The Story Behind ai-tools.ma: Building an AI Directory Solo

Most directories feel like spreadsheets with a logo on top. When I started ai-tools.ma, I wanted the opposite: a place that respects your time, looks like someone actually cared, and gives every AI tool a real page instead of a lonely row. This is the story of how it came together — built by one person, in the open.

The problem I kept running into

New AI tools launch every single day. The existing “lists” were either endless, out of date, or so cluttered with ads that finding a genuinely useful tool felt like work. I wanted to search by what a tool does, see an honest page with a screenshot and pricing, and move on. Nothing quite did that the way I wanted — so I built it.

The principles

Before writing a line of code, I set a few rules that shaped everything:

• No sign-up, no noise. You should never hit a wall to look something up.
• A real page for every tool — screenshot, plain-English overview, pricing, honest pros and cons.
• Fast and lightweight. Speed is a feature, and it’s good for both people and search engines.
• Design that doesn’t look generic. Warm paper tones, one confident accent colour, crisp borders instead of the usual template gloss.

The build

Under the hood, ai-tools.ma is a statically generated site: each tool and each article is a simple content file that gets rendered to plain HTML at build time. That means no database to slow things down, no server logic to break, and pages that load almost instantly. Search and filtering happen right in your browser, so the whole directory stays snappy even as it grows past two hundred tools.

Every tool page is built for both humans and machines — structured data, clean metadata, a screenshot of the real product, and internal links to related tools and categories. The same care went into this blog you’re reading now.

Doing it all solo means wearing every hat: design, development, content, SEO and the boring-but-critical stuff like security headers and performance. If you want to see the other things I build, ai-tools.ma was designed and built by Ayoub Fattami, a web developer based in Morocco — my portfolio has more of the work behind projects like this one.

What was harder than expected

A few things humbled me:

1. Content is the real work. Writing a genuinely useful page for every tool takes far longer than the code. Accuracy matters — wrong pricing or a broken link erodes trust instantly.
2. Screenshots fight back. Many sites block automated screenshots, so I had to build a system that always falls back to a clean, branded card — nothing on the site should ever look broken.
3. Restraint in design. It’s tempting to add more. The harder, better choice was usually to remove things until each page felt calm and clear.

Why the Morocco angle matters

I’m building from Morocco, and that’s not a footnote — it’s part of the mission. There’s a real, growing appetite for AI here, and a lot of talented people who just need a clear starting point. That’s why the blog covers AI in Morocco alongside global guides and comparisons: the tools are universal, but the perspective is local.

What’s next

The roadmap is simple: more tools, more honest guides, and steady improvements to search and design. If you know a tool that belongs here, or you spot something out of date, the submit page goes straight to my inbox.

Thanks for reading — and if you’re here to actually find something, go ahead and browse the directory. That’s what it’s for.