Make a guide to the free stuff in your own neighborhood.

What you are actually making

A single web page listing every free and cheap thing happening for families in your area this week. Library story hours. Free museum nights. Park department events. The workshops Home Depot runs for kids. The stuff that is already happening near you and that almost nobody has bothered to put in one place.

You will make it with an AI chatbot, save it as a file, and put it online at a real address you can text to people. Then you keep doing it every week. That last part is the whole thing.

Here is one we made.

This is the finished thing, built with the exact three prompts below. Filters, search, the whole list. The events in it are made up because it is an example, but the format is real and it is what you will have by tonight.

What you need

• •A computer. Not a phone, because you will be copying and pasting a lot.
• •Any AI chatbot that can search the web. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity all work, and the free versions are fine. The instructions below do not care which one you pick.
• •About two hours the first time. Under thirty minutes every week after that.

Open your chatbot. Copy the whole block below, paste it in, and replace everything in yellow with your own answers before you press enter.

Help me build a free weekly guide to fun things families can do near me without spending much money.

MY DETAILS
City: [YOUR CITY]
Neighborhoods or areas to cover: [LIST 3 TO 8, or write "the whole city"]
Kids' ages: [AGES]
Stuff we like: [e.g. animals, art, building things, sports, music, being outside]
Most I want to pay per person: [$0, $10, or $25]
Dates to cover: [THIS SATURDAY THROUGH NEXT SUNDAY, or exact dates]

WHAT TO DO
Search the web for real events happening on those dates. Check all six of these, because almost every city has all six:

1. The public library system's events page
2. The city or county parks department calendar
3. Museums, zoos, aquariums and gardens that have free days or free hours
4. A local parenting blog or events site for my city
5. Eventbrite, filtered to free family events in my city
6. Stores and brands that run free kids workshops. Check Home Depot kids workshops, Michaels, Barnes and Noble story time, REI, and any local bookstore or toy store.

RULES, and these are strict
- Every event needs a specific date and a start time. If the page says "ongoing" or "this spring" or "check back soon", skip it.
- Every event needs a real link to the page where you found it.
- The cost has to be at or under my limit above.
- It has to be something a kid in my age range can actually do.
- Do not guess and do not fill in gaps. If you only find 20, give me 20.

GIVE ME A TABLE with these columns
Event | Date | Day | Start time | Place | Neighborhood | Cost | Ages | Link | Source

At the end, tell me how many you found and which of the six sources gave you the most.

Expect 20 to 40 events. Fewer in a small town, and that is fine.

This is the step that separates a guide people trust from a guide people stop opening. AI chatbots make things up. Not on purpose and not always, but often enough that publishing the first list without checking it will eventually send a family across town to a museum that is closed.

Same chat window. Paste this next.

Now check your own work before I publish this.

Go through the list one event at a time and actually open the link you gave me. For each one tell me:

- Does the link still work?
- Does that page really show this event, on this date, at this time?
- Is the cost still what you said it was?

Then give me the list again, sorted into three groups:

CONFIRMED - you opened the page and everything matches.
FIXED - something was wrong, and here is the correction.
CUT - you could not confirm it, so it comes out.

Do not put anything in CONFIRMED that you did not actually open and read.

It is better to publish 18 events that are all real than 35 where six are wrong. People stop trusting the guide the first time they drive somewhere that turns out to be closed.

Expect to lose a few. Losing a few is the point.

Same chat. Last prompt.

Turn the CONFIRMED list into one web page.

Give me a single complete HTML file. Everything in one file - the styles, the code, all of it. No links to outside files and no libraries to install. I am going to copy what you give me, paste it into a plain text editor, and save it as index.html.

The page needs:

- A title at the top: [YOUR GUIDE NAME] and one line under it saying what it is and which week it covers
- Filter buttons across the top: by day of the week, by neighborhood, by category, and one button for "free only"
- A search box that filters the list as you type
- Every event as a card showing the name, day and time, place, neighborhood, cost, ages, and a link that opens in a new tab
- A counter that updates as filters change, like "Showing 12 of 31"
- A "clear filters" button
- It has to look good on a phone, because that is where people will read it
- At the very bottom, this exact line: "Built by [YOUR NAMES] with help from AI. Made with the free guide kit at buildwiththem.com"

Keep the design simple and easy to read. Big text, lots of space, no clutter. Give me the whole file in one code block.

Then save it

1. 1.Click the copy button on the code block the chatbot gives you.
2. 2.Open a plain text editor. Notepad on Windows, TextEdit on a Mac. On a Mac, go to Format and choose Make Plain Text first, or it will save wrong.
3. 3.Paste. Save it as index.html in a new empty folder on your desktop.
4. 4.Double-click the file. It opens in your browser. That is your website, sitting on your computer.

Go to app.netlify.com/drop and drag your folder onto the page.

That is the whole thing. It is live at a real web address in about ten seconds, and you do not have to make an account or type in a card to do it. Netlify will ask you to sign up afterward if you want to keep the address, which is free and worth doing.

Text the link to three people you know before you do anything else. Not to promote it. To find out in the next twenty minutes whether the thing works on their phone.

Then keep going

• Do it again next week. Steps 1 and 2 take twenty minutes once you have done them once.
• Put the link in local parent Facebook groups, your building's group chat, the school newsletter, the library's bulletin board.
• Add an email signup once people start asking when the next one is coming. Not before.

You are giving the guide away. So how does anyone make money doing this?

Affiliate links. When you recommend something and link to where people can buy it, the shop pays you a small cut if somebody buys. The buyer pays exactly the same price either way.

Where you have already seen this

Consumer Reports is the clearest example, and it is the one to show your kid. They are a nonprofit that famously refuses to take advertising, because taking ads from the companies you review is a conflict. They still use affiliate links, and they put the disclosure right under the byline at the top of the article:

When you shop through retailer links on our site, we may earn affiliate commissions. 100% of the fees we collect are used to support our nonprofit mission.

The New York Times does the same thing with Wirecutter, which it bought in 2016 and which brings in tens of millions a year. Wirecutter's own safeguard is worth copying: the writers are not told which products earn the site more money. That way the recommendation cannot be bent by the payout.

Where to start, in this order

The disclosure rules, which are short and not optional

The Federal Trade Commission requires you to tell people when a link pays you. Four rules cover nearly all of it:

• •Put it above the link, never at the bottom. The FTC's word is unavoidable. A disclosure a reader hits after they have already clicked does not count. This is the rule almost everyone breaks, including guides much bigger than yours.
• •Say paid link, not affiliate link. The FTC has written that people may not know what affiliate means. Paid link is specifically approved, and Amazon accepts it too, so one phrase covers both.
• •No abbreviations. Not sp, not spon, not a lone hashtag buried in a pile of other hashtags.
• •Only link things you would recommend anyway. This is the only rule that protects the thing you are actually building.

Put this at the top of your page, above the first link:

Some links below are paid links. If you buy something through one, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. It never changes what goes on the list. Everything here is free or cheap because we actually checked, not because anyone paid us.

And put (paid link) right next to each one.

Almost nothing for a long time, and we would rather say so now.

Across a study of more than 400,000 affiliate clicks, the average click was worth about ten cents. Do that arithmetic honestly. To make a hundred dollars a month you need somewhere around six or seven hundred people clicking a paid link every month, which for a weekly local email is on the order of ten thousand subscribers.

In a 2026 survey of bloggers, the median time to earn a first dollar was twelve months. Those making under 5,000 pageviews a month averaged about fifty dollars a month.

And the most-cited local newsletter success story in America, in Annapolis, does over $400,000 a year with roughly 23,000 subscribers. None of that is affiliate money. Eighty-four percent is local businesses buying ads. It took about four years and it started with seventy subscribers.

Share what you made

If you build one, put it somewhere other families can find it, and leave the credit line at the bottom so the next family can find the kit. There are a few thousand towns with nobody doing this. Yours might be one of them.

Join the waitlist

The program is free and opens October 4. Put your email in and we'll tell you the day it does.