Fair question.
remove.bg and TinyPNG are excellent single-purpose tools — I still use both.
My pitch is different:
- One suite instead of 5 tabs
- Bulk mode built-in (20 files at a time on most tools)
- No signup, no watermark, no daily limits
- Clear no-storage policy — files are processed in memory and discarded
Not trying to beat the incumbents at their specialty — just trying to
be the tool that doesn't make you open 5 different sites.
Non-intrusive ads. No data selling, no email harvesting, no premium upsell.
The current traffic goal is 10k monthly sessions — that's roughly when
Ezoic accepts new publishers. At their current RPM (about $8–15/session
for image tools), that's $200–500/month.
Not life-changing, but it covers infra + a bit more. If it scales to
50k+ sessions, Mediavine becomes the target and the numbers get serious.
Hey IH 👋
I launched my first product today.
It's called DailyProTasks — 5 free image/file tools in one place. No signup, no watermark, no file storage.
Why I built it
Every few weeks I need to remove a background, upscale a photo, compress a PNG, or convert a file. Every time I Google it, I hit the same pattern:
- "Enter your email to download"
- A watermark that wasn't in the preview
- A 3-per-day limit that unlocks with a $9/month subscription
- A privacy policy that says they keep my uploads
After the 30th time, I got annoyed enough to build my own.
What's in it
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| ✂️ Background Remover | AI cutouts in ~3s, single + bulk (20 files) |
| 🔍 Image Upscaler | 2× or 4× with Real-ESRGAN |
| 📦 Image Compressor | Target a KB, lossless or lossy |
| 🔁 File Converter | 15+ formats: JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, GIF, TIFF, PDF, JSON, CSV, XLSX |
| 📄 PDF Generator | Images → single PDF |
All free. All working. All tested by me daily.
The numbers
- Time to build: 3 weeks (nights + weekends)
- Infra cost: ~$7/month (AWS t3.micro + Elastic IP)
- Total spend so far: ~$15 (domain + first month)
- Tools shipped: 5
- Signups required: 0
- Users before today: 0
- Users at time of writing: ~40 (mostly friends + PH testers)
The stack
- Backend: FastAPI + Python
- ML: U²-Net, Real-ESRGAN
- Images: Pillow + OpenCV
- Reverse proxy: nginx
- Hosting: AWS EC2 t3.micro (Windows Server 2025)
- SSL: Let's Encrypt via win-acme
- Services: NSSM
- Frontend: vanilla HTML/CSS/JS + PWA service worker
3 things I learned the hard way
1. Windows Server on EC2 is a trap if you don't need Windows.
Every doc assumes Linux. I lost 2 days to RDP lockouts (my ISP rotates IPs) before switching to AWS Session Manager. If I did this again: Ubuntu, no questions.
2. ML models eat RAM.
Loading rembg's U²-Net at startup pushed uvicorn from 150 MB → 700 MB. On a 1 GB server, Windows killed the RDP service under memory pressure. Fix: lazy loading with @lru_cache. Idle RAM is now ~180 MB.
3. Free SSL on Windows is painful but doable.
win-acme works — but the "selfhosting" validation mode fights nginx for port 80. Switch to filesystem mode and it just works.
The monetization plan
The site is 100% free with no ads right now — the launch goal is traffic, not revenue.
My plan:
- Get to 10k monthly sessions organically (Reddit, Dev.to, PH, SEO)
- Apply to Ezoic at 10k sessions
- Move to Mediavine at 50k sessions
- Target: $500–1,500/month by month 6
I know it's a long road. I'm sharing it publicly so I can be held accountable.
What I'm asking from IH
- Try any tool — especially the BG remover. Does it feel fast enough?
- What would you build next? Video compressor? SVG optimizer? Batch watermarking?
- What would you pay for? I want to keep the base free, but a "pro" tier (bigger batches, priority processing, API access) is possible down the line.
What's next
- Week 1: Get to 500 visitors
- Month 1: Get indexed on Google, build Reddit/Dev.to presence
- Month 3: First $100 from ads
- Month 6: 10k sessions, Ezoic application
I'll post monthly updates. If this flops, at least the tools work.
Thanks for reading 🙏
Top comments (4)
Three weeks of nights and weekends for five working tools on one small server is a lean build, and the "getting users" phase is usually where the production rough edges start to show.
I'm a Staff SDET who tinkers with side projects too, so I ran a structured QA pass on dailyprotasks.com. It came out at 89/100 (B). The one I'd fix first: the server only sends its own certificate and not the Let's Encrypt intermediate, so anything that doesn't fill in the chain by itself (curl, a lot of bots and link previewers, some locked-down networks) rejects the connection before it reaches a single tool. Desktop Chrome usually fills the gap quietly, which is why it's easy to miss.
There were 9 other issues in that pass, but I'll leave it at that one here.
With getting indexed as your month-one goal, are you submitting the tool pages in Search Console yourself, or letting the sitemap do the work?
Thanks for taking the time — a structured pass from someone who does this professionally is worth more than a hundred "looks good" comments, and 89/100 gives me something concrete to work against. You're right that the TLS chain is the kind of bug that hides in plain sight: Chrome papers over it, so everything looks fine on my machine while curl and link previewers quietly fail. That's exactly the class of issue I'd never have caught by clicking around, and it's now top of my list — I'll verify the fix with SSL Labs and a raw openssl s_client check rather than trusting the browser.
I appreciate you flagging that there are nine more and not dumping a wall of findings in the comments. If you're open to sharing the rest — here or via DM — I'd genuinely like to work through them; a prioritized list from a real QA pass is worth more to me right now than another feature. In the meantime I'm running SSL Labs, Security Headers, and Lighthouse myself so I'm not just waiting on your goodwill.
SSL Labs plus openssl s_client is the right way to confirm it, since the browser keeps hiding it from you. From here it's still sending just the one certificate as of noon today, so it'll be worth a re-check once your fix is live.
Of the other nine, these two matter most for getting indexed and for phone users:
www.dailyprotasks.comopens the site on its own instead of redirecting todailyprotasks.com. Your canonical tag already points at the bare domain, which helps, but a permanent (301) redirect from www makes it clear to Google there's only one copy of each tool page. I'd do this one right after the certificate.max-width: 100%on it tends to sort it.DEV.to doesn't do DMs, so here's the page with your score and the rest of the problem areas: qa-audit.com/teaser/534faacf-1f2a-...
The full report has every issue with a fix, plus a re-scan to confirm once you've fixed things.
What's Lighthouse telling you on the heavier tools like the upscaler?
Hey Musadiq's, I read your post about shipping 5 image tools and the hard part being users. I'm a solo founder too and stuck on the same problem with my own tool, so I'm curious: who's the one kind of person you'd most want using it right now?