Thank you for sharing this. Not everyone is willing to be transparent and show 1% of what you doing. One of the best dev RUclipsrs who deserves all the support
I say move on to the next project and come back when you’re feeling inspired. Too many times have I got to the “I don’t know” phase and found myself pushing through to no avail. The most success usually comes when you’re feeling the drive.
Hey Cody! Not sure if you've done so already but I'm really interested in the credits system you created if ever you needed a topic for a video. Congrats on the success of your app and yes it's a success. You completed, deployed and are in the green so that's a success in my books. Great work as always!
that's $210 you didn't have to ask your boss for man, i love it, thanks so much for sharing! you're solving a problem, try and listen to your customers and see what pain points you're solving. thanks so much again!
Thank you Cody, one of the most generous, dedicated and honest utubers out there willing to share everything learnt on the way. Really appreciate this sharing and many other videos, helped me from time to time. But I feel the bigger trend right now, is learn how to use AI to speed up self learning. From research to FS
Really appreciate the candid look at the costs and profits behind this kind of stuff. I just bought your course and I'm looking forward to working through it! Thanks for all the free content you put out there.
That's impressive, I had some wrong ideas like I was thinking that AI projects can cost me a lot of money and I can't even get a profit from them, but you gave me a hope, I'm going definitely start an AI project, and maybe get you course if It is on udemy, thanks for clarifying. such a talented youtuber
Would be cool to see how much more it would generate if you added some ads (google/ social). That breakdown would be interesting as a viewer to see if it helps or not.
Still impressive that you made some money. Maybe if you leave it long enough and you can acquire some more customers then, maybe someone might give you an offer to buy the SaaS. But still, the experience you will gain from a project like this is priceless though
thanks for showing all of this, not a lot of people would be this willing to be that transparent with their projects so its hard to find good use cases like these.
If you made 150 in profit, there's a very high chance that with some effort this can be grown to a 1500 extra income project with minimal effort. You just need to figure out the target audience/demo (this is probably something for Discord users?) and start ranking in search engines for a few relevant searches.
@@stephenekwedike1674Would you mind elaborating on this? I have an idea for a SaaS that is similar but for social media content creation. How should I go about marketing on discord?
That's still awesome, there's some people in the world making around that amount of money every month and you just made it selling icons! We are definitely in the future 👾
This is awesome to see dude, you've got an app that you can extend with some other ideas not only icons, so I guess it's too soon to juge its succes right now, give it more time and with more tools it will be profitable in the long term and . Appreciate the share and great video like always.
What is the best way to develop an AI app like this, starting from the structure to merging the openAI API to the payment/credit system, to the chat type AI final screen? I guarantee it will be 1 million views video
Not sure how easy this would be to do, but I would add the ability to purchase more credits in one purchase with better value per credit the higher the cost (note I dont know the current cost of your credits) e.g. $5 for 10 credits , $10 for 25 credits , $50 for 150 credits. Some people have alot of fun money.
Hi cody, I have been watching your videos for a long time and I really like them, especially the MEVN stack, if you could make one more video where you build the chat app, very basic.
How have you hosted this? I am struggling finding the right solution to host my projects. Ideally it should be cost efficent. Maybe a good idea for a future video :)
Great video as always. Quick question concerning the credit feature you have on your site. Do you store the amount of credit the user has remaining on your databse and use a function to update these everytime the user creates an icon. Also were the amount of credits somehow stored in stripe when u created the stripe product/prices and you used a webhook to basically update the amount of credit a user has after they purchase???
I hard coded the amount of credits, but it is possible to attach metadata to items in stripe then query stripe to get the metadata to figure out how many credits belong to a item. Yes, I store the remaining credits on the user and update them after their stripe payment finishes
@@WebDevCody thanks bro.. it would be nice if you like do an in depth tutorial on stripe focusing on subscription not many videos on that particular subject out there especially with next js
@@lepystudio8974 I have it setup with google search console and analytics. It’s slowly been increasing with impressions from google search, but nothing too special
where did you get "Terms of Service" or "privacy policy" from? Did you pay some lawyer to write those? Or is there a website where you can get those from?
@@blasttrash I honestly don’t remember at this point. You can also just try using chatgpt. Just describe your app and what stuff you may store from your users and ask it to write a tos and privacy policy. The main stuff you want to make sure is there is you are not held responsible for any damages your app may cause anyone, you’re not related to any external links that may exist on your site, you can delete user data at any time, and mention any type of name, email, address, you may store from your users and if you send that data off to anywhere
hey cody. I have been practicing on your saas project with the guides but keep running into errors with next auth handleRequestError when trying to sign in. it continues to tell me to try signing in with different account. And ive been having some problem with setting up webhook. would you mind giving me some direction?
Double check your google ids are correct, double check you’ve setup your google oauth project correct with the proper callback urls and domain, try deleting your browser session cookies for localist:3000.
Quick question, they are generating icons but they have a background on them, usually a gradient. That makes it difficult for users to actually use them as icons. Is there a way around this to make it easier for your customers?
Constructive criticism: When I saw the initial vid about this app got quite excited to use it until actually trying it out and seeing that I can't really get normal-looking emojys. IMO it'd have much greater success if you figured out how to get dalle (or a different one) to do that.
Hi, thank you for the valuable video and gumroad link. I have been hiring a custom coder to do something similar for a little over $3000 and seeing that you were showing the process on how to do this in gumroad, i went ahead and get it too. I was wondering, will you be making a tutorial on how to implement the stable diffusion UI settings into the platform to allow customers to have more options on the generated result? Something similar to the Invoke AI. Thank you
I’m using dalle behind the scenes, so I don’t have much control over what it outputs. Btw the code to my course is on my GitHub repo, check the gumroad link
Nice video, can you share how did you market the product? I think if you make some short form videos like RUclips shorts or Tiktoks, those numbers would be higher... I think those icons looks great and that the project has the potential...
thanks, I had one main marketing video on my channel, links to the course in my video descriptions, then I name drop my course in any future videos related to this AI icon project. I don't want to over market to annoy my long time subscribers.
I would love a step by step tutorial and how to build something like this. I know you have your course but it doesn’t include the credits and stuff. I would genuinely even pay 30$+ for it.
Hey Cody, Since you're using the T3 stack which means you use NextJS 13 I just have a question about whether using the app directory is production ready (I mean more specifically for those kinda SaaS projects) are you using it or just using the regular NextJs with the /pages directory
I'm just using the "stable" pages directory for now. I think you could probably use the app directory, and I'm assuming it will brought out of beta soon if you're willing to take that risk. I personally avoid anything beta. I don't think making the transition will be too hard when that happens if needed.
My friend stripe don't work in North Africa how can I build a website for payment like stripe I can open for free but is work at same time with all countries bank
@@WebDevCody In Stripe, in order for him to work for me by establishing a company, and through that company, I can open an account on Wise or make contact with Stirpe, a complex process, and in our country, we are forbidden to pay money outside the country, and even Paypal does not work here, but tell me about Crypto and how to use it on the site Web and to receive any payments , What do I write on RUclips to understand well what you mean
@@WebDevCody See if there are other SaaS out there and if so, see if you can't pull any numbers from ahrefs or how many visitors they get or are transparent with their numbers. If not that, then you go to where you think your customers would be, like a subreddit or forum.
@@ThomHemenway oh there are a couple of other apps like this, maybe 4 or 5. I kind of just keep this as a side project and don’t sweat trying to hard to grow it
How much time it took? I built the mvp in a day, but took maybe a few days to work on the landing page, polish up the styles, add the community page, the collection page and variant feature
Dang yeah you’re right, so minus .675 cent for each $5 purchase 😂 so maybe 121 profit. Stripe is making a killing off of merchants but they can’t make a more intuitive ui to query for data
Good idea, then by that logic it’s $3 profit for every strip purchase, which means 126, minus 0.50 for stripe transactions bringing it to 105, minus 3.5% on each transaction, bringing it to 97.65. Minus aws hosting which is .20 a month
Marketing is half the battle. You have to spend a lot of time writing blog posts, growing a Twitter, making videos, and showing people why they should use your app. It helps if you can convince social media influencers to use your app. If they end up using it in their content, you’ll get traffic
@@WebDevCody yea definitely not dalle-2 exclusively, probably some combo with gpt or similar. The community browse functionality would be worth money on its own once enough are generated (search from prompt embeddings / defined clustering). I know I'd pay money for that. I'll do some testing and let you know
Yes, that's a good point, any of the userbase's unused tokens should have been counted as a liability on the final balance sheet. it would have been more realistic to calculate the costs of a user using a token, and then subtracting that cost from profits. If he made 210 dollars profit, and using dali cost him 60 dollars, it could be that only a quarter of the user bases tokens were used, which means the final cost of using dali would be 240 dollars (assuming the cost of dali remains the same) once the users spend them, making a net loss of 30 dollars.
![Twenty One Pilots - “The Line” (from Arcane Season 2) [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/E2Rj2gQAyPA/mqdefault.jpg)
Thank you for sharing this. Not everyone is willing to be transparent and show 1% of what you doing. One of the best dev RUclipsrs who deserves all the support
Sure thing and thank you for your support!
I say move on to the next project and come back when you’re feeling inspired. Too many times have I got to the “I don’t know” phase and found myself pushing through to no avail. The most success usually comes when you’re feeling the drive.
Appreciate you sharing this with us! 👏
Sure thing
Hey Cody! Not sure if you've done so already but I'm really interested in the credits system you created if ever you needed a topic for a video. Congrats on the success of your app and yes it's a success. You completed, deployed and are in the green so that's a success in my books. Great work as always!
that's $210 you didn't have to ask your boss for man, i love it, thanks so much for sharing! you're solving a problem, try and listen to your customers and see what pain points you're solving. thanks so much again!
Thank you Cody, one of the most generous, dedicated and honest utubers out there willing to share everything learnt on the way. Really appreciate this sharing and many other videos, helped me from time to time. But I feel the bigger trend right now, is learn how to use AI to speed up self learning. From research to FS
Really appreciate the candid look at the costs and profits behind this kind of stuff. I just bought your course and I'm looking forward to working through it! Thanks for all the free content you put out there.
im trying to decide if i should buy it. Should i?
Amazing video, I'm amazed with the transparency in your numbers. I've subscribed.
Subscribed because of the transparency. This is what I want to do myself. 150 usd profit is pretty good. Please make some more videos like this
That's impressive, I had some wrong ideas like I was thinking that AI projects can cost me a lot of money and I can't even get a profit from them, but you gave me a hope, I'm going definitely start an AI project, and maybe get you course if It is on udemy, thanks for clarifying. such a talented youtuber
appreciate seeing things behind the scenes
Would be cool to see how much more it would generate if you added some ads (google/ social). That breakdown would be interesting as a viewer to see if it helps or not.
Still impressive that you made some money. Maybe if you leave it long enough and you can acquire some more customers then, maybe someone might give you an offer to buy the SaaS. But still, the experience you will gain from a project like this is priceless though
Selling the saas would be cool
Hello I think you should totally keep up with this project. Have a great day
shoutout to you for the transparency.
thanks for showing all of this, not a lot of people would be this willing to be that transparent with their projects so its hard to find good use cases like these.
If you made 150 in profit, there's a very high chance that with some effort this can be grown to a 1500 extra income project with minimal effort.
You just need to figure out the target audience/demo (this is probably something for Discord users?) and start ranking in search engines for a few relevant searches.
I hope so, one can dream
@@WebDevCody how do people currently find your app?
@@NubeBuster mainly my yt description and google search
@@WebDevCody bruh you're not marketing nearly enough. I was making $500/mo just from spamming relevant subreddits with my discord link
@@stephenekwedike1674Would you mind elaborating on this? I have an idea for a SaaS that is similar but for social media content creation. How should I go about marketing on discord?
This is incredible! thanks for sharing the "behind" of everything :D
This gonna be your unicorn project
Subbed! Thanks for being transparent.
That's still awesome, there's some people in the world making around that amount of money every month and you just made it selling icons! We are definitely in the future 👾
I would give it another chance and add few more features. You also need good marketing. Thanks for sharing and best of luck!
This is awesome to see dude, you've got an app that you can extend with some other ideas not only icons, so I guess it's too soon to juge its succes right now, give it more time and with more tools it will be profitable in the long term and . Appreciate the share and great video like always.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing! Subscribed.
What is the best way to develop an AI app like this, starting from the structure to merging the openAI API to the payment/credit system, to the chat type AI final screen? I guarantee it will be 1 million views video
it's very interesting idea indeed, a good use of AI.
well done.
Could you give us an example of the prompt you use to generate further to Dalle?
Not sure how easy this would be to do, but I would add the ability to purchase more credits in one purchase with better value per credit the higher the cost (note I dont know the current cost of your credits) e.g. $5 for 10 credits , $10 for 25 credits , $50 for 150 credits. Some people have alot of fun money.
Hi cody, I have been watching your videos for a long time and I really like them, especially the MEVN stack, if you could make one more video where you build the chat app, very basic.
Oh you know the the algorithms gonna get your the views!
How about hosting & those aws coast ?
Did you do some marketing or ads to get users land on your page other than that course??
nope, no google ads; I just added a bunch of keywords to the landing page and hoped for the best
Very informative and interesting !!
I bet with a youtube ad or google ad you would make way more since it would generate more traffic
I may try that out and see how it does
cool to see that . thanks for sharing.
How have you hosted this? I am struggling finding the right solution to host my projects. Ideally it should be cost efficent. Maybe a good idea for a future video :)
it was on amplify previously, but I just switched to deploying onto AWS using SST. Will make an update soon about if it helped with hosting costs
@@WebDevCody Appriciate the answer. Looking forward to the update :)
Good job babe!
Great video as always. Quick question concerning the credit feature you have on your site. Do you store the amount of credit the user has remaining on your databse and use a function to update these everytime the user creates an icon. Also were the amount of credits somehow stored in stripe when u created the stripe product/prices and you used a webhook to basically update the amount of credit a user has after they purchase???
I hard coded the amount of credits, but it is possible to attach metadata to items in stripe then query stripe to get the metadata to figure out how many credits belong to a item. Yes, I store the remaining credits on the user and update them after their stripe payment finishes
@@WebDevCody thanks bro.. it would be nice if you like do an in depth tutorial on stripe focusing on subscription not many videos on that particular subject out there especially with next js
@@speedster784 yeah I haven’t learned about subscriptions yet, but I don’t think it’s that much harder
would like to know how you marketed it, im building something right now while job hunting but have no idea how to get any exposure :p
I just make some videos in my RUclips channel and people seem to sign up
What did you do in terms of getting traffic to the SaaS? Or was it just based on the video you posted, and possibly the gumroad tutorial?
Just RUclips traffic. I’d make 0 if I didn’t have a RUclips channel. I think some traffic comes from google search
@@lepystudio8974 I have it setup with google search console and analytics. It’s slowly been increasing with impressions from google search, but nothing too special
How much value does your product add? I assume the business logic is just an image AI prompt that is configured with user input?
Yeah, that’s all it does. Figuring out a good prompt is hard sometimes, so that’s the main value added
where did you get "Terms of Service" or "privacy policy" from? Did you pay some lawyer to write those? Or is there a website where you can get those from?
I just found a website to generate them. They probably need to be reviewed by a professional
@@WebDevCody thanks and can you tell which website that was if you dont mind? if no, thats fine too.
@@blasttrash I honestly don’t remember at this point. You can also just try using chatgpt. Just describe your app and what stuff you may store from your users and ask it to write a tos and privacy policy. The main stuff you want to make sure is there is you are not held responsible for any damages your app may cause anyone, you’re not related to any external links that may exist on your site, you can delete user data at any time, and mention any type of name, email, address, you may store from your users and if you send that data off to anywhere
hey cody. I have been practicing on your saas project with the guides but keep running into errors with next auth handleRequestError when trying to sign in. it continues to tell me to try signing in with different account. And ive been having some problem with setting up webhook. would you mind giving me some direction?
Double check your google ids are correct, double check you’ve setup your google oauth project correct with the proper callback urls and domain, try deleting your browser session cookies for localist:3000.
Also create API's and sell it as an offering for others with custom capabilities, it is going to sell further
Quick question, they are generating icons but they have a background on them, usually a gradient. That makes it difficult for users to actually use them as icons. Is there a way around this to make it easier for your customers?
I will look into a solution for this
How do you store the credits? Is it a column in the users table?
Yes
Fantastic project
Constructive criticism: When I saw the initial vid about this app got quite excited to use it until actually trying it out and seeing that I can't really get normal-looking emojys. IMO it'd have much greater success if you figured out how to get dalle (or a different one) to do that.
What type of emojis are you looking to get?
@@WebDevCody the kind you find on emojipedia
Hi, thank you for the valuable video and gumroad link. I have been hiring a custom coder to do something similar for a little over $3000 and seeing that you were showing the process on how to do this in gumroad, i went ahead and get it too. I was wondering, will you be making a tutorial on how to implement the stable diffusion UI settings into the platform to allow customers to have more options on the generated result? Something similar to the Invoke AI.
Thank you
I’m using dalle behind the scenes, so I don’t have much control over what it outputs. Btw the code to my course is on my GitHub repo, check the gumroad link
You didn't deducted stripe cost and amazon S3 and hosting in that. Are all that free or close to 0 ? Just asking for more understanding.
Stripe takes 3.5 % and .50 $. Aws was cheap but starting to increase in price, $1-2 a month so far
@@WebDevCody ohh that's why you didn't included that. Got it thanks for replying 🙂
Are you planning on doing some web3 coding ? Around ethereum or smth ?
I did last year, but I don’t plan to get back into it
What stack do u use in ur actual work projects?
Express, react, aws stuff, typescript
Nice video, can you share how did you market the product? I think if you make some short form videos like RUclips shorts or Tiktoks, those numbers would be higher...
I think those icons looks great and that the project has the potential...
thanks, I had one main marketing video on my channel, links to the course in my video descriptions, then I name drop my course in any future videos related to this AI icon project. I don't want to over market to annoy my long time subscribers.
Thank you for sharing.
I would love a step by step tutorial and how to build something like this. I know you have your course but it doesn’t include the credits and stuff. I would genuinely even pay 30$+ for it.
What do you mean it doesn’t include credits? My course implements the credits and stripe
Really amazing content
WhT about AWS cost ? You need to pay for hosting and for s3
Right now it’s $0.04 a day for storing 10k+ icon images
Hey Cody, Since you're using the T3 stack which means you use NextJS 13 I just have a question about whether using the app directory is production ready (I mean more specifically for those kinda SaaS projects) are you using it or just using the regular NextJs with the /pages directory
I'm just using the "stable" pages directory for now. I think you could probably use the app directory, and I'm assuming it will brought out of beta soon if you're willing to take that risk. I personally avoid anything beta. I don't think making the transition will be too hard when that happens if needed.
App directory is now stable!
It's only $20 . That is amazing
thank you for sharing that
Thanks for sharing. What was the cost for hosting?
$0.20
What about the AWS cost?
Thank you for sharing
is your engine build on top of openAI ?
Yes, dalle
Good stuff!
Is aws s3 and amplify free? You should also add this to the costs
They are not free, but the monthly charge has been $0.20 so I didn’t include it
I have a question, did you register urself as a company or are you doing this as an individual?
I have an LLC
@@WebDevCody is it a requirement or can we do it as an individual?
You can be a sole proprietor, LLC just gives more legal protection so they say
what about AWS cost's?
$0.20 a month so far
this info is really usefull, sub
My friend stripe don't work in North Africa how can I build a website for payment like stripe I can open for free but is work at same time with all countries bank
You’d need to find a stripe alternative or use crypto.
@@WebDevCody In Stripe, in order for him to work for me by establishing a company, and through that company, I can open an account on Wise or make contact with Stirpe, a complex process, and in our country, we are forbidden to pay money outside the country, and even Paypal does not work here, but tell me about Crypto and how to use it on the site Web and to receive any payments , What do I write on RUclips to understand well what you mean
How did you market this app?
Just my channel, talking about it and posting on Twitter some
Did you do market research?
what's that
@@WebDevCody See if there are other SaaS out there and if so, see if you can't pull any numbers from ahrefs or how many visitors they get or are transparent with their numbers.
If not that, then you go to where you think your customers would be, like a subreddit or forum.
@@ThomHemenway oh there are a couple of other apps like this, maybe 4 or 5. I kind of just keep this as a side project and don’t sweat trying to hard to grow it
I couldn't fin the discount code for the tutorial
JR9YVVB
A simple marketing campaign on instagram might do you good. However i dont think that demographic might spend any money.
I wanted to test out google or Twitter ads but probably not worth the money
I hope it's not inappropriate to ask how much it toke you to finish the MVP version of it.
How much time it took? I built the mvp in a day, but took maybe a few days to work on the landing page, polish up the styles, add the community page, the collection page and variant feature
What about aws price?
$0.20 a month so far
Stripe has very robust analytics and comparisons
Am I blind then? I can’t find a simple way to see how many people have bought a certain item
I wonder how much the amazon stack cost you to run all this.
$0.20
You forgot to add AWS cost ??
$0.20 a month
What about Stripe fees? U didn't subtract those from revenue
Dang yeah you’re right, so minus .675 cent for each $5 purchase 😂 so maybe 121 profit. Stripe is making a killing off of merchants but they can’t make a more intuitive ui to query for data
Would you be open to selling it?
How much you offering?
@@WebDevCody is it still making same amount or less/more?
@@WebDevCody based on revenue in video I could do $xxxx but if it’s making more now it’ll be more, it’s based off multiplier typically.
$150 in profit would be assuming that everyone has 0 credits left, are you able to see how many credits people have used up for that amount of cost?
Good idea, then by that logic it’s $3 profit for every strip purchase, which means 126, minus 0.50 for stripe transactions bringing it to 105, minus 3.5% on each transaction, bringing it to 97.65. Minus aws hosting which is .20 a month
You forgot to consider your s3 cost and amplify cost for profit
It’s $0.20 a month
Damn thats cheap then
I make a lot of apps but no body using it because they don't even know it 😢😢, so pls tell us how make our app useable by people 🎉❤
Marketing is half the battle. You have to spend a lot of time writing blog posts, growing a Twitter, making videos, and showing people why they should use your app. It helps if you can convince social media influencers to use your app. If they end up using it in their content, you’ll get traffic
if it made svg icons that would be hype. I might make that actually don't steal my idea pls
Idk if that’s possible with dalle, but you could maybe find a way to do it with chatgpt to generate svg code maybe?
@@WebDevCody yea definitely not dalle-2 exclusively, probably some combo with gpt or similar. The community browse functionality would be worth money on its own once enough are generated (search from prompt embeddings / defined clustering).
I know I'd pay money for that. I'll do some testing and let you know
I feel like $5 to have unlimited creations is fair, single credit 30second ad
Where did you get the idea of unlimited creations? That’s absolutely not fair
@@WebDevCody Just pray people only use it once or twice
@@shawnmallon2833 lol I don’t go on faith when it’s attached to my credit card
I would guess you’re still in negatives from profit due to the domain name
The domain was like $12
That's not your profit .. people still have tokens they've paid for, right?
Yes, that's a good point, any of the userbase's unused tokens should have been counted as a liability on the final balance sheet. it would have been more realistic to calculate the costs of a user using a token, and then subtracting that cost from profits.
If he made 210 dollars profit, and using dali cost him 60 dollars, it could be that only a quarter of the user bases tokens were used, which means the final cost of using dali would be 240 dollars (assuming the cost of dali remains the same) once the users spend them, making a net loss of 30 dollars.
No way he calculates 42*5 with a calculator
Sure did
I actually laughed at this because you’re seriously skeptical about this simple calculation
We invented calculators, chatgpt, and gps for a reason amiright?
210 - 59 isn't much to compute without a calculator, but I believe that visual representation is important for a RUclips video
guys PLEASE don’t buy courses
Why? Seems like it would be very difficult to learn to do this solo.
Appreciate you sharing this with us!