Idea feedback for a broken link checker

[Alan Bi]

Hi all!

I’m a senior in high school interested in entrepreneurship and was looking to start a new venture soon. I'm hoping to validate an idea I had for an SaaS that solves the issue of broken links on websites. I’ve noticed that a lot of sites, especially those with curated lists, link to sites that are no longer active. I'm looking to deal with this problem by creating a service that one can integrate with their website to detect when links become broken. The service will send a notification alerting the website owner if any link suddenly stops working and will redirect users to an archived version of that site if one exists.

On a scale from 1 to 10 (with 10 being highly likely), would you spend $5/month on a service like this, and if yes/no, why? If you have any feedback or questions regarding this idea, please let me know.

Thanks!

 

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[apacini]

Hi, there are already a lot of free services like that (even Wikipedia has one, and even opensource, like LinkChecker - Check websites for broken links). What's your advantage over them?

 

[StrikingViper69]

There are a bunch of free wordpress plugins that do this already. Google has free tools to check links too.

 

[Alan Bi]

Thanks for the feedback. @apacini I'd imagine it would be different in that it's a service that one could embed in their sites so that as users are browsing the sites and it suddenly detects that a link no longer works, it would ping the website owner about the broken link as well as replacing the broken link with an archived page so that users can still navigate to that page. @SamRussell mentioned Wordpress plugins that do something similar, although the one I found only replaces the 404 page whereas what I have in mind would ideally also work for external links (as is common on sites like Product Hunt) and non-Wordpress sites.

Do you think this would be enough to differentiate it from the competition? There are certainly a lot of link checkers out there and I haven't had the time to go through them all, so if there's already a service that does something very similar to this, please let me know.

 

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[apacini]

Do you think this would be enough to differentiate it from the competition? There are certainly a lot of link checkers out there and I haven't had the time to go through them all, so if there's already a service that does something very similar to this, please let me know.

The added value would be to make it autonomous, without the need of human intervention, could be nice.