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Tooltester: a website-builder review site that makes $1.4M a year from SEO traffic
Tooltester reviews and compares website builders, hosting, live chat, email marketing and AI tools for freelancers and small businesses, and it earns money from ads, sponsorships and affiliate links — revenue the founder put at $1.4M a year in a May 2023 interview.
How it started
Robert Brandl was working at a marketing agency in Germany in 2009 when he decided to take a sabbatical and start a travel blog about Asia. Looking for the easiest way to build it, he found very little useful information: WordPress was not yet big, and the other content management systems looked too complicated. He eventually found easy website builders like Weebly, Wix and Squarespace — but almost nothing had been written about them online.
So he built a small review site with a free website builder instead. The startup cost, as he described it, was the price of a .com domain name and a couple of stock photos.
The first sale arrived about five weeks after launch: a visitor found his reviews through a Google search and bought a paid website builder package, earning him $30 in affiliate commission. The following month he crossed $100. Roughly six months later he handed in his resignation.
What it sells and how it charges
The official site, fetched on 2026-09-30, describes the business in one line on its homepage: "We Review the Best Web Tools," and in its meta description: "We help you find the best web tools to create a website, an online store, offer live chat, improve your SEO and so much more."
What that looks like in practice is a library of reviews, pricing analyses, tutorials and side-by-side comparisons across website builders (Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, Hostinger AI Builder, Webnode, Jimdo, IONOS MyWebsite, Weebly, Webflow, WordPress, Strikingly, Elementor One), ecommerce platforms (Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce), and adjacent categories such as live chat and email marketing. There are also "best website builder for" roundups by use case — small business, photographers, bloggers, nonprofits, artists, musicians, restaurants, SEO, videographers, authors — plus a comparison tool and a smart quiz.
Revenue comes from ads, sponsorships and affiliate relationships. Readers do not pay for access: the site's newsletter is promoted on the homepage as "Join for free," and the review content is open. The site does not publish a price list for its own services, because it does not sell one — the money comes from publishers and software companies, not from subscribers.
How it got its first customers, and what kept growth going
The first customers came from Google, before Brandl knew what SEO was. The site drew steady organic traffic from launch in 2009; he started investing in SEO courses and software in 2010/2011. A backlink from the New York Times followed in 2012 — even printed in the newspaper — though he is clear there was no repeatable process behind it, just being one of the few sites covering website builders at the time.
The strategy that did scale is keyword coverage. Brandl started by reviewing the top website builders and then expanded into landing page builders, hosting providers and live chat software, and later added niche sites: ChatToolTester, AppToolTester, HostingExperto (in Spanish) and EmailToolTester. English content that performs well gets translated into the other languages the site runs in.
One short line from the founder captures the channel mix: organic search accounts for between 80% and 90% of traffic, which peaked at 676K monthly users during the height of the pandemic. Email and YouTube are the other two main channels, with roughly 87K email subscribers and almost 28K YouTube subscribers. The automated welcome series, segmented by industry, averages a 42% open rate and a 13% click rate.
Growth has not been a straight line. In 2020 the team acquired a competing site, HowToGetOnline.com, and finished fully integrating it into Tooltester.com shortly before the interview. A rebrand between September 2021 and August 2022 was far more painful: changing the domain cost 30% of traffic in the first six weeks. Brandl also names Forbes as the competitor now dominating the software review keywords he targets, which he reads as Google favouring strong domains over specialist depth.
The numbers
| Figure | What the founder said | When |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $1.4M a year (around $120K a month) | Founder-reported, May 2023 interview |
| Team | 9 employees, plus freelancers (5 content managers and 8 freelance writers) | May 2023 interview |
| Founders | 1 | May 2023 interview |
| Start cost | Price of a .com domain and a couple of stock photos | Founder's account of the 2009 launch |
| Languages | Seven | May 2023 interview |
| Traffic mix | Organic search 80–90% of traffic | Founder's account in the interview |
| Base | Barcelona, Spain | May 2023 interview |
Every revenue figure here is what Brandl said at that date. Nothing on this page is current revenue, and no income is promised to the reader.
How it compares
According to 1M.chat's analysis of 1,997 businesses with founder-reported revenue in Starter Story interviews (2015–2026) — a self-selected sample of founders who chose to be interviewed, not a random sample of all businesses — Tooltester sits in the "Newsletters, blogs & media" category, where 162 businesses report revenue.
- Median monthly revenue in the category: $8.5K
- Share of the category at $1M a year or more: 11%
- Median headcount in the category: 1.0
- Share started by one founder: 83%
- Top growth channels, of the 120 businesses in the category with channel information: organic social media 68%, SEO and organic search 62%, email and newsletters 43%, content marketing 37%
Against that category median, Tooltester's reported revenue is about 13 times higher. Two things stand out from the comparison. The business model is unremarkable for the category — affiliate and ad revenue from content is the common path — but the outcome is not: at nine employees it is well above a median headcount of one, and it clears the $1M-a-year mark that only about one in ten businesses in the category reaches. Its channel mix also inverts the category ranking, where organic social media leads and SEO comes second; Tooltester runs the other way round.
What a founder can take from it
- Cover the comparison your buyer actually searches. Brandl did not start with a content strategy; he started with the question he had himself — which website builder is easiest — and answered it in public. The keywords followed from that.
- One product category can carry several sites. Website builders led to hosting, live chat, email marketing and app makers, each with its own keyword set and, in the Spanish case, its own language.
- Translation multiplies what already works. Rather than commissioning new ideas per market, the team translates English articles and reviews that have already performed.
- Owned channels are worth building alongside search. Email (roughly 87K subscribers) and YouTube (almost 28K subscribers) are the two channels the founder names besides the site, and the segmented welcome series is doing measurable work.
- Assume the ranking can drop. A domain change cost 30% of traffic in six weeks, and a large general-interest publisher now competes for the same keywords. If nearly all your traffic comes from one source, plan for that source to move.
Sources
Revenue, team and start-cost figures are what the founder reported at the interview date, not current figures and not a prediction of what you will earn. Product and pricing facts come from the business's own website as checked on 30 September 2026. Method & sources · Disclosure