Rishit Patel

Rishit Patel is a Canadian full-stack developer from Northern Ontario best known for aitools.fyi, a curated directory of AI tools, and for a portfolio of niche directories and small SaaS products built mostly with Next.js. On X, where Rishit posts as @imrishit98, the stated goal is as building a niche apps empire and shares the journey along with memes.

Patel specializes in what they call money-making web apps: sites designed from the start to earn through search traffic, listings, sponsorships or subscriptions. Rishit's personal site says the projects have reached more than 100,000 users and 500,000 monthly page views, and that they have generated millions in revenue in total.

The portfolio leans on directories and programmatic SEO. aitools.fyi helps people find AI tools by category; Amazing Newsletters is a directory for discovering and comparing newsletters; and Outbid.fyi is a pay-to-rank board where sponsors bid for the top spots. An earlier daily AI directory, AI of the Day, was acquired. On the SaaS side Rishit runs Invoice Mama, an AI-assisted invoice generator for freelancers, contractors and small businesses, and has built tools such as PDFPeer for working with PDFs, ChatSimple for AI chat, Tiny AI Tools, the World of AI newsletter, Youfy for converting YouTube playlists to Spotify, and revRN, an MVP-building service.

The stack centers on Next.js, React, Tailwind and shadcn/ui, with Supabase, Upstash and Pinecone for data, Stripe for payments, Vercel and Cloudflare R2 for hosting and storage, and models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Together AI, Replicate and Fal AI.

Patel is a good example of the small-bets approach to indie making: shipping many focused sites quickly, letting search and directories bring the traffic, and selling projects when it makes sense.