I built a free tool that tells you if what you built is actually a product.

I built a free tool that tells you if what you built is actually a product.

Not a quiz. Not a checklist. A conversation that asks you the questions a good PM would ask — and gives you a straight answer grounded in 40 years of product research.

It's called ITAP: isthisaproduct.com

**How I built it:**

- Claude API as the diagnostic engine. Six-layer system prompt: problem legitimacy → customer specificity → willingness to pay → artifact analysis → market signal → result. No shortcuts.

- Express/Node on a Hetzner box behind nginx and Cloudflare

- Zero data retention. Conversations are ephemeral by design, not by accident.

- No accounts, no email capture, no ads, no CRM

**The part I'm most proud of:**

Full transparency. The AI instructions are public. The privacy statement is 47 words of plain language — not boilerplate.

Read exactly what it's doing before you type a word:

→ isthisaproduct.com/api/prompt

→ isthisaproduct.com/api/privacy

I haven't seen another tool do this. If you think I got something wrong, you can read why I did it that way and tell me.

**What it can't do:**

It can't replace talking to real customers. It's a starting point, not a finish line.

Run it on whatever you're building. It's free every time.