-budget paid ads every time for indie products.

The AI-in-Browser Trick

The technical core is surprisingly simple. CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) can compare images against text descriptions — exactly what we need. Using Transformers.js, the e
ntire model runs in WebAssembly:

import { pipeline } from '@huggingface/transformers';

const classifier = await pipeline(
  'zero-shot-image-classification',
  'Xenova/clip-vit-base-patch16'
);

// Every 3 seconds, classify the camera frame
const results = await classifier(cameraFrame, [
  'a person biting nails',
  'a person slouching',
  'a person sitting normally',  // baseline
]);
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The model downloads once (~90MB), gets cached by the browser, and then works fully offline. Users can literally enable airplane mode and the detection keeps running. That's the privacy st
ory — and it's verifiable. Open DevTools, check the Network tab, see zero outgoing data.

What I Learned

AI tools like Claude Code are most valuable for the decisions, not the code. The HTML/CSS/JS took minutes. But the domain research — checking availability across registrars, comparing
TLD pricing, calculating ROI against a fixed budget — that's the kind of tedious-but-critical work where AI saves hours.

Constraints breed creativity. A $25 budget forced a better name (dontdothat.click > dontdothat.ai), a simpler architecture (static S3 > any server), and smarter marketing (free ch
annels > micro-budget ads).

Privacy as a feature sells itself. "Your camera never leaves your computer" isn't just a disclaimer — it's the entire product story. And it's trivially verifiable, which builds trust
faster than any privacy policy.

Try It

dontdothat.click is live. Add your bad habits, enable your camera, and let the AI catch you in the act. Everything runs locally. And if you want to verify — open DevTools. I dare you.

Building something with AWS and AI? I'd love to hear about it. Find me here or on dev.to/saar_tochner.

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