AI-Operated Startup Burns $9 a Day With Zero Customers, Tracks Losses Live

·1 views

A publicly documented experiment called Geppetto Works launched on August 8, 2025, in which an AI handles all coding, planning, and product development while a human owner manages legal and financial tasks. The company's live dashboard at pinocchio.live displays a real-time balance that currently sits at around negative $360, declining by roughly $9.13 each day. Two products are in development: Block Index, which tracks how many websites block AI crawlers, and Citation Verifier, a tool that checks legal citations against official sources without generating new law. The venture has earned zero revenue so far, and the AI-human team has agreed that the company only receives a funded operating wallet once five paying customers sign up. If the wallet ever reaches zero after that threshold is met, the company is considered dead — and the public meter will reflect it.

Read the full story at DEV Community

This is an AI-generated summary. ShortSingh links to the original source for the complete article.

Discussion (0)

OpenPledge Uses Blockchain and AI to Make Charity Donations Fully Transparent

A developer has built OpenPledge, an open-source donation platform designed to give donors complete visibility into where their money goes. Every contribution is recorded on the Solana blockchain, creating a permanent, publicly verifiable transaction record that cannot be altered. Google Gemini generates a personalised thank-you message for each donor, which ElevenLabs then converts into spoken audio, while Snowflake powers a public Impact Dashboard showing aggregate giving trends. The platform requires no login and features a public ledger linking every donation directly to its on-chain record. OpenPledge was submitted as part of a weekend developer challenge and is currently live at open-pledge.vercel.app, with full source code available on GitHub.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community

ProgrammingHacker News ·

Car Industry Data Shows CarPlay Significantly Boosts Vehicle Sales

A blog post highlighted how the automotive industry effectively conducted a natural A/B test by selling identical car models with and without Apple CarPlay support. The results revealed a clear consumer preference for vehicles equipped with CarPlay integration. This real-world comparison provided strong evidence of how in-car technology features influence purchasing decisions. The findings suggest that CarPlay has become a meaningful factor for buyers when choosing between otherwise similar vehicles.

0 comments Read more at Hacker News

ProgrammingDEV Community ·

WebForms Core 2.1 Introduces WPC Criteria as an Advanced Alternative to CSS Selectors

WebForms Core 2.1 has expanded its built-in domain-specific language, WebForms Place Criteria (WPC), which allows developers to select, filter, and manipulate HTML and DOM elements. Unlike standard CSS selectors, WPC Criteria enables filtering of already-selected elements based on text content, attributes, visibility, state, position, and DOM relationships. Developers can chain multiple conditions and apply operators to build complex selections that go beyond simple ID, class, or tag-based queries. WPC also supports text searches and attribute-value matching, such as finding elements whose attribute values end with a specific string. The feature is exclusive to the WebForms Core framework and is not available as a standalone or external tool.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community

ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Developer Wraps Pay-Per-Call APIs in MCP Server, Joins Official Registry for Free

A developer who had failed to earn revenue from REST-based pay-per-call APIs repackaged them as tools inside a single MCP server using the streamable-HTTP transport. The server uses the x402 protocol to charge USDC micropayments only when an agent actually invokes a tool, while keeping discovery methods like tools/list and initialize free. Three tools are offered — a QR code generator, an image processor, and an LLM-backed text analyser — priced between $0.01 and $0.02 per call. The server was listed on the official MCP Registry without a GitHub account by using HTTP-based Ed25519 key authentication tied to a free sslip.io hostname on a $4 VPS. The developer concludes that packaging APIs as MCP tools, rather than REST endpoints, is critical for reaching AI agents as customers.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community