Small online stores sit on hundreds of product photos with blank, useless, or copy-pasted alt text — the short description a screen reader reads out and a search engine uses to understand the image. You sell the fix as a fixed pack: AI drafts a description for every image, you check each one against the actual product, mark the decorative images that should stay blank, and hand back the finished set ready to upload — or upload it yourself. The catch is right up front: the raw AI part costs pennies, so nobody honest can charge real money for that. What a store pays for is the audit, the checking, and the part where it actually gets done.
The idea
Alt text is invisible until it is missing. A shopper using a screen reader hears “image” or a camera file name instead of “women’s waterproof hiking boot, brown leather, side view.” A store owner usually knows their photos are a mess in this one specific way — they just have 300 of them, no spare week, and no idea where to start. It never becomes the urgent job, so it never gets done at all.
That is the opening. Your pack is a defined, finished thing: a count of every image on the store, which ones are blank, which ones are stuffed with keywords or repeat the file name, and which ones are purely decorative and should correctly have empty alt text. Then a rewritten description for each real product and content image — drafted by AI from the photo plus the product name, color, material, and size on the product page, then read by you, one by one, against that page before it counts as done. Delivered as a clean spreadsheet the owner can hand to whoever runs their site, or pasted in by you if they give you store access.
Notice what you are not selling: a magic accessibility certification. Alt text is one small piece of an accessible store, not the whole job, and the honest numbers below start with how cheap the automated version of this already is. Your margin lives entirely in human judgment — spotting the draft that calls a navy shirt black, the one that invents a pocket that is not there, the logo image that needs no description at all.
Who pays you
Independent online stores with a real catalog and a neglected one: Shopify and WooCommerce shops with 50–500 product images, local retailers who moved their shop online and never looked back, makers and vintage sellers whose listings grew one photo at a time. The tell is easy to check from your couch: open a store, look at a few product pages, and if the images have no description, a file name, or the same sentence pasted under every angle, that store is a prospect.
The trigger moments help: a store about to run holiday traffic, one that just rebuilt its site, one that sells into markets where accessibility rules for online shops are tightening and the owner has started hearing about it. You are not selling fear of a lawsuit — see the watch-outs — you are selling a concrete backlog, cleared, at a flat price they can say yes to without a meeting.
Who does not pay you much: anyone who finds the automated tools first and is happy with them, and gig-site buyers shopping for the cheapest listing. Both are real, and both are priced into the numbers below.
The honest numbers
- Startup cost: $0 to about $5. A free AI chatbot tier that can look at images will draft your first sample pack. The automated alt-text services run about 2–4 cents an image on their yearly plans (checked November 5, 2026), so even a paid tool for a real job costs a few dollars — and a client’s first payment covers it many times over.
- The floor you are competing with: fully automated generation at 2–4 cents an image. A store with 100 images can machine-fill every blank for about the price of a coffee. If your offer is “I will run your photos through an AI,” your offer is worth about $4. Say that out loud before a prospect does.
- The human end of the same market: a manual accessibility service lists alt text at $2.25 per image, with a $250 minimum for content remediation work, and a live Upwork listing for alt tags, captions, and image slugs runs tiers of $5, $40, and $300 depending on scope. Real checking by a real person is where the money in this market actually sits.
- What to charge (BogusAPY beginner estimates): a flat $99–$199 for a human-checked pack of 100 images — audit included, decorative images marked, every description verified against its product page. Bigger catalogs price per additional hundred. That deliberately lands under the manual-service cost for the same hundred images while paying you for roughly 2–4 hours of work once you have a routine; the first pack will run slower.
- Realistic beginner math: two packs a month is $200–$400 for a few evenings — grocery money, not rent. A small add-on exists for happy clients: checking the new product photos each month as they add them, an estimated $29–$59 a month for a typical trickle of new listings. Month one can also be zero packs while you pitch. That is the honest picture, both halves of it.
- Time to first dollar: inside one to two weeks is plausible, because the audit itself is your sales tool — you can show a store its own numbers (“143 product images, 97 with no description at all”) in the first message, quote a flat fee, and deliver inside a few days once they say yes. Plausible, not promised: owners are busy and inboxes are deep.
How to start (tonight counts)
- Build a sample pack from a store you can study in public. Pick a small shop with an obvious gap, take 20 of its product images, and write the pack for them: current state, your rewritten description, and a note where the AI draft got something wrong that you caught. That sample — especially the caught mistakes — is your portfolio and your pitch in one file.
- Learn the three calls only a human makes. One: is this image decorative? Logos, spacers, and background textures get empty alt text on purpose, not a paragraph. Two: does the draft match the product — color, material, count, which item in a group photo? Three: does it say what the image adds, instead of repeating the product title or stuffing in search keywords? Practice those on the sample until they are reflexes.
- Write the offer as a fixed pack, in writing. One hundred images, audit first, every description checked against its product page, decorative images marked, one correction round, spreadsheet delivery or upload by you — flat price, a few days. Fixed scope is what keeps a tidy job from becoming “while you are in there, the whole blog archive too.”
- Audit before you pitch, and lead with their number. Count a prospect’s images and how many are blank or useless — most stores have never seen that count. The pitch is one short message: the count, two examples of your fixed versions from their own catalog, the flat price. Not the word “AI” in the first line; the AI is your cost saving, not their reason to buy.
- Deliver like a checker, not a generator. Send the spreadsheet with image, old alt text, new alt text, and a flag column for anything you could not verify from the product page — and let the owner answer the flags rather than guessing. That column is the visible proof a person did this job, and it is why the next store gets quoted your price instead of the 4-cent one.
Watch-outs
Never sell this as compliance or legal protection. Alt text is one requirement among many for an accessible site, and no pack of descriptions makes a store “ADA compliant” or lawsuit-proof. The automated services say the same about their own output. Sell a cleared backlog and a store a screen-reader user can actually shop — the moment you promise legal cover, you are selling something you cannot deliver.
A wrong description is worse than a blank one. AI vision drafts confidently misread colors, materials, patterns, and what is even in the photo. A blind shopper told a dress is red when it is green has been actively misled, not helped. Every line gets checked against the product page, and anything you cannot verify gets flagged to the owner, never smoothed over with a plausible guess.
Keyword stuffing hurts the people this is for. Alt text written for search engines — a string of buying keywords crammed into every image — forces screen-reader users to sit through an ad before they can shop. It is also just bad work that a store owner can spot. Write the description a person would want read to them; the search benefit follows from the image finally making sense.
Mind store access. If a client gives you a login to upload the pack yourself, use the limited staff or collaborator access they offer, touch only the image fields you were hired for, and say in writing when you have logged out for the last time. Trust with someone’s store is the whole business at this size.
First move tonight
Pick one small online store you have actually bought from, or one a friend runs, and audit just its first 25 product images: for each one, note whether the alt text is missing, a file name, a repeat, or genuinely useful. Then draft replacements for the five worst with an AI’s help and check every draft against the product page, marking each place the draft lied to you. In about 35 minutes you will have your sample format, your first real audit numbers, and a clear feel for the actual job — which is not generating descriptions, it is catching the ones that are wrong.
Sources: AltText.ai pricing page (automated generation at about 2–4 cents per image on yearly plans, from $49/year for 1,200 images, and its own note that alt text is one WCAG success criterion of many), Accessible.org pricing page (manual alt text at $2.25 per image; $250 minimum for content remediation), and a live Upwork alt-text, captions, and slugs listing (tiers at $5, $40, and $300), all checked November 5, 2026. Pack and monthly-check prices above are BogusAPY beginner estimates for direct sales, labeled as estimates in the text.
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New idea every evening — filed under AI Money Ideas on BogusAPY. This is an idea with honest numbers, not a promise of income, and it’s not financial advice.
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