I empathise with the comments about copycats.
I made a web game and initially put it up on github pages. It was inspired by a similar web game which had been abandoned and I wanted to add features etc so I re-created it from scratch.
Within a week it was cloned and put up on a nice domain with a different logo and the copycat was impersonating me on social media and ranking quite well on Google. It's no longer open source. The copy cat site now has adverts up and links to a network of copycat web games. Many copy cat sites are now embedding my site proxied (to avoid CORS) and surrounded with adverts. These sites rank really well on Google because the copy cat sites link to each other. The game is at https://redactle-unlimited.com if you want to check it out. I haven't made a life changing amount from donations but it actually might be a significant amount for people in poorer economies.
The bottom line is that you need to have a moat by having a trusted brand or database/codebase that can't be imitated.
This reminds me of the 90s when sites where hosted inside iframes to inject ads. ISPs were notorious for doing this. Every site started running javascript to break out of iframes because of it. I'm not sure if this would work for you, but something like this could help you
if (window.location.hostname !== 'your host name') { window.location.replace('url on your website');
Open source emulation scene have similar problems. Some talented devs basically stop to work on open source emulator because of highly successful copycat (here, RetroArch)[1].
RA spats don't really focus on it being a copycat/multisystem "emulator combiner" from my experience (in fact, non-RA stuff with a similar goal like OpenEmu usually doesn't tend to be at the source for people quitting the emudev scene). It's typically problems with maintainer; he's a huge narcissist who pretty much thinks he's the kingmaker of the emulation scene.
With the sole exception of MAME and mGBAs conflicts with RA (which respectively are about having extremely old cores in RA & the fact that their PS3 port uses a dubiously legal homebrew SDK that uses components from Sonys own proprietary SDK), the overwhelming majority of spats tend to occur because the maintainer has a bad habit of throwing hissy fits over his personal opinions of emulation.
Specifically, the guy gets pissed whenever someone doesn't want to put in extra legwork to support libretro (which due to it being too overengineered is not an insignificant amount of work), gets angry whenever someone licenses out their emulator for a paid device (since RA can't legally be licensed out due to being a mess in terms of licenses) and so on and so forth. It tends to result in said emudev getting a cavalcade of angry IRC messages from the maintainer, backtalking in RetroArch IRC channels and public whining on the RA twitter account/blog (which due to their reach tends to result in users of RA with barely an understanding of the situation sending further angry messages to the emudev) and in at least one notable case, anonymously complaining about other emudevs on 4chan (but being so transparent about it that he was easily identifiable).
Yeah, interacting with this guy is not a pleasant experience. Manages to offend and be more offensive than even 4chan. It's sad because libretro is a pretty good idea and RetroArch has nice features like dynamic rate control and a shader stack.
It's a good idea, but the execution is utterly deficient.
RetroArch (the main libretro implementation as well as basically the reference implementation) is overengineered to the point of bordering on unusable. The entire project is riddled with bad design decisions for the sake of extreme modularity, but all this results in is that it's a pain in the neck to configure and customize. Remapping a button in an emulator, a relatively easy task for basically any emulator out there, can result in your entire setup breaking down and because your typical RA install has ~30k files and poor separation of configuration and application components, your only real recourse is to reinstall the entire thing.
Ironically, this specific deficiency also why most emulators nowadays have migrated over to using Stenzeks duckstation UI (which itself is based on Dolphins user interface, just better written); it turned out to be well written enough to be reusable across multiple emulators with fairly little modification, while also leaving developers the room to customize certain elements to fit their emulator (something which libretro is really bad at).
Libretro mostly got where it is because Twinaphex has enough orbiters to keep all the various cores up to date, even if it takes what amounts to a hostile fork to do so.
I completely agree. Funny that you mentioned button remapping, that's literally my number one problem with RetroArch since I first used it many years ago. The input mapping system is confusing and the RetroPad abstraction is redundant and unnecessary.
If it doesn't manage to autoconfigure the controller, you want to remap inputs or you're using a keyboard, you're in for some pain. The GUI doesn't show which actual physical button you're remapping core inputs to, only the RetroPad button. You have to keep in mind two levels of chained button mappings which is harder than it seems. If you remap the RetroPad itself you also remap the entire user interface inputs which leads to stupid situations where the GUI stops working and I have to edit the config file to undo whatever mistake I made that left the inputs in an inconsistent state such as two buttons mapped to the same key.
I actually argued with this guy on 4chan over this once many years ago. Why not have cores enumerate their inputs so that the frontend can map directly to them? SNES cores would return the symbols representing the buttons on the SNES pad. Something like this:
core.inputs.digital = [↑ ↓ ← → A B X Y L R START SELECT]
We'd be able to map buttons and keys directly to those symbols just like every single standalone emulator out there without any of this RetroPad business getting in the way. He basically told me that the RetroPad is perfect, I'm retarded and if I'm autistic enough to want to use a keyboard to play games I deserve to be a second class citizen.
Oh, so that's the reason. I have a 6-button Saturn-style gamepad that I bought dirt cheap to play MAME. A year ago I wanted to play some Megadrive games. I tried RetroArch, and it's absolutely impossible to configure it, it insist that your controller has a SNES-like layout. What good is an emulator if it doesn't show you the real controls of the real machine? Also, I guess the interface is nice if you are playing on a RetroPi or similar connected to a TV, but on a PC with a real mouse is absolutely atrocious. And don't get me started on the million different cores and forks of forks of forks.
A few months ago I found Ares (https://ares-emu.net/), a fork of bsnes/higan with a pleasant UI and multi-system support, and I couldn't be happier. It is not perfect, but it is so much nicer.
Yeah, it's stupid. It's even more annoying with MAME and arcade games in general because every single system has its own button layout and every single game has its own button conventions. There is no such thing as a standard controller and of course trying to wrap such a diverse ecosyetem into an XInput controller abstraction results in a mess.
I always have to remap inputs for nearly every game because I want to have my jump, attack, dash buttons and all the other inputs remain consistent for every game due to muscle memory. The mere existence of the RetroPad makes this nightmarishly hard.
It's not like he doesn't know this. I remember him committing features that would let people swap A/B and X/Y buttons precisely to help the arcade players. Who knows what he's done since then. Maybe he fixed it but I wouldn't bet on it.
> And don't get me started on the million different cores and forks of forks of forks.
Yeah, even the emulator authors themselves are unhappy with that. I guess RetroArch needs those forks because their audience includes people with underpowered devices.
Great, but that has nothing to do with copycats. A copycat is a product that copies the original and pretends it is the original.
You can't release software under an open source model and complain about "copycats" since that's literally what you gave permission for. As long as the licenses are followed, people have the right to do whatever they want with the code.
I'd like to remark for anyone not already familiar with the game in question that ...
* Redactle Unlimited is a big improvement on original-Redactle
* Redactle is (at least for those who like such things) a terrific game, and you should totally go to redactle-unlimited.com and take a look
* as berjin says, the creator of original-Redactle hasn't been heard from in ages and shows every sign of having completely abandoned the game, so Redactle Unlimited isn't an unethical name-grab
(It looks as if redactle-unlimited.com is #2 on Google and the main clone site is #1; on DuckDuckGo it's the other way around, so well done DDG.)
I see this got downvoted. I vigorously endorse everyone's right to downvote things they think are bad, but I'm baffled as to what is supposed to be bad about the above, and if I've done something bad without knowing it I'd like to find out what. If whoever downvoted it happens to be around and willing to explain, your chances of making me not do whatever-you-didn't-like in the future are much better if you do so; your downvote unfortunately literally can't do that since I don't know what it's for.
(Top hypotheses: 1. too much thread drift; 2. suspicion that I'm some sort of a shill for Redactle Unlimited; 3. actually it wasn't meant to be a downvote at all and it's just because the up/down arrows are easy to misclick on mobile devices. For what it's worth, it doesn't feel to me like an unreasonable amount of thread drift, I have no connection to RU other than enjoying playing it, and I entirely agree that the arrows are fiddly on mobile.)
I'll add a fourth guess for why. You know that "Redactle Unlimited is a big improvement on original-Redactle" shows support for the author of this article, whose game is Redactle Unlimited.
But to someone not paying close enough attention, it's easy to think original-Redactl is the author's game. Then that line can be misread as supporting the copycat over the author, which would be unkind in context. I misread it that way, until I scrolled back to check which one was the author's game.
Ooooh, that's an interesting thought. You could be right.
So, for the avoidance of doubt:
The original original was redactle.com. The creator of that seems to have abandoned it not long after its creation, and to have taken no further interest in it.
The thing we are talking about is redactle-unlimited.com. This was made by berjin. It gives suitable credit to redactle.com. It provides a notably better playing experience than original redactle.com does. I do not consider it a copycat in any culpable sense.
And then there are the copycats of Redactle Unlimited, most notably redactleunlimited.com. That one, so far as I can tell, has simply taken berjin's code and filed off the serial numbers. It offers no improvement over redactle-unlimited.com. It does not give credit to any of its predecessors. It is definitely a copycat in every sense.
Redactle Unlimited (launched in July) looks like it launched about three months after Redactle (launched in April), and is using the name of the original one in its name.
I’m not sure what I feel about this if the original really is abandoned (is something ‘abandoned’ if it is working fine and just hasn’t been updated in eight months?) - but it definitely feels a little rich that the Redactle Unlimited author is complaining about copycats.
Well, there were people saying that Redactle seemed to have been abandoned in the Redactle subreddit before Redactle Unlimited was created. (I think.) In other words, although it's hard to know anyone's intent with confidence, it seems like when berjin made RU he had reason to believe that he wasn't stealing the thunder of someone who was still actively involved with Redactle. And Redactle Unlimited credited original-Redactle explicitly from its first creation, according to archive.org's Wayback Machine. So it's not trying to pretend to be "the real thing" in any sense in which something else is the real real thing.
All of which makes it seem ethically-OK to me.
It's also relevant that the point of Redactle Unlimited was to offer a feature original-Redactle didn't, namely the ability to play more than one game per day. By making Redactle Unlimited, berjin made Redactle players' lives a little bit better.
Whereas, e.g., redactleunlimited.com credits neither original-Redactle nor original-RedactleUnlimited whose code I believe it has copied, nor does it offer any usability improvements or extra features over original-RedactleUnlimited. In other words, it's purely parasitic -- it doesn't on net make anyone's life better other than that of the person who "made" it -- and it's playing a zero-sum game, gaining whatever success it does at the expense of something that went before it, whose identity it's trying to create confusion with.
1) When I say abandoned the original redactle.com has had it's problems. There have been several days where the original was down because the hosting bill was not paid. Some fans tracked down the hosting company and paid it. Also the certificate was expired for months. Some days it loads a disambiguation wiki page instead of a real article. The dev hasn't been seen on social media since April.
2) Everything I did in redactle-unlimited is from scratch and with significant improvements like multi-player and lemma. The copycats are actually using others' content by either pulling en eBaum's world and embedding the sites or in one case cloning the source code, replacing the logo and domain and claiming to be the "official redactle unlimited" on reddit.
3) I'm hardly the only person to have re-created a Wordle or web game from scratch.
Sorry to be that guy, but this is exactly why lawyers and IP protection were invented.
As a hacker, I hate that these are needed. As a member of society that tries to be considerate and respectful of others, this seems like a ridiculous and wateful overhead.
However, as a realist with some experience in being brain-raped by a bigger company, unfortunately you need to protect yourself from the people that aren't nice or don't care.
This has put our open-source hardware efforts out of public development. It stopped when I'd posted a picture of one of our prototypes, and it was ripped off before I even got a final quote from a metals vendor.
I feel like doing it behind closed doors results in many projects getting completed way slower. It still gets released as open source (and eventually ripped off anyway), but now there's no visibility into the process from the outside, which had been a big source of personal motivation in the past.
Well you know what they say, phish a man and you anger him for a day, teach a man to phish and he'll ask you for help with moving large sums of money out of his war-torn country of Nigeria.
I reflect on this often. There’s something to be said for the lost ways of retribution of old, and the evolution that came with it.
If modern bankers and sycophantic politicians et al tried their modus operandi back in the era of tribes, I’m quite sure they were removed from the gene pool fairly quickly.
It's worth reading the history here. Usually "your group" would steal from you and tell you it was some outside group. You go burn down and lynch a bunch of people who had nothing to do with it.
Often times this included moneylenders.. who were usually a religious minority. It usually involved their kids too.
I wrote my original comment at the midnight hour as I was falling asleep; I should have clarified that I meant more ancient than that, i.e. pre-agriculture, post-cave dwelling.
More along the lines of:
Jim has a bad habit of being a bit of a dick—harassing & bullying tribespeople, taking an unfair amount from the tribe—Jim gets removed from the gene pool next hunting trip. The quality of the tribe, present and future, improves.
I understand how this kind of thing doesn't track very well as a strategy overall in more complex & modern environments.
No, the British were actually taxing the Americans without representation and running kangaroo courts, though the tea ship the colonists attacked wasn't really all that involved.
Right on — I should add that my shower thought wasn't suggesting we should go back, just an observation of the evolution of all things, in this case, justice and social order etc.
While some is gained and some is lost, I'm in the camp that the world is a better place now than it was then.
Could you not do a domain check of some kind in the JS payload and just document.write the entire thing with a bigass notice if it's not on your blessed domain?
You'd have to move the domain check in syntax and placement I guess, in an annoying game of cat and mouse... but it'd be something I suppose? Probably not worth it if it's not a large enough return.
That is trivial to remove via proxying, which author mentioned them doing.
Really, anything you add to the page can be just removed that way. Only thing you can try is to somehow differentiate attacker traffic from normal users but with ubiquity of VPN providers good luck
About
Redactle Unlimited was inspired by the original game at redactle.com which was inspired by Wordle. A random Wikipedia article is displayed with important words redacted (hence the original name Redactle). Redactle Unlimited has many useful features: multiplayer, smart guessing to match plurals and inflections (lemmatization), annotations and of course no daily game limit.
So, GP's game is a more feature-rich version of the original sitting at redactle.com if I understood correctly.
Nobody has heard from the redactle.com dev for around a year now. The main difference with redactle unlimited is that the 1 game per day limit is removed and the multiplayer feature is a lot of fun if you're stuck. Just make sure you go to redactle-unlimited.com and NOT the one without the dash!
You’re being purposefully vague. This is not a good thing if you want to convince people. All the things you refer to could be easily linked to, or referred to by name. You don’t even link to (or name) your own product, or the original abandoned web game.
EDIT: I now see the link in your comment. If it was there originally and I missed it, then I apologize. Otherwise, thank you for adding a link to it!
I build in public and think about these two things often.
As an indie dev, I make around $800k per year on my two saas companies.
Copycats: There have been some, but the saas companies that I've build have such a hard cold start problem (they're social marketplaces), that all the ones I've seen pop-up flatline. If you have a product that has no moat, sure, don't build in public.
Bragging: In fact, it's the opposite. When I post something, and the comments start rolling in, it's only then that I realize mistakes I've made or things I could've done better.
---
I think building in public is still a decent way to build an audience and to get free insights.
Now I feel that sharing the revenue over and over looks a bit by bragging, but I'm pretty sure it's just because I've already seen too many #buildinpublic tweets.
I'm always reminded by the fact that I myself started selling Lunar (https://lunar.fyi) specifically because in a private discussion with the developer of rotato.app, he told me he makes $16k/month with his apps. I was making less than half of that, working on things that felt useless and ready to be scrapped by the next manager, and feeling miserable every day.
Because of this, I also started sharing my revenue in comments from time to time, in the hope that someone would be inspired as I was.
But I strive to do this as rarely as possible. Some of these #buildinpublic journeys create the false impression that it's easy to get that kind of money. It isn't, a lot of it is chance.
Since Lunar, I've put my countless ideas into some other apps at https://lowtechguys.com, but very few generate more than $100/month of revenue. There is room to grow, but hitting a niche is usually the biggest factor in getting sustained revenue high enough to live on.
I come across your path every once in a while, and I appreciate how you talk about your work.
Honesty and openness is really hard to come by when you need it the most. When you're in a position to share, you start to understand why: it's all downsides.
I resonate with everything said in the post based on my experience building my own projects over the past decade.
I'd say that indie hackers don't need to feel pressured to build in public. You have the freedom to share or not share anything. It's your work. If you don't feel comfortable sharing too much, it's totally okay. People might blame you not open source your entire project. People might blame you for not sharing your personal income. Ignore them. Be yourself.
It's certainly not obligatory, but sharing one's journey is very edifying.
I found patio11's old blog inspirational, both for the specific learnings and for showing what a lone person can do. I'd like to someday inspire others in the same way.
It's a sad loss for the world if bad actors ruin this.
I don't believe sharing one's journey is going away any time soon, but it's going to be far more reflective in nature and also more polished. Due to moving away from building in public, you're also not going to get to see the gritty mistakes they make in their codebase along the way.
Which is great news if you want more patio11 blogs, as his were very reflective and less about the direct building in public. Not so great if you want more levelsio type blogs from lesser known folks.
I'm starting the transition from "building in private" to "building in public" (emphasis on the "build", though, because the product still isn't ready so it's not like there's any real financials to discuss).
To be honest, my heart does skip a beat when I think about being completely open about everything. It's the same feeling I'd get if I were naked in public - there's nothing wrong with it, I'd just feel very....exposed. I'm not even sure what people would be interested in hearing. How I blew almost $150k on my first venture? How many followers/signups I got from posting X/Y/Z to platforms A/B/C? How much I paid for designs that I didn't like? I suppose a lot of it is experimentation/trial-and-error, but it's tough to go against my natural instinct to hide behind my IDE.
all of these are good topics to discuss. coming from the design world in my previous career, i think there's value in discussing how you paid for designs you didn't like!
I find the whole BIP movement somewhere between cringe and naive. Also, while it might be a cheap way to promote your product (Though I doubt the audience will also be your customers), it's the equivalent of the reason why someone works out — Do I want to impress the other guys, or am I doing it for health benefits?
I always took "build in public" as a prompt to share what you're working on, and interesting tidbits about your work. In my case, it's mostly because I don't get to talk shop otherwise. My posts are a mix of German bureaucracy updates, web development "TIL"s and new handmade illustrations.
I find that talking about income fosters the wrong kind of discussions with the wrong kind of people. These discussions tend to be extractive rather than conversational.
I relate to this a lot. I used to do a yearly roundup of all my side projects, which were generally well received by HN. Then some of my projects started making money and the copycats came.
Carving out a niche is more important to me than building in public. I'm not one of those guys on Twitter making $1M/yr and I don't need a personal brand.
Good luck to Cory - I've enjoyed reading his stuff.
This is my first time learning of the term Building In Public. However a few weeks ago I discovered and fell in love with the GitLab Handbook, and the term I've been using to proselytize to my teammates (lol) was "Open Source Company" or "Documentation as Company."
Of course, GitLab doesn't share everything, and certainly not Money as a Dashboard (you will find live dashboards scattered throughout the Handbook, though). As with most things I've read, they are very transparent and intentional about the decisions they've made to make certain data public vs. limited access vs. internal.
Open Sourcing accounting internals about a for-profit business always seemed to me a non-starter. Interesting that other companies have experimented with that business model
It’s funny that this guy mentions Pieter Levels as being “inspiring” when he does it. That guy has a huge audience so when he debuts some new product it’s like… cool, good for you, but why does that matter for an indie dev? The most relevant part of that success - having 100,000 eyeballs checking out everything you do - is the hardest to achieve.
I think it's the story of Pieter. He started at zero several years ago and build his way up with no prior coding experience. That's the inspiring part. It's not what he does now, because as you said: he has an audience and launching within that audience makes a big difference.
I always love seeing numbers and other peoples success. It motivates. I think the majority don’t see it as bragging, it shows you can bootstrap your own startups.
Building in public is mostly screenshots and meaningless info. I say mostly, as sometimes I see some value, like suggesting products for day to day usage.
It can motivate some people to see others progress and succeed in entrepreneurship or side projects. Still, the reality is, running a startup is far more complicated than being squished in tweets and screenshots.
Building in public is public roadmap, being active in forums/chats as a rep of your product, putting out questions on debated topics, and of course, screenshots.
The meaningless info you're referring to are IMO copycats of Levels who thinks build in public is just screenshots of MRR.
> Why do you need a product to participate in online forums/chats? And how's posting your roadmap building in public? Isn't that a necessity?
I don’t build in public myself, but i do love reading the stories of others. I always took this behavior as “building [a business] in public” more than just the codebase or product. You want to interact and converse with your customers. Find out what they’re willing to pay for, what they want, share where you’re going (so people can get excited about what’s to come).
I am always so inspired when someone posts open info like this. But as everything is in life, we cant have nice things because of few assholes that ruin it for everyone :(
IMO you have some misguided views on what we are all doing here on earth. It's not a zero sum game, we should all be building bigger and better things.
You shouldn't worry about people copying your old stuff, because you should be on to the next thing. Building the next bigger, better thing.
#buildInPublic has worked great for you—you reached the next level. But now you are considering pulling the ladder up, so you can look down on people, rather than looking ahead to the next hill to climb.
I'd urge you to not only not stop building in public, but to double down and build even more in public. For starters, ditch the copywrong and go public domain. After all, this world wide web that you are 100% dependent on to make your business was built by TBL and released to the public domain.
This is an interesting take, and I agree with a lot of it. As I mentioned in the post, I'm not going to stop building in public entirely, and to some extent part of why I'm changing up what I'm doing is to be on to the next bigger, better thing. I felt the current version was leading to stagnation. "More bigger swings" is an emerging theme for me.
I didn't understand your last point - possibly because "copywrong" and "TBL" are new terms to me...
copywrong = A better term than the one we use. Sorry, I've been involved with the "Intellectual Freedom Movement" for about 17 years. We say IP = "imaginary property" and we say things like (c)opywrong and (c)hains.
Only when done right. When low-effort posting of said build in public data is done it just looks spammy. It's the IndieHackers problem, that whole site is full of people going "I agree, I did that with <mysite>.com"
IndieHackers used to be such a brilliant resource for genuine conversation and camaraderie. I think the homepage layout revamp with a hundred different columns and tabs and tags and sh!t completely ruined the earlier ethos.
I remember posts routinely getting dozens of comments and responses. Nowadays, if a post gets low double digit comments, it is doing very well. Sad, imho.
Yeah tbh I think they just gave up on it. It's running on autopilot these days with very little being done to turn it back into an actual community instead of a place where all you see is dead or dying low effort moneygrabs.
I thought I was the only one that felt this way about the homepage revamp.
There’s also no effort to tone down excessive self-promotion posts and posts that instead of kindle discussion on-site, they link out to third party sites.
Yeah, it’s just a spam sink nowadays. I guess Stripe figured that not a lot of indiehackers were converting into stripe customers so they decided to let it die of neglect.
I don’t think it was ever snappy and I’ve had an account there since 2017-18. It’s slow compared to other sites but not that much slower than it was say 2-3 years ago.
there is a guy in Berkeley who made a certain ultra-high precision app for the iPhone.. meticulous detail, great graphic design.. endorsed by a photographer for National Geographic (a big deal in the USA and elsewhere)
Someone xxxchinaxxx copied his app exactly, with fewer features but all his layout, and advertised it heavily somehow.. after months, the clone was more popular on the Apple app store - also unclear what that means..
That was the last software written by this smart, careful and hard working guy that I know of.. had to "get a job" with a local union doing non-software stuff due to health care and retirement (over 40) considerations. There is no respect or social safety net here (California), based on this real example.
I guess it could be considered arrogant to talk about making lots of money, but in this specific instance, given that the author shares so much information, it's far more valuable than braggardly.
To be considered braggardly would mean that we accept a capitalist definition of value and worth being how much money someone earns or makes. That means that we accept both that the market efficiently rewards societal contributions with money (lmao no) AND that those that are rich because they got a good spawn point are as valuable to society as someone that has the same net worth through their own work "from scratch."
I reject this and therefore I'm disheartened that this person will stop being radically transparent. The information is valuable. I understand the copycat thing though, that makes sense.
I try to avoid linking my own shit on here but I did literally just last week write a post on this subject: https://blog.calebjay.com/posts/share-your-salary/ after a similar conversation with someone who makes a lot of money, and how they felt uncomfortable sharing their salary cause they didn't wanna seem like they're bragging. No ads or trackers or anything (other than goatcounter).
I think this is where a lot of IP proponents would argue that IP is a way to form capital where it doesn't exist - around formalizing ideas and processes into something that you are legally entitled to rent. I think this really dangerously damages ideas that can help people and I think that it's a terrible crutch for a bad system.
I agree, though information asymmetry (what you know that your competition doesn't) is a huge competitive advantage in a capitalistic market. Building in public erodes that information asymmetry away, giving away much of your competitive advantage.
Within a week it was cloned and put up on a nice domain with a different logo and the copycat was impersonating me on social media and ranking quite well on Google. It's no longer open source. The copy cat site now has adverts up and links to a network of copycat web games. Many copy cat sites are now embedding my site proxied (to avoid CORS) and surrounded with adverts. These sites rank really well on Google because the copy cat sites link to each other. The game is at https://redactle-unlimited.com if you want to check it out. I haven't made a life changing amount from donations but it actually might be a significant amount for people in poorer economies.
The bottom line is that you need to have a moat by having a trusted brand or database/codebase that can't be imitated.