September was the month when this stopped being just a collection of interesting conversations with AI. I began putting sustained work into projects I wanted people to use: an existing photography website, a gem-mining game and, towards the end of the month, an insect-colony idle game.
I was not starting the month with a working business model. I was trying to find out whether ChatGPT and coding assistance could help me turn ideas into something real. Before asking how much those projects could earn, I had to get them working.
The free trial was not my first full month of work
My ChatGPT history starts with a free Plus trial in June, followed by paid months in July and August. That was the period when I was playing with the tools, asking questions and exploring what I could do with them.
September felt different. There is a useful distinction between having access to a tool and actually sitting down to build with it. For this experiment, September is where I begin the monthly development story, rather than treating every earlier subscription as a month of full-time production.
Giving GottaPics another chance
GottaPics was already an established photography website. I did not create it from nothing with AI. I used AI assistance to work through a rebuild of something I already owned and wanted to improve.
I began the intense part of that work around the middle of September, and the main rebuild took roughly two weeks. It involved the less glamorous parts of a website as well as its appearance: organisation, readability, content cleanup and making it easier to navigate.
That mattered to me because it gave the experiment a practical starting point. Instead of producing another demo that nobody would see, I was improving a real site with an existing history. Whether that would eventually produce better results was a separate question.
Building the foundations of Gem Forge Idle
Gem Forge Idle was also taking shape during September. The idea was not simply to tap a rock forever. I wanted mining to lead into discoveries, collecting rough specimens and eventually cutting stones into finished gems.
The work from this period included the mining loop, inventories, saving, Prestige and Ascension, and faceting jobs that could finish while the player was away. Those foundations are not as eye-catching as a polished store banner, but without them there is no dependable game behind the pictures.
I still had to decide how the game should feel. What should happen after a reset? Which stones should be worth keeping? When should automation take over? AI helped with implementation, but it did not remove those decisions.
The swarm arrived at the end of the month
The earliest local milestones for Swarmloom Idle are from the end of September. Its central idea reverses the usual garden game: instead of protecting plants from insects, you grow the colony that consumes them.
This was the beginning of that project, not the finished version with every later feature. Looking back, it is tempting to compress development into one neat success story. In reality, the late-September foundation came before the balancing, platform adaptations and player feedback that followed in October.
What I paid in September
My records show £84.31 for ChatGPT Pro and £20 for additional credits during September. I also paid £11.14 for a testing service. Those items add up to £115.45.
At this stage, the story was mainly about putting money and work into the projects. The first earnings milestone I cover in this series is in the October report. September explains how I got to that point.
What the month gave me
By the end of September I had made meaningful progress on an existing website, built more of the systems behind Gem Forge Idle and started the project that became Swarmloom Idle. None of that paid for the work by itself. It did give me something concrete to continue testing and improving.
So that is where September ended: £115.45 spent and £0 earned. There was no money coming back yet, but I had given GottaPics another chance, moved Gem Forge Idle forward and started Swarmloom. The next month would show what happened when more of that work reached other people.
Start with Can You Make Money with ChatGPT? My Real-World Experiment, or continue with October’s progress and early earnings.
Try the current Android games
Gem Forge Idle · Google Play
Swarmloom Idle · Google Play
Gems of Luna · Google Play
Directed by human. Created with AI assistance.
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