My joke product site went viral, so I built a free API for it
A year ago Anycrap, a fake store selling things like Dehydrated Water and Anti-Gravity Toilets, hit #1 on HN. Classic viral moment, zero monetization, maximum chaos.
So I did what any sensible person does: ignored it for a year, then over-engineered it.
What I actually shipped:
REST API — 35k absurdist products, free key, filterable by category
CLI — npx anycrap random because terminals deserve nonsense too
faker.js plugin — drop-in for faker.commerce.productName(), works offline, no key needed
HuggingFace dataset — 35k rows if you want to train something questionable
Monetization: a fake product ownership certificate. People actually buy them. I don't fully understand it either.
What's next: no idea. Hoping developers find the faker plugin useful. Or someone trains a model on it. Or nothing happens and I write another update in a year.
I cannot believe people are buying the fake ownership certificates x)
Why don't you monetize it with ads? it could bring money just by going viral on reddit or even tiktok
I tried Google Ads but they rejected it because of low-quality content. Since then, I'm too lazy and too busy managing other projects