How I built a search engine for 700+ AI tools with $0

I work a day job as a software engineer. Nights and weekends, I built saas.pet — a search engine for AI tools. No team. No budget. Here's how it works and what I learned.

The stack

• Node.js — all build scripts, data fetching, sitemap generation
• Vercel Hobby — free hosting, 12 serverless functions max
• GitHub — source of truth for reviews and best-of guides
• Vanilla JS — no React, no Next.js, no framework. One build.mjs generates every page Why vanilla? Because Vercel Hobby caps you at 12 functions. Every import in a Next.js project counts as a function. With vanilla JS, I have exactly 8 API routes and 400+ static HTML pages — all within the free tier. ## How the search works The site doesn't use Elasticsearch or Algolia. It's simpler than that. Every review is a JSON file in a reviews/ folder. Every best-of guide is a JSON in a best/ folder. The build script reads all of them, extracts keywords, and generates a static search index. The search API (/api/search-tools-v2) does a simple text match against tool names, descriptions, and categories. It's not fancy. But it's fast — all static, served from Vercel's edge. ## What Google cares about (after 2 weeks of data) I've been watching GSC obsessively. Here's what I've learned:
• Editorial content beats volume. I deleted 10,000 auto-generated pages and replaced them with 75 hand-written guides. Google started indexing them within days.
• 404s don't matter. I have 20 from old boilerplate pages I deleted. GSC shows them as "not indexed" — and that's fine. Google doesn't penalize you for cleaning up.
• Sitemap crawl budget is real. When I had 10,481 URLs in my sitemap, Google crawled 76/day. When I cut to 401 editorial URLs, the crawl rate didn't drop — it just got smarter about which pages to index.
• CTR at position 15 is brutal. 0.7% CTR on 153 impressions. Not a content problem — a trust problem. People don't click new sites. The fix is external signals (backlinks, mentions, community validation). ## What's next More of the same. Write real reviews. Build more editorial pages. Get listed on directories that don't charge money. Wait for Google to decide I'm legitimate. The full site is at saas.pet. All code is private (commercial project), but happy to answer questions about the build process in the comments. --- Posted on Dev.to by Alex. I run saas.pet as a side project. Every subscription I review, I pay for out of pocket. No sponsors, no affiliate pressure.