March 22, 2026 | By SPUNK13
Building in public isn't just a trend. It's a strategy. When you share your progress, your numbers, and your tools openly, you attract customers, collaborators, and community without spending a dollar on ads.
I built the SPUNK empire entirely in public: 220+ websites, 684 tools, 34 ebooks, 15,830 git commits, all documented on X/Twitter. Monthly cost: $25. Here's every tool in the stack and why each one earns its place.
Every line of code, every deployment script, every blog post in the SPUNK empire was built with Claude Code. It's an AI agent that runs in your terminal, understands your entire codebase, and executes multi-step tasks autonomously. This is the single most important tool in the build-in-public stack.
Cost: $20/month (Claude Pro subscription)
Build-in-public benefit: You can share speed metrics. "Built 10 sites today" hits different when people see it's real.
SPUNK.CODES provides 684 developer tools for the daily tasks between coding sessions. JSON formatting, regex testing, meta tag generation, security scanning, color picking, Base64 encoding -- all free, all instant, all in the browser.
Cost: $0 (free tier) or $9.99/mo (Pro)
Build-in-public benefit: Share which tools you use daily. Tool recommendations build trust.
GitHub Pages for static sites, Cloudflare Workers and Pages for dynamic projects. The SPUNK empire runs 207 sites on Cloudflare across 209 zones and 55 TLDs.
Cost: $5/month (Cloudflare Workers paid tier)
Build-in-public benefit: Share your deployment numbers. Scale is impressive and verifiable.
Clown.Best has 777 free meme templates. For build-in-public founders, memes are the highest-engagement content format on X/Twitter. Your progress updates get 10x more reach when wrapped in a meme.
Cost: $0
Build-in-public benefit: Meme your milestones. "Just hit 200 sites" with a reaction meme gets shared.
Turn your build-in-public knowledge into ebooks. The SPUNK empire has 34 ebooks covering development, crypto, entrepreneurship, and tools. Each one is a passive income stream and a credibility builder.
Cost: $0 (write with AI assistance)
Build-in-public benefit: Every ebook launch is shareable content and social proof.
Building in public means showing your revenue too. Here's the full monetization stack:
X is where build-in-public lives. Every milestone, every launch, every revenue update goes on @SpunkArt13. The key: consistency over perfection. Post daily progress, not polished marketing.
What to share: Commit counts, new tools shipped, revenue milestones, user feedback, behind-the-scenes decisions, and failures.
Blog posts like this one compound over time. Every article targets a keyword, every keyword brings search traffic, every visitor sees the products. Use SPUNK.CODES SEO tools (meta tag generator, sitemap builder, keyword analyzer) to optimize every post.
When you're running 220+ sites, you need a central command dashboard. The SPUNK Command Dashboard shows:
This is the operational backbone that makes building in public at scale possible. Without centralized visibility, you're flying blind.
Let's total it up:
Total: $25/month to run an empire of 220+ websites, 684 tools, and multiple revenue streams. That's less than a single month of most SaaS tools.
You don't need a massive budget. You don't need a team. You need the right tools, consistent sharing, and the willingness to show your work. The stack above is everything I use, and it's almost entirely free.
684 free developer tools. 777 free meme templates. Start building today.
SPUNK.CODES (Free) Clown.Best (Free)Published by SPUNK13 | spunk.codes