Creator and commerce decision
TinyAdz
A small, functional ad-serving and reporting replacement is feasible for a single technical person, but reproducing TinyAdz's marketplace liquidity, traffic supply, and advanced fraud protections is not practical to rebuild here.
Visit website↗Not priced
No pricing page we fetched carried a figure, so there is nothing to compare against. The build side is still real.
$100one-off74 h to build
$40/mo6 h/mo upkeep
No published price to break even against.
No open-source build does this yet
Nothing published replaces this one, so a replacement starts from an empty file. Here is what it would have to cover.
What a replacement has to do
- Match advertiser campaigns to publisher placements, serve banners, record impressions/clicks, pay publishers and report results.
What it still won’t have
- Established advertiser demand and publisher liquidity (marketplace effects)
- Proprietary fraud-detection at scale and historical signal
- Brand trust and existing reporting/verification integrations
- Any bespoke partnerships or platform-bundled traffic
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
No published price
TinyAdz does not publish a price we could read, so there is nothing to compare against. What building costs is below.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal self-hosted ad network using Node.js (Express) backend, Postgres for data, Redis for counters/queues, React for a small dashboard, and Nginx + Cloudflare for CDN/bot mitigation. Core features in scope: (1) publisher and advertiser signup and account pages, (2) campaign creation with simple targeting (domain whitelist, placement type, daily budget), (3) banner serving endpoint that returns creatives and records impressions and click redirects with ref=tinyadz-like query param, (4) event ingestion pipeline that writes to Postgres and Redis counters, (5) a reporting dashboard showing impressions, clicks, CTR and spend, (6) scheduled nightly fraud checks (simple heuristics: IP rate limits, known proxy lists, UA anomalies) and a payout job that computes balances and exports CSVs, (7) payment integration with Stripe and PayPal for advertiser top-ups and publisher payouts (export only). Out of scope: building a large marketplace of publishers/advertisers, advanced ML-based fraud detection, legal/compliance review, PCI storage. Deliverables must include error handling, basic unit/integration tests, and deployment scripts (Docker + docker-compose or Terraform for one cloud provider).
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- 3 cited sources+3
- Evidence score55
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 3
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productTinyAdz — official site
- official productTinyAdz — fraud and payout policy
- official productTinyAdz — payout terms
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
