I built one that doesn't. I did it alone, from India, and the first stable version took 15 days.

This is the story of how ResumeOrbitz came together: why I built it, the hardest parts, and what I'd tell anyone starting something similar.

Why I built it

It started with my own job switch.

I was updating my resume, and every time I made changes, the platform asked me to pay before I could download it. The free ones weren't much better. Either the useful features were missing, or the good templates were locked behind "premium".

That's when it hit me: if I'm facing this, thousands of other job seekers are too.

So I decided to build an AI-driven resume app that would be completely free. Not a free trial, and not "free with a paywall at the end". Just free.

What ResumeOrbitz does

I'll keep this short, because this isn't a sales post.

• ATS score: checks how well your resume will survive an applicant tracking system
• Keyword gap analysis: compares your resume with a job description and shows what's missing
• 150+ templates, with both Indian and US formats, and none locked as "premium"
• Cover letter generation from the same profile
• Free: no paywall at download time

The stack, in one paragraph

The frontend is React with TypeScript, built with Vite and styled with Tailwind. Supabase handles auth and the database, and Netlify hosts it. AI features run on LLM APIs. There are no servers for me to babysit, which matters a lot when you're the only engineer, designer and marketer.

I'll break down every layer in my next post.

Hard part #1: Building a full product with no team

I'm a software engineer, so I knew how to start and roughly how the pieces should fit together. But knowing how to start is very different from building an entire custom app alone.

Three problems hit me right away:

1. No team. There was nobody to own the frontend, the backend or the architecture. Every decision, and every bug, was mine.
2. Too many layers at once. UI, database, auth, AI features, hosting and SEO all had to work together, and I had to switch between them constantly.
3. Free AI tools kept running out. I started by juggling free sessions on different AI models. Each one had usage limits, so I'd lose context in the middle of a problem and have to start over somewhere else.

The fix: I stopped juggling and moved everything to one paid tool, Claude Pro. It became my pair programmer, architect and debugger in one place. Having one consistent assistant that could hold the whole problem made a big difference to how fast I could move.

The lesson: when you're solo, your tools are your team. Paying for one good tool cost far less than the time I was losing by switching between free ones.

Hard part #2: Deciding what an "ATS score" means

There's no official ATS standard. Every company uses different software, and none of them publish how they rank resumes. So any ATS score is an estimate, and I wanted mine to be an honest one.

So I built the checker around the job description. You paste in the JD from Naukri, LinkedIn or any portal, and the AI scans your resume against it for the things that reliably cause trouble:

• Keyword match: does your resume use the exact words the JD uses? "NodeJS" and "Node.js" aren't the same to an ATS.
• Missing skills: which key skills from the JD aren't on your resume at all
• Formatting traps: tables, columns, images and other elements that scramble ATS parsing

The score matters less than what you do with it. A number alone doesn't help anyone. So after the score, there's a one-click AI fix that rewrites or strengthens sections to close the gaps. Then you check again.

Hard part #3: SEO for a single-page app

This one surprised me. I built ResumeOrbitz as a single-page app, which is great for users but harder for search engines.

Three things made the biggest difference:

1. Tracking route changes. Google Analytics only counts the first page load in an SPA by default. I added a small custom hook so every route change is recorded as a page view.
2. Structured data. A small component adds JSON-LD schema (including FAQ schema) to each page, so search engines understand what the page is about.
3. An llms.txt file. This is a newer idea: a plain-text file that tells AI assistants what the site is. More people now ask AI assistants for tool recommendations, so it felt worth the 20 minutes.

I also set up Google Search Console early. If I started again, I'd do all of this before launch, not after.

The rename: ResumeForge to ResumeOrbitz

The product started life as ResumeForge. Then I found out the name and the domain were already taken.

Renaming mid-build was annoying: new domain, new logo, new repo name, and every reference in the codebase. But it was much cheaper to do it then than after launch, and I ended up liking ResumeOrbitz more anyway.

Tip: check the domain, the social handles and a quick trademark search before you design a logo.

The solo founder timeline

Here's how it actually went:

• 15 days to build the first stable version
• Then small enhancements, one at a time, based on what I noticed and what users needed
• Now, 99% of my time goes into marketing

That last point is the one nobody warned me about. Building turned out to be the easier half. Getting the product in front of the people who need it is the real work.

What I'd tell someone starting out:

• Pick managed tools. Every hour spent on infrastructure is an hour not spent on users.
• Ship before it feels ready. My first stable version took 15 days, not 6 months, and that was the right call.
• Plan marketing from day one. You'll spend far more time on it than you expect.

Where it stands now

ResumeOrbitz is live and completely free. I've paused big new features, and almost all my time goes into reaching job seekers who need it. This blog is part of that.

What's next

Next I'm writing up the full stack: every tool, why I picked it, and what I'd change.

A question for you: what would you want from a free resume tool that the current ones don't give you? I'll read every answer.

Disclosure: I'm the founder of ResumeOrbitz, the tool this post is about.