A sports creator built a daily game with Claude in about eight hours. He says it now makes about $40K a month. Here is how he did it, and the part you can actually copy.
In today's issue:
The Build: an eight-hour web game with 700,000 monthly players
Money Moves: Gemini prices that double on a set date, custom AI voices, cheap-model routing
Try This: price a "tag and triage" service with real token costs
🔦 The Build
A sports creator built a daily guessing game with Claude in about eight hours. He says it makes about $40K a month.
Who: Frank (@frankmikesmith), maker of GeoSports. He's been a full-time sports creator since 2020.
What: a daily web game. You get five sports clues, tap a spot on a map, and score points by distance.
How he built it: about eight hours, with Claude. He says he doesn't know how to code.
Who pays: advertisers, mostly. He says programmatic ads bring in about $30–35K a month. About 1,800 people pay for Pro through Stripe.
Revenue: about $40K a month, with roughly 700,000 monthly active users. Self-reported.
He doesn't hide his real head start. Before launch he had over 4 million followers, which he says came from short sports commentary videos. Launch day came from one reply to his own NBA tweet: "Hey by the way I made this game." That reply brought about 40,000 players. The next day, 150,000 played.
Our take: The eight-hour build is the part you can copy. The audience isn't. Without 4 million followers, you borrow reach instead. His "host" program shows how. One caveat: his ad income comes from 700,000 monthly users. A small game won't earn like that, so plan a paid tier from day one.
🛠️ The Playbook
Remix a format people already love. Someone showed him MapTap, a map-guessing game. He built the sports version.
Spec it before you build. He had Claude research MapTap and write a spec. When he got stuck, he sent screenshots and asked, "Is this right?"
Ship the web version first. No app store, no review wait. His advice: "Don't be afraid to build for web first."
Make every result shareable. He reports a 53% share rate: of 100,000 daily players, about 53,000 share their score. He says 98% of players probably don't know he made it. Group chats bring them in.
Borrow other people's audiences. Sports personalities and athletes "host" a day by writing its five questions. He found them by DMing big accounts that had liked posts about the game. He says hosts almost always retweet their round.
His own posts on X and Instagram drive about 2,000 clicks a day. He puts that at roughly 2% of traffic.
🧰 The Stack
Tool | Job |
|---|---|
Claude (Max 20x plan, per the transcript) | Spec and code |
Vercel Pro | Hosting |
MapLibre | The interactive globe |
Upstash Redis | Leaderboards and stats |
Google Sheets | The question bank |
Stripe | Pro subscriptions |
He didn't share costs. Our read: a spreadsheet question bank lets non-coders add questions without touching code.
⚡ Money Moves
Google's new Gemini prices double on dates it has already set. On Google's pricing page, Gemini 4 Argon costs $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens through Nov 30. From Dec 1 it's $4 and $20. Gemini 3.8 Flash costs $0.75 and $3.75 through Dec 31. From Jan 1 it's $1.50 and $7.50. If you sell a flat monthly price on top of Gemini, put the new rate in your contract now.
AI voices can now be made to order. OpenAI's changelog says all API customers can now create a custom voice from a text description. Creating the voice is free. Speech is billed at normal GPT-Live rates. OpenAI also added nine voices in German, French, Hindi, Japanese and Korean. For AI receptionist sellers, every client can get their own voice, and non-English clients are easier to serve.
Builders are moving bulk work to cheap models. Vercel's AI Gateway index says DeepSeek models handled 58% of tokens on its gateway but only 6.6% of spend. The average price per token fell 47%. That's one gateway's customers, not the whole market. The lesson still holds: put high-volume, low-stakes work on the cheapest model that passes your tests.
Cal AI's growth came from paying influencers by reach. The AI calorie app made over $30M in two years, per TechCrunch. MyFitnessPal bought it in March for an undisclosed sum. At TechCrunch Disrupt, founder Zach Yadegari, 19, explained how. Cal AI tied influencer payouts to reach levels and chose creators with "very tight communities." If you're paying for promotion, pay for results, not for posts.
Two big open models came out this week, with very different licenses. Reflection's Beam (501B parameters) uses Apache 2.0. That's a standard license with broad commercial-use rights. Meta's Muse Spark Open (816B) uses Meta's own license, which it says has "limited commercial terms." Building a paid product on an open model? Read the license before you write code.
🧪 Try This
Price a "tag and triage" service on Gemini Flash.
Lots of small businesses have hundreds of reviews or support emails nobody has sorted. Here's how to price sorting them for a fee.
Get 200 real items from a business you know: reviews, inbox emails, or lead notes.
Prompt Gemini 3.8 Flash to tag each one: topic, urgency, and a one-line draft reply. The free tier covers testing.
Check 20 results by hand. Fix the prompt until you'd sign off on them.
Price the real run with Batch: $0.375 per million input tokens and $1.875 per million output tokens through Dec 31. Then it doubles. Say a client sends 10,000 emails at about 1,000 tokens each. That's 10 million input tokens, or about $3.75 (our estimate; output is extra).
Charge for the sorted inbox, not the tokens. Write the Jan 1 price change into the quote.
Your model cost is a rounding error. What they pay for is the sorting.
💬 Before you go
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Income figures are reported by the builders and aren't guarantees. We label every number Verified, Reported or Self-reported. Prices are as listed by each company on the date of this issue. AI Money Brief is operated by TFS LLC.