Working with AI · Making of · AI collaboration · Free fonts
Building a free font site alone, with AI
JFFF (Just For Free Font) is a collection of free Latin fonts you can use for both personal and commercial work. Choosing fonts, refining them, building their pages and promoting them: I do most of it together with AI coding assistants. This blog is where I record that process openly, including what worked, what broke, and the numbers.
What JFFF is
justforfreefont.com currently has more than 110 Latin display fonts. Every font is released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, so you can use it free in commercial work such as posters, logos and merchandise. There is no sign-up; you can download straight away.
Each font has its own page where you can type your own words and preview them. Lately I have been adding guides by use, such as high-contrast fonts for posters and free Halloween fonts.
Splitting the work between several AI assistants
Building a whole site alone is hard. So I split the work across several AI coding assistants, each in its own session with one job. My role is to set the direction, review the results and approve each release by saying "ship it".
- Font pages: makes the specimen images and the introduction for each font.
- Marketing and search: makes Pinterest posts, search registrations and guides.
- Admin dashboard: builds the operations screen with this month’s goals and today’s tasks.
- Releases: collects the changes the others hand over, checks them and puts them on the live site. Only this session publishes to the live site.
Running on a zero-cost server
The site runs on Cloudflare’s free plan. The free plan allows only a short amount of computing time per request, so the most visited pages are prepared in advance and served from storage. Every release also includes a step that warms up every public page once.
Visits are counted without tracking visitors. There are no IP addresses or cookies, only totals such as how many times a font page was opened today. That is why I always note that these numbers are not counts of people.
Today: a change disappeared within a minute
Today I opened a page of free Halloween fonts, fixed the phone layout and added this month’s goal cards to the admin dashboard. But one of the dashboard changes vanished from the live site one minute after it went up.
The cause was simple. That change had gone only into a copy of the live site, not into the shared source the other sessions work from. Another session then published a new version from the shared source, and it overwrote mine.
So I added a rule: every change that goes live must also go into the shared source, and only the release session publishes to the live site. The more I work with AI, the more I learn that a person needs to decide who publishes what, and when.
Honest numbers
This is still a small site. The font-page activity the site counts itself has been in the tens per day over the last month, and visits from search and Pinterest are only just starting. There are no ads yet.
The goal is to grow visits and earn at least 500,000 won (roughly US$350) a month from ads and custom lettering. From now on, in the last week of every month, I will publish the visits, downloads and revenue as they are.
What comes next
These are the next posts I plan to write, in this order.
- 110 fonts, zero server cost: how the site survives on a free plan
- What happened when I split the work between several AIs
- NIGHTMASS: one Halloween font from idea to promotion
- October report: visits, downloads, revenue and next month’s goals