Feedback for something im building
[WARNING, LONGGGG POST]
From lurking to posting, yikes its a scary change! I’ve been building a project called RamenSplit, and I wanted to share to the community what it was. I keep posts and realize i havent contributed anything to the sub yet 😅
For a while, I was trying to figure out how to get leads for projects without spending ridiculous amounts of money on ads. As a small (indie?) builder, it’s frustrating to see how expensive customer outreach can be.
You can have a useful product, but getting it in front of the right people often requires paying for clicks, impressions, or lead lists before you even know whether the audience cares. It feels like one must throw money at an idea without having a guarantee that the right people will see it. At the same time, I kept seeing different “idle-pay” or “passive income” software products promising that people could make money while their computers sat unused on X.
A lot of those products felt fake, or designed more around hype than trust. Most of their websites looked low quality, and while they boasted about hundreds of users It was difficult for me to understand:
- Where the money was actually coming from
- What users were agreeing to
- What data was being collected
- Whether the earnings were real
- Who ultimately benefited
That made me think about whether there was a more transparent version of the idea. I really wished passive income could exist, and wanted to see if I could make something that rewards all participants.
Instead of pretending that people are earning money from invisible background activity, what if users were rewarded for something they are visibly doing, like spending time waiting for an AI response?
That became the starting point for RamenSplit.
The goal is to build something community-sourced for the community:
- Advertisers (indie devs or small startups trying to drive first users) get a more affordable way to reach people actively using AI who would be interested in their products.
- Users who view an ad make a small cut of the revenue the advertiser paid to post the ad (50%-75% split among all viewers)
- A platform that allows advertisers to track metrics and see what they need to work on before they start paying for more diverse ads.
The current product is a Chrome extension that shows a small sponsor card while ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, Perplexity, or v0 is generating a response.
It does not read prompts, responses, page text, or code. It only observes whether the interface appears to be generating. Users explicitly authorize the extension, complete onboarding, and can pause or disable it at any time.
I’ve built the extension, account pairing, user earnings dashboard, advertiser dashboard, privacy controls, offline event queueing, campaign attribution, and production site.
But I’m still very early and nowhere near finished.
There are no impressive traction numbers to share yet. The payout system still needs to be fully activated and tested. There are currently no active production advertiser campaigns. I’m still trying to figure out whether this is a real business or just an interesting idea I got emotionally attached to.
So I’m sharing this before it’s fully polished and released because I want feedback from people who have built websites and platforms with users.
The questions I’m trying to get some help answering are:
- Would you install something that monetizes the time you spend waiting for AI?
- Does the model feel more trustworthy than typical “idle income” software or methods?
- Would a small sponsor card during AI generation feel acceptable or annoying?
- Can this actually help small companies get leads without huge advertising budgets?
- Is there a real community benefit here, or am I just creating another piece of bloatware?
I’d especially appreciate criticism from people who think the idea is flawed. If you made it this far, congratulations, you have my respect. Apologies about the long post.