Hi everyone,
I want to share what I’ve been building for the past months, because it exists thanks to the Gemini API — and because I could use the community’s wisdom on what comes next.
WonderBooks is a digital library for kids. Its library is completely free — no payments, no ads — and it always will be. Every book is fully illustrated, in English and Arabic. Just books, for any child, anywhere. (Down the road I plan optional premium sections — like video series — to fund production, but the free library stays free, forever.)
Some numbers from the journey so far:
- 25,000+ illustrations generated with the Gemini API — it has been the illustration engine from day one
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- A full production pipeline on Google: Gemini for art, Firebase (Firestore, Storage, Functions) for everything else
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- One solo founder — I manage the entire AI-native project from A to Z, self-funded from my own pocket, month after month
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- One goal: one of the biggest free children’s libraries in the world
- It hasn’t been a smooth road. At one point the project was hit by a $24,000 unauthorized-usage attack by hackers — a brutal blow at this scale. But I took responsibility, kept going, and I’m still here, because I genuinely believe kids everywhere deserve free access to beautiful books.
- Illustration generation is by far the largest cost of the project — bigger than everything else combined. So here’s my honest question to this community: does anyone know of Google programs, credits, or support paths for projects like this — educational, free for kids, built end-to-end on Gemini and Google Cloud? Gemini API credits would translate directly into new free books on children’s screens, and I’d love to keep this library growing.
- Happy to share details about the pipeline, prompt strategies for children’s book illustration at scale, or anything else that helps other builders here. And if anyone from the Gemini team reads this — thank you for building the tool that made 25,000 illustrations for kids possible.
— Amr, founder of WonderBooks