Roadmap
The whole plan, in public: fourteen stages, 307 tracked items, and an honest marker against each one.
Last updated 2026-08-08
Why this is public
Two reasons. First, it keeps us honest — a plan nobody can see is a plan that quietly gets rewritten after the fact. Second, it tells you whether the tool you need is coming, so you do not have to guess.
The order is deliberate. Everything that costs money to run — servers, storage, model calls — is deferred until there are enough visitors to justify it. Everything that compounds — tools, internal links, topical depth — comes first.
The fourteen stages
- 01
Strategy and foundation
Done18 itemsMission, three-year targets, the opportunity database, the ten-question filter, and the 50-point scoring model that decides what gets built.
- Scoring model defined and applied to the first 100 candidates
- Three starting divisions chosen: text, developer, security
- Categories we will never build, written down
- 02
Brand and domain
Done16 itemsName, mark, palette, typography, tone of voice and the asset set.
- AdeptBay name and mark
- Bay-teal palette, contrast-checked in both themes
- Inter and JetBrains Mono, self-hosted
- 03
Engineering foundation
Done32 itemsThe platform itself: defineTool, the registry, the dynamic route, the SEO and schema generators, sitemap sharding, and the scaffold CLI.
- One route renders every tool page
- Seven schema types generated from the registry
- Category-sharded sitemap index
- Registry validation fails the build on a thin page
- 04
Component library
In progress26 itemsThe shared components every tool page is assembled from. Most are built; the file-handling set lands with the first PDF and image tools.
- Done: ToolShell, OptionsForm, ResultBox, DiffViewer, StatGrid, FileDropzone
- Pending: PdfPreview, LightCodeEditor, ImagePreview — waiting on the tools that need them
- 05
The first tools
In progress15 itemsText and developer utilities, each with its own benchmarks, limits and failure modes.
- 14 live
- Next: find and replace, line numbering, text to columns
- 06
Content system
In progress22 itemsGuides, comparison pages, glossary, and the policy set. Guide pages are live on a template; hand-written replacements are being written three a week.
- Done: About, Methodology, Privacy, Terms, Cookies, Accessibility, DMCA, Contact
- In progress: hand-written guides, three per week
- 07
SEO implementation
Next28 itemsSearch Console and Bing verification, IndexNow, internal-link auditing, and the Core Web Vitals baseline.
- Bing Webmaster Tools verification — not optional; ChatGPT search runs on the Bing index
- AI citation tracker: 20 target questions, monthly
- 08
Infrastructure and security
Next26 itemsPostgres, Redis, object storage, the job queue, rate limiting and the abuse controls that server-side tools require.
- Not needed until the first server-side tool ships
- Security headers and CSP are already live
- 09
Monetisation
Later24 itemsAdvertising after 100 pages and policy-page approval, then affiliate, email, Premium and the API.
- Gate: 100+ live pages before applying
- Ad slots are built and reserve their height; the flag is off
- 10
Distribution
Later22 itemsDirectories, Show HN, Product Hunt, a browser extension, embeddable widgets and the retention loops.
- Six channels, so no single one is more than 60% of traffic
- 11
AI layer
Later16 itemsThe model router, prompt cache, quotas and evaluation set. The abstraction is built and disabled; nothing calls a model yet.
- Cost controls exist before the first feature, not after the first bill
- 12
Legal, financial, operational
Later24 itemsCompany structure, banking, payments, tax and the first standard operating procedures.
- Revenue first, structure second
- 13
Measurement
Later18 itemsThe per-tool dashboard: runs, success rate, p95 duration, clicks, average position and RPM, sortable.
- Past 50 tools, memory stops being a reliable input to decisions
- 14
Scale
Later20 itemsHiring, internationalisation, the public API, and the first genuine SaaS product.
- Year two and beyond
What is deliberately not on this list
Media downloaders, DRM circumvention, fake document generators, engagement-farming tools, contact scrapers, AI-detection tools claiming an accuracy they cannot have, and medical dosage calculators. Several of those would bring significant traffic. None of them will be built here — the reasoning is on the About page.
Requesting a tool
Requests go through the same 50-point score as everything else. Describe the task rather than the tool and send it to support@adeptbay.com — see the contact page for what makes a request actionable.