Real-revenue cases
A software engineer built a diamond price tracker and search engine that scrapes inventory from online jewelers and logs price history, earning roughly $500 a month from affiliate commissions.
01
It replaces walking into a jewelry store and manually comparing prices, by exposing live online diamond prices and specs. An engagement ring is a rare but very high-ticket purchase, so buyers have strong incentive to keep checking prices before they commit, which keeps affiliate revenue flowing.
Users search and set price alerts for free; jewelers pay roughly a 5% affiliate commission on resulting sales, across six retail partners.
In-store browsing and manual price comparison
02
Not specified; the founder only notes early traffic of at most about 10 visitors a day, mostly from social media.
03
This playbook ports directly to AI apps: pick a high-ticket category where buyers compare repeatedly, aggregate data via scraping or APIs into a comparison or tracking tool, monetize with affiliate commissions, and bet on long-tail intent keywords instead of paid acquisition.
04
Revenue basis · Founder self-reported, unaudited (see source page)
The $500/month figure is founder self-reported, unaudited, and the measurement period is unclear.
No traffic, conversion rate, or affiliate click-to-sale data is disclosed, so revenue stability can't be assessed.
The revenue split across the six jewelers isn't given, so single-partner dependency is unknown.