Niche sites
Build a calculator website that earns from ads
Make a website with a calculator for one formula people already search for, like a tax or tire-size calculator. It earns from display ads and affiliate links shown to visitors who arrive from search.
The hard part: picking a formula people search for that big sites haven't already covered, then building search traffic over months.
Who pays
Advertisers pay through ad networks like Google AdSense to show ads to the people who use the calculator. Affiliate links to related products earn a commission when visitors buy. danielkbuilds reports $1,000 in ad revenue over 30 days from an international tax calculator. staticmaker1 points to a tire calculator site with 1.4 million visits a month and an estimated revenue in the millions.
How to build it
Find a calculator people search for
Look for searches like 'X calculator' in a topic you understand, such as taxes, tire sizes or measurements. Favor ones where the top results are slow, cluttered or out of date.
Build the calculator page with AI
Ask Claude to build a fast, mobile-friendly calculator page for the formula and to check its math against worked examples. Host it on Vercel with your own domain.
Add helpful text and related calculators
Explain on the page how the formula works and how to read the result. Add a few related calculators so visitors stay longer and find more searches.
Add ads and affiliate links
Apply to Google AdSense for display ads and add affiliate links to products that fit the calculator's topic.
Grow and track search traffic
Submit the site to Google Search Console and check which searches bring visitors. Add new calculator pages for related searches that start to show up.
Sources on X
- danielkbuilds · Sep 3, 2026
danielkbuilds says they reached $1,000 from ad revenue in the last 30 days, grown only through organic search, with an international tax calculator website. That figure is the poster's own claim. They built it after watching a Starter Story episode about someone making $10k a month with a simple calculator website.
- staticmaker1 · Sep 17, 2024
staticmaker1 points to a 'boring' tire calculators site that gets 1.4 million visits a month from search and makes money through Google AdSense and affiliate links. The poster puts its revenue at an estimated millions, which is their estimate, not a reported figure.
Ideas are curated from public posts and untested by us. Read the full note.