$12, a typo, and the dumbest website I've built

Last night I was doing overdue admin, closing tabs on old accounts I'd half forgotten existed, and I logged into a PayPal account I hadn't touched in years. Apparently my past self likes leaving small treasure chests for future me to trip over. Sitting in there: $12 and some change.

I did what any self-respecting (read: degenerate) vibe coder does with free money and no plan. I asked myself one question: what can I build with twelve dollars?

A twelve-dollar dare

I'd already been sitting on an idea for a while, a portfolio of the dumbest apps and sites I could make, purely for the branding and the laugh.

So I opened Gemini and typed something close to: "I have $12 USD, tell me what to do with it. I need a domain and a dumb concept I can build for no more than this budget."

It gave me exactly the kind of stupid, unhinged suggestions you'd expect. Most of them were forgettable. One stuck, and it's this one below.

A typo that paid off

While hunting for a domain, I fat-fingered a search and landed on a genuinely good .com. Instant buy, $8.88, on Spaceship, and yes, I'm aware my last experience with Spaceship involved an outage. I still like the platform enough to hand them more money.

Read also: Spacemail is down, and I blame them, but mostly myself

Here's the part that got me leaning fucking forward in my chair: almost every short, clean .com you'd want is gone. Dictionary words, exact-match domains, anything with real recall, someone's sitting on it or actively using it.

Finding one available for hand registration at a normal price is like finding a unicorn in your backyard.

Finding one that's been sitting around since 2007 is close to a rounding error.

I didn't believe it at first. I used to invest in domains, so I know the drill: sometimes a registrar shows "available", and it's a glitch, and the second you try to check out, it isn't.

This wasn't that. It let me pay. I own a 19-year-old domain now, and its entire backstory before me is a mystery:

Registered, abandoned at some point, and left to drift through whatever chain of brokers and squatters park expired domains and wait for someone dumb enough to want them.

That someone was me. Maybe I am the sucker, or I'll become the punchline for $8.88. Who knows.

I broke my own rule in one afternoon

I recently added a rule about not building on weekends. It's the one piece of discipline keeping me from turning every idle thought into a repo.

I held the line for most of the day, then the idea wouldn't leave me fuck alone, so I sat down and built the whole damn thing in a single afternoon on my kitchen table.

Looking at the finished version, I think it might be stupid enough to work. Not "stupid" as in bad, stupid as in the specific flavor of dumb that makes people want to share it.

I kept the scope tight on purpose. I prompted it properly, got most of the design and functionality in close to one pass, and used Gemini and Claude to sanity-check the rest.

The whole thing runs on a ticket stub layout, a perforated line down the middle like an actual tear-off ticket, with a short pitch on the left and a loud, high-contrast payout number on the right.

You vote on whether each entry is stupid or genius with two chips; you get a toast notification when you do. Every entry is deep-linkable by hash so you can send someone a specific one directly, and you can flip through the whole thing with the spacebar or arrow keys.

Entries are sorted into categories: startups, music, pop culture, internet lore, toys, and a bucket I'm calling stupid tech.

The engine underneath isn't new. I adapted and refactored the flashcard system from Study Brew, the language learning project I'm building, which is the only reason this came together as fast as it did. Same bones, completely different, much dumber skin.

Right now it's pulling from a static JSON file with 300 entries, handwritten, no AI filler. I'll add roughly a hundred more a week until there's enough volume to start randomizing what people see.

The stack, or lack of one

There's nothing to it, financially or technically. Vanilla JavaScript, Tailwind through a CDN, Google Fonts, hosted on Vercel's free tier. No database, no backend, nothing to maintain, nothing to think about. The entire cost of this project, start to finish, is the price of the domain.

The final word

I have a flagship SaaS I'm supposed to be spending my focus on. I have a $168M goal I'm chipping away at in public. And somehow the thing I'm proudest of this month is a dumbass joke website built from spare change and a typo.

I think that's fine. Some months the win is the big serious thing moving forward an inch. Other months it's proof that you can still find a 19-year-old domain for $8.88, build something dumb enough to make people laugh, and call it a day's work.

You can check out this absurd project and website here. Who knows that my own stupid build might rake in the most money at some point.