How to Rebuild Linktree With AI in 15 Minutes | Base44 Walkthrough (Rebuilding SaaS Part 1)

So guys, this is Linktree. And if you notice anything, it is a list of buttons on a page. However, 50 million people use this thing. And if you want your Linktree to not have their logo on it, you are paying up to $15 a month for buttons on a page. That would be great if we lived in 2019, but we don't. And so today I want to show you exactly how, step-by-step, to rebuild Linktree with AI. That's the page, the admin dashboard, the analytics, all the paid features. And this is the first video in a mini-series where we rebuild some of the most popular SaaS tools on the planet that you may be paying for. So we're gonna keep a running total of the amount of money we save throughout this series. And then my hope for you is, number one, you realize what AI can do and just how much you can build with relatively little effort. And then number two, if you currently use a platform like this, you can actually save a little bit of money and put it back into your business. That's gonna be the video. Appreciate you being here. Let's go. Now, first, let me just say, Linktree is a beautiful business. You hook everyone in with the free plan, but then all the actual stuff that you need the moment that the thing becomes valuable to you that you signed up for because it was free, you have to pay. And those paid tiers are $8, $15, or $35 a month. And then the pro plan doubled in price at the end of 2025. And this is the best part. If you sell anything through Linktree, they take up to a 12% cut of your sales on top of the payment processor fees. And again, this is a page with links on it. We're starting reasonable in this series. They'll get more complex. This is literally a page with links on it. So you should not be giving up 16% of your sales or 400 bucks a year when you can do what we're about to do. Now, the tool that we're gonna reuse this is Base44. They're sponsoring this entire series. And the big advantage, and I've said this before about Base44, is that they do it all. They do the front-end, they do the back-end, they do the hosting. It's not just a website builder. That's great if you can go to a website, but what you need to actually rebuild real tools like Linktree that people actually use is all the back-end work. Things like your database, your hosting, your SSL, your auth. And so with Base44, like you're gonna see, you build it, you publish it, it can go live on the internet, and that is actually a real functioning tool that exists. Base44 was acquired by Wix.com, which you may have heard of, for $80 million fairly recently. There is a free plan with no credit card required, and they have nearly half a million users. So it's a pretty cool platform. You're gonna see that regardless as we get into this build. And if you wanna follow along, you can build it with me in real time. You go to this link on the screen or in the description. And if you currently use Linktree and you're about to save 20 bucks a month or whatever the number is, buy a coffee on my behalf. That's my hope for you. And now without further ado, let's get started. So this right here is the Base44 dashboard. If you're used to any kind of a chatbot system like Chak2BT, it works in exactly the same way. We're just gonna describe what we want to the agent. If we wanna integrate with any kind of apps to do so, we can click on connectors, and there's quite a few there. We can select the AI model underlying the system. Clod is usually gonna be the best, so Opus 4.8 right there. And if we wanna turn on client mode, that is exactly what it sounds like. If you've never been on a platform like this before, what I recommend you do is go to the template section and just go and see what other people are building. It's really useful, I think, for inspiration and just to see what is possible. You have everything from some kind of dashboard for finances to a Super Mario game. There's also a lot on here as far as super actions and automation goes. We covered that in the last video. You can click up here to watch that. And so I'm gonna start off with this prompt. So build a link in bio app for a content creator. So I'm basically just describing Linktree and what it is. The more comprehensive the prompt, the better, but these days, the better the agents themselves and the models have gotten. You don't need anything incredibly detailed. You can treat it more like an ongoing conversation. That's exactly what we're going to do. Let's go ahead and click start. We can see what the agent is going to build. We have the core features, the visual direction, and then the main workflow as well. What we could also do if we wanted to is search up Linktree on Google. We could look for what the pages actually look like. Let's go to images. Then I could, for example, screenshot this, and then I could plug exactly this image into base 44 and say, hey, just copy this exact interface for the app you're building. So if you want it to look different, and in this case, you want its own visual style, that's great. If there is something that you want to copy as opposed to trying to type it out, just go find the thing, take an image, plug it in, and the agent really will do the rest. Now we can see it started to write the code for this. And like I said before, the real advantage here is the backend. If you want to rebuild SaaS or Linktree, you need a domain, the backend, the auth, the database, the whole nine yards of the messy infrastructure that makes everything work. And so what we'll be able to do is go to the dashboard here in a minute, and then we'll be publishing as well. That's where you can get the custom domain and so on. So let's let it work for a few more minutes, and then we'll check back in. Okay, and there we go. It says it is done. We can go ahead and see the preview here. It should load. And we can also see suggestions for other things. We can start the work. So there we go. This is pretty much Linktree. This is with a darker theme, which I kind of like. So if we press on one of these links, it will open that external link. That works. And then if we click Manage right here, we can go ahead and see the analytics, the portal links. We can add or delete links, and then we can see the profile. And it looks like it added a login system. So if we hit the forward slash admin, that's how we can edit here. And then if we go, and then we can see the other pages. So reset password for got, and then if we go to the register page, we can continue with Google. We can create an account. And so we're gonna test all of this after it's published. That's gonna be the final test. And this basically rebuilt Linktree without the little Linktree logo, but that's the free version. So let's try and add some of the paid features. And I'm gonna give the system this prompt to add an email capture block to the public page, then create a database for subscribers to said email capture block. And then we'll need an analytics page for all of that. Let's go ahead and click Send. Okay, it's done. Let's let the preview load. So it added analytics and then the email block and subscribers. So on our Linktree page, if you stay in the loop, enter your email to subscribe. We can click Manage right here. And now if we go under analytics, we can see a whole email analytics page broken down by clicks, and then subscribers, and we can still edit our profile. So this is still not the final test. That again will be once it's actually published to the internet. And the last major paid feature of Linktree, like I said, is payments, where they add an extra 10 plus percent on top of the payment processing fee. So what we're going to do is automatically integrate Stripe. And this is without requiring the whole normal, if you've done it, extremely laborious process to integrate Stripe manually. So we'll be able to sell digital products in addition to our email, connect Stripe, and then be able to basically sell things on our Linktree page. Let's see if that works. So then here's what's required to fully sync Stripe. So we need our two standard secrets. To do that, I'm going to jump into my Stripe dashboard. Well, settings, I suppose. Collect the keys and then drop them into here. Let's click submit. Let's not save that. And so this overall is how the standard kind of connector process works within Base44. You have your set of connectors which integrate automatically. And if that's not available, then you can add the API like so. And that's kind of like environmental variables. If you're familiar with Vercel and one manual type setup, a rebuild, whereas you don't have to actually interact with those secrets. And before the last test as well, I think this is the last feature, but I do want to beautify the UI UX a little bit. You can see this is built for mobile, but I want more interactive features, a little zest for our UI. Now, if you press on any page that's written, you can also see the actual code and what all of that looks like. And if you want to check out the databases, you can do the same thing. So this is that backend kind of management dashboard. So under users, you can see everyone who's created an account on the app or databases are stored here. So for example, email subscribers, the links, and then we can see all kinds of analytics after we publish marketing SEO. And then here is where we can connect a custom domain as well. Let's go ahead and do that right now. I'm going to click buy another and let's search link tree and see what the closest available domain is. Let's go for link-tree.shop, 98 cents for the first year. We've checked out on the domain. It should redirect us. Okay. And there we go. That will connect automatically. And in a few minutes, link-tree.shop will be live. And after we publish it, you watching this right now can go actually check it out on the internet and verify for real that this thing does replace link tree. Okay. So Stripe has been successfully built. Now I'm going to give it that UI prompt. So I've given it this prompt. I want interactive UI UX and we'll just see what it comes up with. It's like avatar pool, staggered list, entrance, confetti, hover, shimmer. It's like a good list, but that pretty much wraps it up. That's all of the paid features on link-tree. We have our custom domain, all the off, the backend payments is good to go. So our last step here for the final test will be getting published and then trying it out as a user on the internet. Okay. It's done. And let's go from admin to the normal page. Ooh. So we have our little shimmer effect right here. Everything bounces. And if we enter test at gmail.com, we get confetti. There we go. Okay. This looks good. This is what I want. Let's go ahead and click publish, publish app. And we can publish as a mobile app as well. We're not going to do that today, but if you're doing this for real, this is, you can see design for mobile. So you would publish on the Apple app store and Google play. Let's give it one more second. And there we go. Our link-tree copy is published. So I've opened up an incognito tab. Okay. So I've gone to an incognito tab. Let's go to link-tree.shop. And then let's go ahead and log in with Google. And just a quick note here. Normally, if you've done this before, you have to go to the API on the Google side. You have to connect all the stuff, create an app. You have to do a lot of manual work. This just set up Google off for us completely seamlessly. It is a insanely beautiful world we live in. So let's click continue. Okay. And now I'm able to edit this page. So let's click on manage. I'll go to profile. I'll change it out for John. I've uploaded a profile photo of me. So it can actually post images. That is good validation. And let's go to my YouTube channel. 747. We just appreciate the Boeing little reference there. Anyway, let's go ahead and copy this sentence. We'll jump back in here. We'll paste that. We'll leave the email capture block on. We'll click save profile. And then let's jump into links. Under YouTube, we'll go forward slash my channel. Save changes. We'll go to my X accounts. And then we'll do John Leidy on Instagram. Now let's go ahead and delete the other two. So we have three core links I would actually want on link three. We're not gonna sell any digital products, but we could. And then that should work. Also, it looks like there's light mode. That's great. Let's go ahead and open this now in a new tab. So we can see my personal link three. This all syncs correctly. Let's test the links. This opens the channel. This would open DX if I was logged in. This did not work. It looks like I put the link in incorrectly. Let's go ahead and fix that. We'll edit this. Click save. Let's reload the page. Go there. And here we go. Instagram works as well. And then let's test the email subscribe function. We'll jump back into analytics and subscribers. And there we go. We can see our test at email.com. So that's all the features that you would pay for on Linktree. Rebuilt with AI. So it passed the test. I think that is a successful rebuild of Linktree. Now I wanna do a quick reality check. That was awesome. The thing works. You should 100% do this. What you are really paying for these days with SaaS is convenience. What is nice about Linktree to give them credit is you can pay $15 a month, $8 a month, $30 a month, whatever it is, and you don't have to think about anything. At a certain point, that is great. If you're making money, you have a functioning business, keep your costs down. If you're making money, you have a functional business, it's okay to spend 3% of your revenue on infrastructure that other people deal with and improve over time. But if you were just starting out, this is, I think, where you really wanna do a lot of things on your own nowadays. Because it takes that barrier of entry that used to be $1,000 a year in SaaS costs, five grand, 500 bucks, whatever it is, and it's bringing that number to nearly zero, maybe a few hundred bucks a year. And that, I think, is a massive value add right there. But that does not mean that you can rebuild everything. Phase 44 is great. All the builders out there are great. We talk about a lot of them on the channel, but they can't do everything. However, they can do a lot more than you think. This was part one of the series. Our counter is now at $180 a year for money stayed on this video. But we're gonna level up. In part two, we are going to rebuild Typeform. They charge $99 a month for the platform. We used to use them all the time for agency, for service work. So one more time, if you wanna build your own apps, you go to this link on the screen or the link in the description. You do help support the channel when we do that. And again, part two is going to be rebuilding Typeform. So that 180 number is gonna go up. It's gonna be fun. I'll see you there, and I will see you in the next one.