I Built a Tiny AI Tool Shop for $0 and Started Selling in 2026
After building and iterating on small utility products over the last few months, I realized something: the market is flooded with AI features, but still starved for actual tools that solve one job well.
So I put out three one-time-purchase AI utilities under AI Suite and started shipping.
The 3 Products
| Product | What It Does | Price | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anthropic Intel Brief | Distilled intel on Anthropic's 65B model: benchmarks, architecture insights, strategic implications. | £9 one-time | anthropic-65b |
| AI Coding Cost Tracker | Visibility into AI coding tool spending. Per-device, per-project dashboards + exportable reports. | £5 one-time | copilot-token-billing |
| AI Phone Service | AI receptionist for your business: natural voice, 24/7 call answering, lead capture, calendar booking. | From £99/month | ai-phone-service |
What I Learned
1. Micro-products beat grand launches
Each product solves one job. No sprawling dashboards, no onboarding flows that take 20 minutes. Buy, download or activate, use. That frictionless model works because customers already know what they are buying.
2. One-time pricing is an underrated unlock
For utility products, subscriptions feel like a trap. £5–£9 one-shot removes the mental tax. It also means I don't have to build retention infrastructure before I have the demand.
3. The real product is clarity
The hardest part was not the code — it was explaining what each tool does in a sentence. Copywriters call this the "one-liner". Every successful micro-product I've seen has it. If you can't say it in one tweet, you can't sell it.
The Stack
I wanted to keep hosting and dependencies minimal:
- Pages: Static landing pages on Cloudflare Pages / Pages-esque hosting
- Payments: Stripe (in audience-side card processing + webhook + delivery)
- Delivery: Instant digital delivery after payment confirmation
- Copy: Written to fit the mental model of a busy dev or business owner
What's Next
- Short screen-recording demos for each product
- Light telemetry to see where users drop off in checkout
- A second tier of product: ~£30-£50 "pro packs" with extended datasets
If you've shipped a micro-product, I'd love to hear what worked — or what didn't. Drop a comment.
Top comments (0)