MediaGrab

I wanted to build something I could actually sell — a real digital product, not just a project for a client. A video downloader felt like the right scope: useful, well-defined, and something people would pay a small amount for.

The desktop app is built with CustomTkinter — it looks clean and modern on Windows without requiring the user to install Python. You paste a URL, pick a quality, and click download. That's it. The tricky parts were packaging and protection: PyInstaller bundles the whole app into a single .exe, and PyArmor obfuscates the source so the code isn't trivially readable if someone unpacks it. Getting these to work together without breaking the app took more time than building the actual downloader.

I sold it through a simple landing page and handled payments manually at first, then through a basic checkout. It made real money — not a lot, but enough to prove the model works.

In 2025 I rebuilt it for the web: a Flask backend wraps the same yt-dlp engine, runs each download in a background thread, and streams the file back through a short-lived token URL. Customers unlock the tool with a license key verified server-side against my PayToUse API — no install required.