I Built 6 Free Developer APIs. Nobody Uses Them (Yet).

I have six APIs running on a VPS right now. A dead link checker, an SEO auditor, a screenshot capture tool, a page performance analyzer, a tech stack detector, and an SSL certificate checker. They all work. They all have interactive tool pages. They all have OpenAPI specs, structured data, sitemaps, and IndexNow pings. Three of them are listed on RapidAPI with paid tiers. Total paying customers: zero. The Build vs. Distribution Gap Every developer knows the feeling. You ship something, you're proud of it, and then... silence. I've been tracking my server's access logs obsessively. Here's what actual traffic looks like for a new API service with no marketing budget: 438 requests in the first 24 hours 60 unique IPs Roughly 30 of those are bots (YandexBot, security scanners, mystery crawlers) Another 25 are automated probes trying to find .env files, PHP shells, and Spring Boot actuators ~5 appear to be legitimate tools evaluating my pages 1 actual human visitor (and that might be me chec