I run a small family of free, no-login tool sites — eight of them are listed on my /tools page — and every one of them lives or dies on search traffic. Somewhere around the fifth site I figured out the expensive truth: the real cost of a new site isn't the build, it's committing to the idea before the build. Register a domain on a guess and you're quietly betting three months of work on a hunch. This post is my full validation workflow — every gate a candidate idea has to pass between "interes...