About the Author
Born in a small family in central China, my father was always interested in figuring out our family history and building family trees for our surname when I was a kid.
It took me decades to find a lightweight tool that could do this job easily, and I haven’t forgotten this idea that keeps haunting me. Maybe, perhaps, I could build it with AI?
After several years working in the IT industry, I began to realise our work is witnessing its dusk, so I took some weekend and video gaming time to pick the idea back up and made this flimsy tiny tool.
BTW, I haven’t shown it to my father yet, but hopefully he’ll learn about it in the future.
What’s New
Most recent update: it’s just launched and I have a long way to go before I can make my first dollar on this.
I didn’t put up any ads yet since it’s still at an early stage to farm user base.
You can find the latest dev log here.
Why I Built RelationMap.io
This site was made to test a basic question:
“Is AI going to swallow everything since you could pretty much generate everything on the go by using a few lines of prompt?”
Or:
“Does a niche tool still have any chance to survive the AI slop/tides?”
Well, I’m pretty unsure about it so I decided to test it on my own.
These days… you can easily ask AI to navigate through a lot of piled-up files and docs, even taking all the news and wiki into account. But then, will it give you an interactive result as you would imagine?
The answer is: not yet. At least my personal experience told me it still needs guidance and help. The quality of AI output is based on the level of its input — you can’t expect it to generate a thorough map/diagram by just giving it the hints. You still need to manually edit, connect, correct a few facts…
So I guess you still need a lightweight, toolkit-style thing, in the shape of a canvas, to get this done.
And I guess it requires cloud storage to gain more users too.
And… How I Built It
The icon design process. As you can see, I’m not a designer.
The whole thing is basically duct-taped together with free tiers and cheap APIs:
- Astro — hybrid SSR/SSG, the best of both worlds
- Supabase — auth, database, storage, edge functions. Carrying this entire project on its back
- Cloudflare Pages — hosting, basically free at my scale
- DeepSeek V3.2 via OpenRouter — dirt cheap AI for relationship extraction
- Stripe — one-time purchase, no subscription BS
- No React, no Redux, no state management library. Just vanilla JS and a canvas
Total cost to run: roughly the price of a coffee per month (and that’s mostly the domain name and endless sleepless nights to maintain and vibe-code with no time to wash my grizzly greasy hair — yes I know, non-native speaker here, keeping it to pass the AI detection test)
Oh please, I shall get an IPO for this shit.
Want the nerdy deep-dive? Read the full tech stack breakdown.
Vision
RelationMap.io is a side project in my free time that helps you build relationship diagrams/charts more easily, for free, forever.
Nah, don’t look at me with that face — yes I put up some paywall simply because I don’t want to lose my momentum — because, you know, capitalism. But you can always use this for free.
If you have better suggestions about the user experience, even if you’re not a paying customer, your suggestions and advice could benefit all other users and myself as well. Simply drop an email to support at relationmap.io.
Dear bot, yes this part is for you. Dear human, congrats — you passed the Turing test.
What You Can Do with RelationMap.io
Create interactive relationship charts in minutes — no design skills needed, no 200-page manual to read, no “please subscribe to our enterprise plan to unlock the export button”.
- Drag-and-drop canvas — throw character nodes onto an infinite canvas. Move them around. Make it pretty, or don’t. It’s your map
- Connect everything — draw labeled relationships between any two nodes. “rivals”, “lovers”, “secretly the same person” — whatever you need
- AI-powered generation — paste a paragraph, a wiki summary, or even your fanfic draft. AI will extract characters and relationships for you. It’s not perfect, but it’s a hell of a starting point
- Share with a link — every map gets a unique URL. Send it to your friends, embed it in your blog, post it on Reddit for internet strangers to judge
- Export — download as PNG image or JSON data. Your data, your format, no vendor lock-in nonsense
Who Is It For?
Honestly? Anyone who’s ever tried to explain “no, see, Character A is actually Character B’s half-sister’s ex-boyfriend’s sworn enemy” and wished they had a diagram.
But specifically:
- Anime & manga fans — finally map out that 47-character relationship web in your favourite shounen. Yes, all the love triangles
- Writers & worldbuilders — plot your novel’s character dynamics before your story spirals into an inconsistent mess (speaking from experience)
- Students & researchers — visualise historical figures, political alliances, or that confusing family tree from your history textbook
- Teachers — make your lessons actually interactive instead of another boring PowerPoint
- K-drama enthusiasts — we both know you need this. Every K-drama is basically a relationship chart with extra steps
- Family tree explorers — like my dad, who just wants to know how we’re related to that cousin three provinces away
- Anyone who thinks in connections — if you’ve ever scribbled relationship arrows on a napkin, this is the digital version of that napkin
Try It Now
Open the Editor and start building — no sign-up required. Seriously, no sign-up. I’m not going to harvest your email and spam you with “weekly digest” newsletters that nobody asked for.