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u/Objective_Might593 14 hours ago

I built a site builder for authors that will never make money, and I love it anyway

This sub is full of MRR screenshots, so here’s the opposite. A few months ago I built Zenpage (zenpage.io), a website builder for authors. It’s free. No paid tier, no trial, no upsell waiting behind a button. It will probably never make a cent, and that’s fine. Why build it? I wanted to give something back to the author community. Most writers I know either have no website or a sad one they paid way too much for. A clean author page shouldn’t require a web designer or a monthly subscription. Here’s a demo site so you can see what it looks like: https://wrenhalloway.zenpage.io/ Out of the box you get book pages with buy links, series reading order, a blog, events, a newsletter signup with a lead magnet, and all your socials in one place. The plan is to keep building until it’s the most complete platform an author could need. No revenue goal, no exit plan. Just a thing I enjoy working on that seems to help people. Every time an author tells me they finally have a site they’re proud of, it feels better than any Stripe notification would. Anyone else here running a project purely because they like it? How do you justify the hours to yourself?
2 comments held Reddit says 0 on reddit ↗
  1. u/Ok_Anteater_6445 1 13 hours ago
    god, this is so refreshing after all the "how i hit $10k mrr in 3 months" posts. sometimes you just wanna make something nice and put it out there, you know i looked at the demo and it's actually really clean. was expecting something way less polished for a free tool. how do you keep it running without charging? just eating the hosting costs?
  2. u/Objective_Might593 OP 1 13 hours ago
    yeah, it's basically free to host (a few dollars a month for now, i'll have to rethink some things at scale but should be fine cost wise too). it kinda limits me in the features i can build though, the basic idea is it shouldn't cost me more than 10$/month at this stage and it shouldn't cost anything for authors.