I'm building Adsloty. Here's why.
If you run a newsletter, you've probably dealt with this: a brand reaches out wanting to sponsor an issue. Cool. Then starts the back-and-forth. Pricing negotiations over email. Figuring out dates. Chasing invoices. Copy-pasting ad copy into your template manually. It works, but barely.
And if you're on the other side (sponsor), a brand trying to get in front of a newsletter audience, it's just as painful. You're DMing creators, waiting days for replies, comparing pricing across spreadsheets, and hoping the audience actually fits your product.
I kept seeing this friction and thought: there has to be a better way.
So I started building Adsloty.
What it is
Adsloty is a self-service marketplace where newsletter writers list their ad slots and sponsors book them directly. No emails back and forth. No awkward pricing conversations. Writers set their price, sponsors browse and book, and the platform handles payments and payouts.
Think of it like Calendly meets Gumroad, but specifically for newsletter ads.
The part I'm most excited about: when a sponsor submits an ad, it gets analyzed by AI before the writer even sees it. It scores how well the ad fits the newsletter's audience, checks the tone, rates the clarity of the copy, and gives the writer an estimated click range. So instead of guessing whether an ad is a good fit, you get actual data to help you decide.
Why I'm building it
Honestly? Because I wanted it to exist.
The newsletter space is booming. More people are starting newsletters, more brands want to reach those audiences, but the infrastructure to connect them is still mostly manual. The tools that exist are either too enterprise (built for massive publishers) or too scrappy (a Typeform and a Stripe link).
I wanted something in the middle. Something a solo newsletter creator could set up in minutes, embed on their site, and start earning from — without hiring a sales team or building a media kit.
And I wanted to build it myself. Not because I have to, but because I genuinely enjoy solving this kind of problem end to end.
The tech stack
This is the part some of you are here for, so let me break it down.
The backend is Rust, running on Axum. I know, I know Rust for a web app might seem like overkill, probably. But I'm learning a lot, and the performance headroom means I won't need to rewrite anything when traffic picks up. But I've grown to love writing Rust. The type system catches so many bugs before they even make it to runtime. SQLx gives me compile-time checked SQL queries against Postgres, which means if my query doesn't match the schema, it won't even compile. That alone has saved me hours of debugging.
The frontend is Next.js with the App Router, React 19, and Tailwind CSS. State management is Zustand for global state and TanStack Query for server state. Forms are handled with React Hook Form and Zod for validation. Nothing groundbreaking here, I picked tools that let me move fast without fighting the framework.
For payments, it's Stripe all the way. Checkout Sessions for sponsors, Connect for paying out writers. The platform takes a 10% fee on each booking, which is how the business sustains itself. During beta, that fee is waived for the first three months.
The AI scoring uses Google's Gemini API. When a sponsor submits an ad, the backend sends the ad copy along with the newsletter's audience data to Gemini and gets back a structured analysis: fit score, tone, clarity, estimated clicks, and recommendations. It's not meant to replace the writer's judgment — it's meant to give them a head start.
For everything else: Cloudinary for image hosting, Sentry for error tracking on both frontend and backend, Argon2 for password hashing, JWT with refresh token rotation for auth, and Governor for rate limiting.
The database is Postgres. Nothing fancy. Just well-structured tables, proper indexes, and views for the dashboard queries.
I will use this project to improve my skills in DevOps by deploying and managing it with Kubernetes. This involves:
- Containerizing services with Docker and- Deploying both backend and frontend in a Kubernetes cluster
- Managing settings with ConfigMaps and Secrets
- Setting up Services and Ingress
- Managing scaling and rolling updates
- Ensuring observability and health checks
The aim is to treat this as a production system, not just an application.
I'm going to keep building in public. I'll share what's working, what's breaking, what decisions I'm making, and why. Not the curated everything is going great version. The real version.
If you're running a newsletter and want to try it out when it launches, or if you're a brand looking for a better way to sponsor newsletters, I'd love to hear from you.
More soon.
Top comments (1)
I see you're building Adsloty as a newsletter ad marketplace — that's a smart play given how fragmented the newsletter advertising space is right now.
As you're building in public, have you considered how you'll find newsletter publishers who are actively looking for monetization solutions? I've been tracking discussions across dev communities and there's actually quite a bit of chatter from newsletter owners struggling with ad sales.
What's your biggest challenge right now — finding publishers or advertisers?