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Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell
934 points by code_Whisperer on Jan 27, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 1047 comments
Not sure about anyone else, but I enjoy seeing the posts on side projects making money. Often while reading all of the comments I find new products or services I want, so I buy them and contribute further to that hustle's success. But for every hacker making $100 or more per month with their idea, there are hundreds more working hard, making nothing, struggling to get started. Does that describe you? Maybe the community just needs to hear about what you're offering, what you've been working on. If you've got something cool that has not yet gained traction, maybe it just needs to be seen by a gaggle of like-minded hackers and geeks. So share!



SteamDB: https://steamdb.info/

I've been running it for over 10 years now, it's a database of Steam games, their updates, price history, charts, and a lot more.

In the early days we took monetary donations but stopped a few years in. It costs less than 100$ a month to run. Cloudflare reports 552.2M requests in the past 30 days, and 6.09M unique visitors.


You run SteamDB? Thanks for making this! I've used it for all those 10 years whenever I'm getting back into gaming and want to see what the popular games are! The player count charts are a really awesome feature. Thanks for keeping it running all these years.


Yes same here. Still use it to find upcoming trending games.


You're passing on $50k-100k per month of ad revenue from just basic banner ads... at least based on how RPMs were a few years ago. I respect that, definitely not the decision I'd make.


Even assuming a _very_ low $0.01/session, he'd be making $60k/mo.

More realistically, if he decided to do this right, and sell direct ads using something like Kevel, with "promoted" game slots or something on the homepage and search, he could do $10-$20CPM direct since it's a large and well known site with high purchase intent.

Let's say a conservative 4 impressions per page and 3 pages per session.

(12 imps per session * 6m sessions)/1000 * $10CPM is $720k / mo

This is a _very_ achievable number, quickly, for a site that is this close to purchase intent.

I don't understand. Even putting a single adsense ad at a $1 CPM would net him close to $20k/mo. This might be one of the least monetized sites I've seen at this scale.

Respect.


[flagged]


Comments like this make me wish I could downvote, but I don’t have the points. Live and let live, friend.


You clearly value different things to them, and that's okay.

To you, a big car or house may be a sign of success. To them, it might not be. Not everyone values material things the same.

It's clearly a considered decision. It's not stupid by any means, if this is what they want.


I’m extremely business minded but I don’t judge others this harshly for their own financial decisions.

Nicely fucking stupid? Give me a break.


You know nothing about this guy or his values. It can be just as stupid to harm a great accomplishment in order to drive a fancy car, so maybe let people have their own values


I see your maths here but Cloudflare hits include any assets, images, and so on so one page views fans out potentially dozens of hits. Cloudflare also includes all bots and non-human hits.


Page views are ~140 million per month: https://twitter.com/thexpaw/status/1604768632331870209/photo...

Assuming $0.50 net CPM on one AdSense unit per page view, that would be $70k monthly/$840k yearly revenue. And since operating cost is $100, that's all profit. I'm no AdSense expert but I believe this would be super conservative, maybe an expert could chime in with higher realistic numbers. Even if you don't like advertising there are other ways you could earn money with a site like SteamDB.


Cloudflare stats are inflated. I have a site getting 30k visits a day according to Google Analytics but Cloudflare says it's close to 100k. So I think Cloudflare doesn't filter out bots in their analytics.


Why are you doubting the numbers? All gamers use this site. Anything less than a huge number would be unthinkable.


I'm not doubting the stats, just saying that Cloudflare is not an accurate gauge of website views and visits. Cloudflare shows 3x the pageviews on my site than Google Analytics.


A man with two watches...

Why do you think google analytics is more right than cloudflare? Adblock can block GA, but it can't block cloudflare


Google analytics numbers don't include users with adblock


isn't that what you want if you want to calculate adsense revenue?


For page views (not "Visits") on my site, Cloudflare is within 10% of Google. Your experience doesn't necessarily apply universally.


I know nothing of this, but does .info reduce the numbers, compared to something like .com, all other things aside?

edit: err, it's a genuine question, from someone that doesn't work in/with advertising, and had a .info domain within the first month they were offered, in 2001. Here's a rephrasing: Do ad networks, or customers of those networks, treat TLDs differently?


He's doing us a favor by not plastering ads all over his site.


Yeah I wish I wasn't anti-ad but it's so bad... Ads between every paragraph or ads that pretend to be a virus so some fake Microsoft/Amazon scammer can get you to call them.

It's funny I wonder about the influence of ads too like you by using ad block experience a better internet (no influence on behavior).

There's a hijacking thing too of intent, at which point I modify websites to hide these above the fold attention grabbers.

My kindle forces you to read an ad everytime you turn it on. I know you could root it, lost money on device, etc...


Agree with you. Ads make sites look bad and I say this as an owner of several websites that run ads lol.

SteamDB looks pretty amazing and sleek without ads. Putting ads would only degrade the user experience and force people to install adblockers or use adblocking browsers like Brave. Kudos to xPaw for keeping his site ad-free for all of us to enjoy.


And he'll have my eternal respect for it.


Simply by the fact he runs SteamDB without monetization, I can safely assume he's much richer than me. I would'nt try to teaching someone who's richer than me how to make money.


He could sell ads for the Epic and GOG game stores!


Id rather make a loss than take money from Epic. Most unethical company. Makes steam look like saints.


Wow, you don't make any money on SteamDB? It seems like the sort of thing that should be able to make a lot of money. Even very minimal ads would probably bring in hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars per year, and if you hate the idea of ads it seems like you could probably sell a premium subscription for some of the info you have that would be useful for devs, like imdb pro or crunchbase pro or something.


I can, but I have no interest in doing that currently.


As some others have said, affiliate is the way to go. You are already driving sales... Should be fair to you to get compensated.


Agree. Valve should probably find a way to compensate him. I've spent money on Steam because of his site.


If you don't mind me asking, what's your day job?


check his profile by clicking on id full stack developer per his home page


It's clear that he is a (very good!) full-stack developer. I am curious about where he works, or if he is retired or something, living off investments while working on SteamDB full time.

I think very few people would knowingly turn down income of a million dollars per year. In fact I'd say it's a privilege to be in a position to be able to turn that down. I even see some people here who are asking him to make the income even though he doesn't want it so he can give it to a charity.


I wouldnt be surprised if you could easily work out some sort of deal with Steam, if a game page from your site leads to a buy on their end they give you a small percentage.


I hate ads too. The thing I tried that felt ethical and useful was an affiliate code for related (to the content) products that would split the discount 50/50 between me and readers. I stated this clearly in the ad.


You're an absolute beast. Nice.


Legendary.


Valve should just acquire you to be honest.


No they should not, because they'd kill it or remove features, and god knows what else.


Not all heroes wear capes


Thank you!


Would be dope to monetize the traffic and donate it or support indie game projects.


Would you share more with us about the reason why you're not monetizing it?


Extremely baller


Does steam have some sort of affiliate link program? If they don't they should.


Many of us appreciate both the service and lack of ads. Thank you for both.


Can I ask if you might consider leveraging your position to aid a charity ?


This isn't a cost-free proposition. "giving away" money is a lot of work; leveraging an asset into money to donate is even more.


Agreed. Knowing the opportunity cost must weigh heavily. Bytes and Food. The new boots and cats.


Seems like the service itself is his choice of charity.


I'll do it?


kudos, mate


I completely respect the owner of SteamDB for not doing this... I'm not a fan of ad networks as it stands.

Although, affiliate links to games might be an idea (assuming Steam has such a thing). At least for the purchase if someone is interested in buying.


> affiliate links to games might be an idea (assuming Steam has such a thing).

Steam does not have such a thing.


Does Amazon still do affiliate links? Because they sell steam codes for games.


[flagged]


>You're a fan of taking things and not giving anything back, I see.

Don't be obtuse, that's not what he said and you know it.

Ad networks are problematic not because of the ads but because of the tracking and page bloat.

As he said affiliate links or some kind of custom non-tracking ads would be fine, and I'm not sure no one would be opposed to that.


> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.


Avid user for years, so cool to see you on the social web! Thanks for your work! I'm annoyed for you at all these people trying to tell you what to do with your project, after you've been doing it successfully for 10 years and they have not. Y'all really think this person hasn't thought about monetizing? Take it easy startup-stans!


I can definitely see the frustration. Highly money-motivated people working their arse off to try and make even $1k MRR, and all this guy needs to do is push a button and he's got 100k. Must blow their minds.


I haven't read every comment, but I see a lot of surprise, a lot of respect and no annoyed/pissed off "startup-stans". Where are you getting this from?


You are an absolute chad. I salute you. Not to undermine your motive and intent, but people will gladly click on links to support your site. Regardless, what a legend you are.


I want to say thank you for building this, but also there's no shame in putting a simple banner ad somewhere on the page. Most people who care have ad blockers, anyways.


I'm not an user myself but since many comments chastise you of not making money with ads, I would like to thank you for your work and for keeping it free from ads


Yes, thanks for reminding me and everyone else that you can just do something nice for others and pay for it.

Maybe it is worth paying $0.00000018109 to satisfy someones request? If they are running up the bill to $0.00001642036 per person (90.6751339113 req/user/month) there must be something there worth something for them?

I get that some people are to cheap to purchase fun for others but at these rates it is more like people are against fun in general. One can be cheap but one cant be that cheap?

I've had this discussion before... uhh... a few times.

Them: Why are you doing this????

me: Aren't you having fun?

Them: YEAH, but why????

me: You see little jimmy over there? You think he is enjoying himself too?

Them: uh yes? But why????

me: Well, I don't mind it.


Amazing. What is your setup like to make costs so low, a lot of caching?


Bruh! I love this site. You absolutely could put ads here, in a way that isn't annoying.

I guarantee you that there are game shops out there that would pay you like $10k minimum to "Feature" their game for a month or something.

You feature 5 games a month for 10k, you suddenly are at 50k/mo.

Or, you could go the route of using traditional ads like google ads etc, but those can be kind of spammy and the ad targeting kind of sucks.

I'd really recommend exploring that, and don't feel bad about using ads. You deserve to get rewarded for the excellent site you've put together, a lot of people clearly get value out of it.


Impressive. What's your tech stack? How are you able to keep the cost so low?


php, nginx, mariadb (mysql). The stack that continues to deliver robust, low-cost, and reliable solutions yet HN shits on it at every opportunity.


It really is impressive how versatile that stack is, both on the low end and high. Wikipedia is also basically that stack too (just with apache instead, and varnish/ATS playing an important role)


nginx is decent to be fair


Assuming it hasn't changed in the past 2 years:

> nginx, latest php, mariadb.

> and of less importance: memcached and influxdb.

https://twitter.com/thexpaw/status/1315941483867000833


That's still correct.


What host do you use?


Hetzner.


I'd love to learn how you managed to scale on a single server - other than the above, any tips or tricks? I'm also a PHP guy on Ngnix with MySQL but want to know what tips you might have for a dynamic (non-static) site to handle such scale on a single server


Equip your server with a decent CPU, enough RAM to allow MySQL to keep most of your database in it, and fast SSDs. Profile your code and optimize/cache anything that stands out as slow, aggressively cache data that is read often using memcached/redis/etc, use an http cache proxy like cloudflare in front to cache static assets (and maybe pages that aren't dynamic for every user)


me also , how can it be 1 server ? how do you protect DDos attacks?


They use cloudflare in front, they do the heavy lifting.


Ty


Thanks!


When's the Next.js migration?


The amount of value I get out of your service is nuts! No better place to figure out whether a multiplayer game is worth getting... Daily users is hard metric to game or lie about.


I actually wouldn't mind some ads on this. Not the generic Google banner ads, but some cutesy illustrated banner in the style of Darkest Dungeon and such. Open an ad slot for bidding and the most interesting banner wins.


Wait, why are you not monetizing it? that traffic looks bonkers


Thankfully, some people out there still do things because they enjoy it and not because they think there's money to be made.


Most people who do things "just because", don't monetize because either it isn't possible or it isn't worth the effort. For a site with as much traffic as GP's, it's probably worth it. Regardless, anyone turning down that much revenue out of principle deserves a lot of credit.


That sounds like a pretty ideologically-motivated form of selection bias.


Well, my 2c is that making money is an enjoyable activity as well.

As someone who loved all the RTS/Tycoon games back in 2000's, I look at making money through own ventures as just another game at the same time


Sometimes making money off of something turns out to be incompatible with enjoyment, and you find out too late.

Depends on the person, how slippery the slippery slope is, and the motivation for a particular project.

I could ask myself "how much money would I be willing to pay to bring benefit to a large number of people?" It's definitely nonzero. But that's not a great question, because we all hate losing stuff we have (and paying is losing). It's a lot easier psychologically to forgo getting the money in the first place.

(Note that I wouldn't be able to forgo that much money. Though I might be able to procrastinate throwing the monetization switch for a while. How long is relative to my level of privilege in my own finances.)


Agreed. Depends on the personal point of view for every individual, and that's the reason I commented as my "2c". Personally, if I were the guy running the steamdb website I would have brought in the monetization aspect as quickly as possible, once I knew there was a lot of traffic coming in.


those two things are not always mutually exclusive


Monetizing something usually affects what you create as well as your experience creating it. It can easily be a negative effect.


I think Valve will shut it down once it learns about the monetization. AFAIK that is what happened to https://steamspy.com/ when they introduced paid subscription tier.


Valve didn't shut it down though. It just gave people privacy controls with sane defaults, cutting off data to scrapers. Not sure how much SteamDB depends on data like that but it seems to be doing fine.


The only explanation for why he is not monetising it is that he is Gabe Newell.


The fact the you choose to keep this project ad free is fire.


Thank you! I love the site. And also thank you for not having ads.


instant search is easily my favorite way to experience steamdb

to those who haven't used the tool (listed at bottom of page), it can be great for discoverability with a ton of filters, and quick responses

https://steamdb.info/instantsearch/


Why do you not take donations?


He does: https://steamdb.info/donate/ link is just above footer of main page.


That's a bit misleading. SteamDB don't accept monetary donations. Games are they only thing they accept donations of.


Games gifted to the bot are used to gain access to some extra info.

I do get game gifts to my personal account from time to time.


I will try to remember to donate games to you


Well as xPaw already stated he does not seem to interested in money. I would guess:

Give a Steam Award to xPaw

A Steam Award gives the creator of this site Steam points!

Is the best we can do to support his work! I just wanted to point there is a /donate. Not sure why it need to be cold hard cash to count.


I agree it is good to share that there is a donate page, but I also think it's a good thing to point out that they do not accept monetary donations.


"Currently we do not accept monetary donations"


Adding the donation link on the top banner should drive some donations. Currently, I can see it at the bottom.


I think you need to read that quote again.


Thanks for making this available. Has been a huge help over the years. Would make a good platform for other side projects (e.g. SteamDB YouTube) if you were to look for new challenges one day.


Had never seen your site before (stopped gaming before Steam became popular), but in visiting it now, very surprised to see that CS is still __by far__ the most popular online game.

Great resource. Thanks!


Kudos on the site & no ads.

Like others have said you could have affiliate deals with the game publishers direct, so there will be no in your face adverts.

You could also have banner ads that are complimentary.

Perhaps you don't need money, but personally I'd capture what I could as over 10 years that would be substantial.

You would then have extra reserve savings for yourself in case your circumstances change, or you could hand it over to charities

Love what you're doing regardless


Oh, cool, I used to run something very similar called steamwatch.com, back before they allowed you to have watch lists. It would monitor prices, let you know about sales, and I would occasionally run game give away raffles for free with whatever ad revenue I collected. It only ever made maybe $100 over its entire run. This would've been over 10 years ago though so I doubt mine and yours ever coexisted.


Huge fan here. It's impressive that it costs less than $100/month to run such a great service. Thank you so much.


Used it some years ago and thought that it was a really good front-end to the Steam store since the search interface is a bit lacking. Am surprised to see that this has millions of visitors but has such low running cost. Must be really highly optimized SQL queries and code there!


I would suggest you to place a donation regressive counter with the price that takes to make the website run, let's say 100 USD, everytime someone make a donation the value updates until it reaches the donation goal of the month.


How would you suggest starting data-mining for a project like this?

Every time I think of a project like this, I convince myself that steam/amazon/twitter/Facebook/etc will rate limit any bot that tries to scrape data from their service.


Thak you (and Marlamin) for SteamDB and especially for providing Linux filters as well as the steamdb IRC bot that you ran. Sad that you moved your channel off of IRC when Freenode died.

Respect for keeping the site ad-free.


I have used your site so many times. Thank you for all the work you’ve put into it.


Yeah making money from such website can be dangerous. You would get lawsuit from Valve


Valve is probably one of the least likely of companies to sue someone for doing something cool with their stuff.


I don't think so. If the owner monetize it, it's very likely ...


Hey there! Thanks for creating this site. Long time user here. It is an awesome product! I was curious about the system design diagram of SteamDb. What type of DB do you use to record historical prices?


thanks a lot for making this happen, in this exceptionally altruistic way, learning that such as staple as steamdb is a passion/hobby project really makes one believe in the software engineering mission


Just wanted to say big big fan. Have extensively used it during sales to see the lowest record prices. I absolutely love everything about the site, the design, the layout. Thank you for making it.


i am a bit late to comment but thanks for creating and maintaining the service for all this time! it really came in clutch when deciding on buying new games.

i am curious to hear from you about your experiences with people trying to scrape data off the site. i noticed that we cannot go back beyond a couple years for price history without logging in for one. is that a decision made because of people scraping data?


Thank you! SteamDB has been super helpful for me. I like to be able to pull posters and banner art for games, and it's also super helpful for untangling bundles of Rocksmith DLC.


Thank you very much! Your killer feature for me is being able to sort my library by fewest hours played and highest review rating so I get the best value out of my library.


I'm not a heavy Steam user, but SteamDB is great. Thank you!


As someone who played Fallout 4 with mods, thank you very much!


Dude take some revenue so you can continue doing cool stuff.


Wow, crazy to see how many players Unturned has. I used to love that game years ago. AFAIK it was created by a teenager at the time.


You're a hero to all gamers. Take a bow sir.


Are you independently wealthy from another project or inheritance?

Would you monetize it to fund a nonprofit or charity?


Holy cow, thank you so much for this resource.


Thanks so much. This site has helped me find new games, and it has saved me lots of money with the price history feature.


This is amazing! Is there a way to limit the charts to certain platforms only, like Mac or Linux compatible games?


I love your site! I suggest it to everyone.


Upvoting, as a Dota2 enjoyer/sufferer


I always wondered how Valve thinks about this project. And congrats on the project itself, for sure!


I know some Valve employees use it.


That's cool, thanks for the info!


I want you to know that I love you.


Steam should buy you , you are driving revenue for them.

I respect you for what you have done.


Cool! I've been recently using it to find free weekend games.


Wow, thank you for your work! Regularly use steamdb, lovely site!


Thank you! Love the site.


That's awesome! I've been using SteamDB for years.


You are a lifesaver. Cheers to you!


Make money through referer links?


Grew up using this. Thank you!


Big fan use it all the time


SteamDB is awesome!


I wonder what's the cost of running this ?


It's written right there in the comment.


But isn't it low compared the site visitors. I believe you run some servers to scrape the data from steam and save it somewhere right ?


Everything is done on a single server. What makes you think it's low?


The number of users maybe, with millions of users making requests to get the data, a $100 single server won't be able to handle the load. that's why i asked, anyway great achievement


Respect


Thank you!


amazing product.


Radiant: https://getradiant.app/

Premise: Takes your Spotify and turns it into a personalised FM-style radio station, complete with a snarky, AI-powered radio presenter called Rad.

Rad'll quip, read you the news and weather on the hour, announce what you've just heard and what's coming next, gives you biographical info for bands you might not be too familiar with but most importantly; Rad helps you discover new music while playing all the songs you know and love, in a smart, contextual way.

Availability: iOS, Android.

Price: $0

Cost to me: like 40-50 bucks a month.

Why do it? I use it daily and so do many others. Great for house parties, offices, long car journeys or just your daily pilgrimage to the supermarket.


Unsolicited feedback: If this were also offered as a web-based application I'd probably use it (sitting at my desk all day I don't want to use my mobile device for music). Maybe sell rotating ads or sponsorships (on screen but not in the audio stream, please!) to make some $.

Very cool.


That's exactly what is coming next for it! A fully-fledged web app. It's actually built using web tech so it's an easy port. Just need to rebuild some of the native bits for web (ohh I might get to use wasm!) but once that's done it should be good to go. Planning on pushing out in the next 2 weeks.

And yeah while I don't need to run ads on it at the moment, if the right sponsor wanted to work with me I'd be exceptionally happy to do so.


Doesn't Spotify have terms around not making money on any apps that use their API? From https://developer.spotify.com/policy/#iv-streaming-and-comme...

> Except for the limited commercial uses for Non-Streaming SDAs (set out below) commercial uses are not permitted for SDAs.

Their guidelines are super strict about using any music or artwork in specific ways. For instance, I'm pretty certain you need to display a Spotify logo any time you play music from Spotify, which I don't see on the player. And the player has rounded corners on the artwork.

Some excerpts from https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/general/design-a...

> To comply with our licensing agreements, you must always attribute content from Spotify with the logo.

> Artwork must be kept in its original form. Don’t animate or distort it in any way. This includes applying overlays and blurring.

I'm not a lawyer so I'm sorry if I'm reading these incorrectly. I tried making an app using the Spotify API at one point and had it running but it got shot down a couple times for not displaying the Spotify icon. Good on you if your app is all set. I was always worried I was going to face the Spotify legal team with mine and gave up on it.

I only mention these because I do love the radio! Great mix of genres so far!


Radiant launched with a paid subscription model (like a dollar a month) Spotify shut it down, took away our API creds and left us in the lurch. Had to set it up again, with the subscription removed. That hurt because we had a good number of paying customers at that point.

But we moved to be compliant with their guidelines after that and I carried it on as a labour of love.

Now I'm actively looking at moving away from Spotify and on to my own data set and APIs that can match what Spotify has. I've built something like it before using the Cover Art Archive for the artwork, Acoustic/MusicBrainz for the metadata and custom logic built atop so I know it's possible.

Once I've done that I can start looking for sponsors.

There is always the possibility that if the userbase really scales up, Spotify would grant me a commercial license and allow me to commoditise the platform but I don't need that to happen really.


How long did it take for them to notice?


I made a Spotify powered app ( https://mergemusic.app ) and we didn't add any payment methods to comply with their terms.

Tried for months / years to get in touch with someone at Spotify who could discuss a commercial licence agreement, so the app could have a business model. Stonewalled.

Turns out Spotify instead of working with us, made their own version - Spotify Blend, launched 2 years after our app.

The thing that bugs me the most is Spotify is a member of https://appfairness.org which states

> App store gatekeepers have carefully crafted their mobile device ecosystems to eliminate competition and maximize their own control and profits, to the detriment of developers and consumers.

However Spotify's own App Store did exactly the behaviour they are complaining about.


I suspect it might be complicated by the fact that most of their content isn't owned by them but leased(?) from record labels, artists, podcasters, etc?

But I agree it seems like they use this API as a free launch pad for ideas, which seems morally or ethically questionable. Sorry to hear they might have ripped your idea.


We weren't taking content. Just creating playlists back on Spotify through their API.


Same, won't use a mobile app but would happily use a web app.

Any plans for Youtube Music support? I rarely use spotify anymore. Not your problem obviously, just wondering if you have plans to expand.


I've got plans to build my own "open music API" that'll make whatever service you use just an adaptor that Rad can tap into. At the moment Radiant is very embedded in Spotify's API ecosystem due to a few key features none of the other services has.

Longer term thing sadly as this is very much my side deal but it'll get there.

Probably make that new API and dataset OSS as I want other devs to build cool stuff without being at the mercy of the streaming services.


Honestly, I think the value is in the DJ personalities. I'm trying to get away from sarcasm in my daily life as it makes me unhappy overall. Most evenings, I just kinda wanna listen to someone more positive like a dead head talk about music -- no offense, I just wanna look at the positive side of life for the years I have left.

That said, I would like to see even just a recommendation engine plug into YT Music, spotify, even hell, an nzb downloader. "You liked this song and band, you know you should try this band."


Very much hoping for some alternative services functionality — would love this in my shop. Cheers for an incredible idea!


If you want something like this for a shop or store etc, ping me via rad@getradiant.app, we might be able to build something cool to fit that need (I've been toying with this idea for a while so it'd be nice to have a first user for it)


I'm curious about the stack-- is the app React Native with some actual native modules, then? Or is it based on something like Ionic?


It was a native iOS app originally but now it's pure web (straight Svelte SPA, no UI framework) with native plugins.

I did it because I don't have the time to maintain for 3 platforms in parallel without one falling behind and I'm not a fan of React native personally. I spent a good chunk of time testing with much older hardware as a target to make sure performance wouldn't be a noticeable distraction for users and I'm happy with how it turned out :)


If you have more info on how you set up your Svelte project, I’d be interested in hearing! I recently rewrote my personal website from react into something much simpler with Svelte and am trying to figure out the best way to serve it on phones.


Hell, ads would even make it feel more like real radio. Bonus points if the "host" "reads" them.


If you're on an M1 MacBook, you can run the iPad app on it, pretty responsive.


Me three!


> If this were also offered as a web-based application I'd probably use it

#metoo


If anyone is interested in learning more, suggesting stuff or getting support etc I've set up a discord that I've done a frankly appalling job of promoting -> https://discord.gg/4YgkhAgfJ5


BTW you can also follow along on Reddit if you'd prefer doing it that way -> https://www.reddit.com/r/RadiantApp/


I love this! I did something similar recently with Phoenix10.1 (https://github.com/pncnmnp/phoenix10.1).


I love the idea, and I instantly downloaded the app. After a peppy welcome message from the robot, it doesn't actually play any songs. Just crashes constantly :(

I can send you any debug info if you like. But no pressure, it's free as far as I can see and I don't want you to worry just because it doesn't work for me.

Great idea anyhow!


Yep. That's not good... thanks for the offer, if you could shoot over an email to rad@getradiant.app and I'll get whatever broken fixed this weekend and released by Monday.


Just downloaded. I loved JackFM back when I listened to terrestrial radio in the car - it was a station with a snarky robot dj and it was great. Thanks for making this!


Is there like a link to a JackFM broadcast on Youtube or something? I'm super curious to learn what their formatting was like and maybe use it as a case study!


It was 100.3 KJKK Jack FM which I’m realizing was only in the DFW area. I figured it was syndicated

Here’s a link to what I’m guessing is their site: https://jack.fm/listen-to-jack-fm/

Here’s a YouTube video which is either a recording or a fan-made version. Either way the quip by Jack after the first song (~3:37) nails the tone for the robo dj’s persona: https://youtu.be/ewDE2rrRbH8


Was definitely syndicated. Listed to a lot in Southern California. Haven’t heard it in years though. They had the largest selection of songs.


oh wow thanks!


I think this is a really cool idea and you should keep working on this. You're onto something. Incorporate more day to day? Include podcasts that I subscribe to as programs? So much potential.


Short-form podcasts are being looked at as sort of a syndicated content. Like there'd be a list of interesting shows like 'The Daily', 'Business Wars Daily' etc that you could subscribe to and have injected into the stream when appropriate!

Obviously, I'd expand this with more full-fledged shows if people liked the format. You could even configure it with "I listen to my podcasts in the morning / after noon / when I'm driving" etc in settings and Rad would factor that in when choosing when to play em.


I would love to be able to listen to news podcasts in this.


> Why do it?

Doing stuff like this is how you get experience in areas where your day job may not provide you the opportunity.

After all - employers don't care how you got the skills, that you have the skills.


Also having something I'm passionate about gives me a lot of purpose. I've obviously up-skilled tremendously building (and then rebuilding it for cross-platform) but above all else, it's a lot of fun to build and it's something I personally wanted to see in the world and enjoy using!


I've been listening for about 30 minutes and it's pretty neat, I've already found some new music I like. However, the weather forecast told me it was 275° F.


Damn it! Thought I'd fixed this. Back to that micro service I go :(

Thanks for using and for the bug report!


Trying it now and it seems really nice! I wish you had a desktop/web version, and it would be my daily background radio while I work all day. Spotify's Discover Weekly playlists are nice enough, but they barely carry me through the first 1-2 days, and then it gets pretty repetitive.

It would also work really well as an Alexa skill, especially with Rad's commentary.

What did you write the apps in?


Yep, the idea is that the stream of music it plays is both time appropriate and always relatively fresh. You can tune its selection algo too with the thumbs up or down (long pressing on either for more fine controls).

Web is due out in the next 2 weeks. Alexa skill has been on the roadmap forever as I've always seen smart speakers as like the place it makes the most sense.

The apps are Svelte based with capacitor (planning on switching to Tauri when that gets proper mobile support) and some custom plugins for the native stuff. It was a native iOS app but got a full rewrite to support Android and iOS with the web planned as a fast follow.


Very cool! Joined your Discord server. Even if you don't want to monetize it right now, you should set up a Patreon or something like that, and at least let people chip in on your server costs.

It would be a very cool community-supported smart radio service :)


The app has a built-in link to 'Buy me a coffee' (which actually does cover my coffee expenses along with some of the hosting costs!)

I'm quite keen to get a bigger community of people contributing ideas and maybe give me the push to move away from Spotify.

Eventually, swathes of the service could go open source too if the community wanted it.

Thanks for joining the discord!


Looks like those clowns in Congress did it again! What a bunch of clowns.


Rad literally says this


Ha! How does he keep up with the news like that?


This sounds absolutely incredible. Definitely checking this out.


I had this idea myself but never bothered to make anything of it. Thanks for saving me the effort!


This is super cool, but the first thing I wanted to do was cast it to the Chromecast plugged into my hi-fi. It seems casting isn't available yet - do you have plans to add it? It would make this a total winner for just playing music in the background.


Chromecast support is a gigantic pain to implement! But I 100% agree it'd be excellent to have it!

Maybe it's gotten easier since I last checked in on it


Very cool, I've daydreamed about building something similar but always convinced myself I'd have to wait until text-to-speech was better to really incorporate all the sources I'd like. Awesome work!


The major advancements in text-to-speech we've since in the last year have me planning on revamping Rad's voice (maybe basing it on Tom Sellek...who knows) but the fact we've come this far has really opened a world of opportunities for audio-first experiences.


You could use unreal speech for this. Not a plug but i found it really cheap to make realistic tts using an api using it.

https://unrealspeech.com/


This looks (or sounds, rather) exceptional.

Long term I'm going to go with something self-hosted using Tortoise TTS etc but I also want to break away from Google's Cloud Speech as that can cost me hundreds a month when the user base has a peak so this looks great, thank you!


I’d be very interested to see what’s possible taking SOTA models and trying to get some version of them working offline, on-device.


Cool! Just signed up. I was a little turned off by how much access you need to Spotify. Is that just because they don't have granular enough permissions?


I know it's a bit of a laundry list. Everything there is required to use the Spotify API the way I needed to. Playlist read/write so it can add songs you like to the 'Liked on Radiant on Spotify', Profile to set your locale when making requests and for setting your profile picture if you have one etc etc.

I'll look at paring it back in future if I can!


It makes sense what you ask for based on what the app does! I was just wondering if it was an issue with scoping and them not providing enough granularity.


FWIW, I think you meant to say "paring it back" and not "pairing it back".

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/pare


What does it request? That part was in french for me.


Basically write access to playlists and change access. I totally get why, I was just wondering if their scopes were limited.


Weird its in french. Thats all controlled by Spotify which suggests your Spotify is set to french. Might be worth checking to see if your Spotify is being accessed anywhere else...


Is it possible to onboard service onto Apple Music?


Not today but we're planning some radical changes to the music data we rely upon which should open it up to Apple Music, Deezer and beyond!


Got my attention! Switched to Deezer a while back and there aren't a ton of integrations for it. Which is fine, but also, they'd be nice.

IMHO, this is exactly the sort of functionality I'd expect to be built into any music service when I say "start song radio". They misuse the word "radio" by so many degrees, they just mean "shuffle".

Even if it's not broadcast over actual radio, at least give me an announcer! And you've done that, and I'm very intrigued. Is there a place I can sign up for reminders to learn when the Deezer connector is ready?


If you head over to our Discord which you can find here -> https://discord.gg/4YgkhAgfJ5 and it'll be announced there :)

You can also follow updates on Reddit -> https://www.reddit.com/r/RadiantApp/


I love it! And I would love to have some kind of Home Assistant integration so Rad can wake me up with news in the morning.


This is absolutely on the roadmap!


Thank you so much to everyone for the points and really nice words of encouragement. Real shot in the arm and means a great deal.


Downloaded, will test it, looks very promising. Absolutelty willing to donate. Do you take donations?


The bottom of the settings screen has a 'buy me a coffee' link but I'm equally happy if you're using it and enjoying it!

Or if you have feature requests please send them my way! Those are worth an awful lot :)


Thanks! I had some issues with playback as soon as the app was im background. The song switched but it did not start to play.


Very cool. An alarm function would be nice. Waking up with Rad! My family is blown away by the idea.


Interesting! I've never actually thought about that! Very clever!

If it was launched from the alarm it could start the show with "Gooood morning, looks like it's going to be <insert weather> and <insert some info about traffic on your usual route>, now let's get to the reason we're both here; great tunes." or something.


Public transport info for those of us that live in countries with good APIs for this stuff that travel in, too.

A long time ago I had an internet radio (musicpal) that played shoutcast stations, you could point the screen at RSS feeds; it felt kind of futuristic to have info on when my next train to work was on it, this would even more so.


I'd buy that for a dollar!


Just to let you know, on Android the "Connect with Spotify" button opens a Google Chrome view, which is weird, because my default browser for everything is Firefox.


It would be nice if you could make the DJ a bit more like the ones in GTA radios, in particular Vice City. I would pay for that!


This is literally my dream for the service. A personal GTA radio station. I'm entirely all ears if you have any suggestions on how to pull that off!


ChatGPT

> Write a Grand Theft Auto Vice City in-game radio advertisement.

> "Attention all Vice City residents! Are you looking for a new ride to cruise the streets in style? Look no further than auto dealership, "Tommy's Auto Sales"! We've got a wide selection of sleek sports cars, rugged off-road vehicles, and everything in between. Plus, with our no questions asked policy, you won't have to worry about where you got the money to pay for it. And for a limited time only, take advantage of our special offer: steal any car on the lot and bring it to us, we'll give you a substantial discount. So what are you waiting for? Head on down to Tommy's Auto Sales and step up your ride today!"


Ahh so fake ads! That'd be neat actually! Going to work on that over the weekend :) TY


I wish I could get the Mr. Sticky Buddy ads from the original YDKJ....

Chalky the Squirrel!


This is fantastic


I love the idea!


This is... awesome! Great concept!


Well, that was an easy sell.


This is very comfy.


Everyone Draw: https://everyonedraw.com

I created a little experiment a few years ago to see what would happen if anyone in the world could draw pixel by pixel on an infinite, shared canvas.

It has attracted a small community of fans who use it to relax and practice their drawing skills. The community has spawned some breathtaking pieces of collaborative art, including a world map[1], a galaxy[2], and a magic forest[3].

There have been a few donations, but not nearly enough to cover all my costs. I'm fine running it at a loss while I have a job. This summer I plan to take some time off from full-time employment to travel the world, at which point I'll try to monetize this project to cover my travel expenses.

[1] https://everyonedraw.com/1/-2564/-759

[2] https://everyonedraw.com/2/9339/-7770

[3] https://everyonedraw.com/1/40117/-40


You can sell loot boxes that contain different colors. Also sell finishing coats by the pixel. Once applied and dried (moderation) the underlying pixels can no longer removed.


Please don't do this.


Sounds like the million dollar web page where you just buy pixels for $1.


This is awesome! I love these sorts of creative community projects. Have you had to deal with trolls at all and how have you managed that?


Oh, absolutely. The initial launch was a disaster because I had no way of dealing with trolls. I've learned a lot since then, and built a bunch of tools that moderators can use to clean up the damage caused by trolls.


Can you share more about what you learned about moderation?


I learned how crucial moderation is for a community site like this. I originally hoped that the "good" users would overpower the trolls and create a self-sustaining community without any deliberate moderation. I was very wrong. I knew there were some people on the internet who like drawing penises and swastikas, but I totally underestimated the volume of these people.

I also learned the importance of bringing on additional help. I naively thought I could do everything myself (and I still like flying solo on the development side), but bringing on a volunteer to help moderate the site and manage the community has been incredibly helpful.


I played around with this for a while, and then realized it polluted my browser history with hundreds of entries. Please don't save a new history state every time the canvas moves. It would be easy enough to get rid of on desktop, but I'm not on desktop; the only way to remove these is to select them all individually and delete.


I built something similar for Android called Pixmap, which is a live collaborative drawing app. It was one of my first side projects! It's still online, only costs me like $25/mo to run, so...

You can also create private rooms etc.

There is also a competitive drawing aspect where you're shown an image and have to redraw it, and a matchmaking system with ranking...


Are these examples just different locations on the same canvas?


Isn't this a copy of Reddit's April fools /r/pixel game?


r/pixel was like the 7th iteration of this idea on the web.


The oldest one I can remember is million dollar homepage.


which is a copy of a copy, what's old is new


How do you deal with graffiti?


Graffiti is part of the fun!


Love it!


https://guestrevenue.com/ - an tool to integrate Airbnb bookings into Xero for short let owners who want really precise accounts. Built for myself, turned into a multi-tenant app because in 2019 it would definitely make me rich.

I have one user called Todd. He seems lovely but I don't have the heart to charge him because then he'd expect it to work. Everyone else has bounced off because they are weak. Actually I might have more users who just never got in touch; I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure it can't be abused for Bitcoin mining. Maybe Todd is just the strongest of them - he doesn't mind downloading CSVs and trimming off the rows that cause mysterious 500 errors. It's a test of character. Maybe it is being used for Bitcoin mining and works anyway?

I maintain it because it's a lot less painful than typing 300 bookings a year manually, but a lot more painful than if someone else would just do it for me. It's probably not a business, but if you disagree you can have it for £100,000 - a high multiple you say - but you can't put a price on potential.


:D this is great


I run Plain Text Sports (https://plaintextsports.com/).

I got sick of waiting for ESPN to load so I made a site with the goal of providing immediate access to what people actually care about: sports scores.

It's pretty fully featured at this point, supporting the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, MLS, Premier League and Champions League, college basketball and college football, WNBA, NWSL, and the World Cup. And for a lot of leagues it has full schedules and standings as well.

It actually was really popular in South Africa during the World Cup when a "super-app" that points users to sites that don't use a lot of data linked to it.

The site is served off of S3 (which is cheap), but there's a job running on an AWS server that's fetching the data for all the games and republishing pages to S3. It's using Ruby and is making a lot of network requests, so it's definitely not super efficient. I need a least a couple virtual CPUs, so it ends up costing ~$60 a month. I could definitely reduce that number, but the trouble just isn't worth it to me right now.

I don't want to make money on it. It's been difficult enough to get people to use it; getting people to pay for it would be even hard. At this point I feel like I've gotten everything I've wanted from the project. (An eye-opening experience into the marketing world; a website that I use every day.)

I try to limit how much I work on it now to mostly just maintenance work. I'd rather work on other stuff. If I started making money that'd just be a number to obsess over, and, honestly, it's never going to make enough money to replace my salary as a software engineer.


This is cool, really dig the text look. Reminds me of https://wttr.in/. I would love to see more of these text-based sites.


I use it every MLB season and love it! Thank you for your work. Baseball is the perfect sport to go plain text, it already works really well over the radio etc.


Where do you get the data?


Really love the site. Is there a way to view multiple football/soccer leagues (i.e. Premier League (PL) and Champions League (CL)) at once?

I know you said you're just maintaining the website, but if there were a simple way to follow a team, that would be a really nice QOL addition. That way I could follow a PL team and see their CL matches as well without having to switch between pages on the website to make sure I don't miss a match. Perhaps adding the team as an URL parameter could keep the design simple?

If you want to take it to the next logical step, there are more leagues that a football club can compete in such as the FA Cup and Europa League. This of course is Europe-centric.


The intention is to put the schedules for everything on this page:

https://plaintextsports.com/premier-league/2022-2023/clubs/l...

The challenge is that these pages are really labor intensive, because I want to show relevant information for whatever league is happening, e.g., group stage points, leg of Champions League matches, and it's really difficult to figure out how to fit everything in just 45 columns.

I complained about it in this tweet: https://twitter.com/CodeIsTheEnd/status/1569489636900347904


This was a life saver when I was traveling in Europe and had limited data to use! Thanks for making and keeping it running.


In similar spirite, when the world cup was going on I used https://worldcup.cole.ws/ a lot to check on it. Much better than all other sites.


I've been using your site daily during the MLB season, the design is perfect. If you displayed a plain text advertisement I wouldn't even mind.


That is an awesome site that I will be using a LOT from now on! I love it when I find gems like this on HN! Thank you for making this!


Love the site. How can I contact you (I don’t have Twitter)? Would love to purchase the ability to use your code for our company!


I use this site every day. Thank you for making it!


Awesome. Could you please add the Bundesliga?


This is super cool


Love this!


PoachMe.Dev: https://www.poachme.dev/#/devLand?reqCode=HNGOBRRR

Premise: Recruiters spam left and right, so we decided to create a website just so they could get a familiar calendar-like interface but asked them to pay for your time. As soon as we exposed the external version with the URL, we decided to make an automated template ("Great. Please book a slot on my calendar and we can chat more about this. You'll receive my resume upon confirmation of the booking. https://bk.poachme.dev/Lazaro"). After that we ended up creating a virtual business card service so that could easily create a web presence without going through a different service (https://bk.poachme.dev/kBMf).

Availability: Web

Price: $0

Cost: Nearly nothing, it just sits with my other hosted services.

Why do it? Honestly, asking someone to pay for your time is the easiest way to see who values your time. The cost to send a single spam message to thousands of developers is nearly zero and it takes time to sort through the messages to see if there's anything good. I have had experiences going from blackmail all the way to people disclosing the actual salary for the position without any money exchanging hands which proves that when your time has value it's suddenly possible for the pay bracket for a position to appear.


I really like this idea, where I'm from recruiters are the absolute worst.. Being that this is your app can you disclose that the model works? Like are people making some money with this? I'd hate to take this line and get no bites, or worse alienate myself from the opportunities.

Edit: I just remembered the title of the thread :), I guess not?


> get no bites, or worse alienate myself from the opportunities.

Each person can do it however they see fit. I tend to use it as a way to get the critical info needed (company name, salary, remote or not). Recruiters who send me messages with enough info don't get a link from me. If you're still reluctant to give me enough info to make a decision can book at $100/hr, and about 5% of those book.

It's up to you, if you're getting shitty recruiters, send me them the link.


Great idea, you must pursue it. I too get a lot of recruiter spam. The idea should be extended to companies who take up several hours of your time to interview only to reject you. Life is short.


The same ideals apply to companies...

"Here's my booking link"


Followed the 1st link in post, used GitHub sign-up button, allowed pop-up, signed in to GH, authorized app, ended up on white page with message about missing session status or something (sorry, I didn't capture verbatim message).

Went back to 1st page and tried again. No GH login prompt, white page with coloured progress bar at top, ended up back on initial page with message "Unable to establish a connection with the popup. It may have been blocked by the browser".

Firefox on Android. (Btw, perhaps it's on purpose, but I can't select and copy text on that page.)


Sorry, man, things be on fire over here... I didn't think anyone would actually sign up.

Gonna check this out and see what's wrong.


Some feedback (not sure if this is on purpose):

I'm using Brave, and I couldn't right-click to "Suggest a Strong Password" in your signup field. I've never had that happen with any other site before. No adblock or Shields up.

Also I can't seem to confirm my membership.


Weird, I have never seen that dropdown option but I was able to do it (but I also sometimes get a "Suggest Password" option).

We're mostly developer focused so that email/password signup is really for non-github users. I'll check it out.


Mm, okay. I tried signing up (I'm a marketing/community guy) and didn't use the Github sign-up. When I click the verification email link it just hangs on your logo.


That's no bueno but we are getting the HN hug of death.

I see your account is created and ready to roll.


How many users do you have right now?

Last year I created a prototype of something very similar, the key difference was that the idea was to auto pre screen recruiters instead of ask for pay.


We stopped counting after a bit but regularly get an influx get new features drop (like the virtual business card) and when we post someplace.

It's profitable enough to cover hosting but honestly we built the features we wanted out a product we wanted and it went from there.


Reminds me of 21 Co's Earn Product RE pay for answering message


Goes to show nothing is truly unique in this world.

We mostly just got fed up with spending hours on interviews where recruiters showed up late or just ghosted only to realize nothing materialized.


Go Transit: https://gotransitapp.com/

I've built and maintain website + iOS + Android apps for public transit for several small municipalities that don't have a good solution. I usually end up adding cities if I visit there and an unhappy with their app offering.

Most of these municipalities use a smaller 3rd party vendor for tracking their buses, but often, the user facing application is sorely lacking. My applications utilize the same data, but try to:

1. Have a simple interface for quickly tracking buses 2. Have a simple interface to see times at your stops 3. Be specific to the city/transit agency. Most of the 3rd party vendors don't white label their apps, so somehow you have to know to download the My Stop app for Birmingham, AL, even though searching the App Store for Birmingham won't bring that app up. Once you have the app, you then have to find your transit agency.

Currently, I support Availtec, RouteShout, and TransLoc.

This was originally built for me in Birmingham, and I slowly expanded it as I visited other cities.


Just a friendly heads up, but Go Transit is also the name of the regional transit system in Southern Ontario, Canada (originally named GO Transit for Government of Ontario Transit, as it started as a part of the Ontario Ministry of Transportation). Calling it out because your app looks cool, but with the direct overlap in name and product focus, it could lead to a future trademark dispute if your app takes off.

https://www.gotransit.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GO_Transit


Yeah, I know. However, I white label all the applications, so the app ends up being called "Go Birmingham", "Go Steamboat", "Go Grand Rapids", etc... My users rarely actually find https://gotransitapp.com, and typically just search for City + transit on the app store.


Do google maps / apple maps / transit / citimapper / moveit not work for these cities?


Typically they do not. The Agencies _might_ submit GTFS data, but rarely do any of these vendors provide real time data in GTFS-RT that Google/App and other would need.

I find commercial apps like transit and moveit are only willing to work with bigger cities, and have very little interest in smaller agencies.


Interesting! Have you considered reaching out to one of those (e.g. Citymapper) and see if they would like to work with you? Either employ you, subcontract you, use you as an API, or whatever! :)

I think it's really cool that you maintain such a service and maybe they can find in you a good partnership!


I tried with Moovit, but they weren't interested unless the Agency was formerly part of it. At the time I was a board member on the citizens' board which was an official board of the agency, but still didn't have enough sway. The reality is that most transit smaller agencies are so under funded and under staffed, they just don't have the resources. Your lucky if there is more than one planner and a single technical person in many of these agencies.

I was the original person to create GTFS data (before real time tracking data existed, just stops, routes, and schedules) for my transit agency back in the mid 2000s, but again, Google wouldn't accept them unless they had signed agreements with the transit Agency. So at that time, I hosted my own Open Trip Planner instance.


One more thing I'll point out, is that I am reusing data that already exists for my apps. Most agencies are recognizing how important it is to have a GPS tracker on every bus. In some cases, it isn't for the rider, but is more for the agency to plan and keep track performance.

So, I am not the source of truth, which means any 3rd party app should really be getting their data from the original vendor. It is just a shame that many of these smaller vendors want to keep the data to themselves, and aren't willing to have public GTFS-rt data or data that other commercial applications are willing to use.


A bit of an unfortunate naming/seo clash as GO Transit is the public transit service in Ontario Canada.

https://www.gotransit.com/en/


How many users have you gotten so far? Looks really nice!


Awesome work!


https://thoriumsim.com

A multiplayer spaceship bridge simulator game, where your crew each takes a different position on a futuristic spaceship, explore space, meet aliens, complete missions, and hopefully keep your ship in one piece!

If you've ever played Artemis, Empty Epsilon, Starship Horizons, Star Trek: Bridge Crew, heck even SpaceTeam, this is in the same genre. It's pretty much Space DnD, with the option to have a Game Master role.

Still under development, but by the time its done it'll have a 3D universe simulation, crew and ship systems simulation, interactive controls for a whole bridge of friends, and an interactive mission designer.

I've got a handful of donations coming in through OpenCollective, but I just about break even with my hosting and Apple Developer program costs.


Glad you're still working on this, Alex! Keep it going


How do I play it? Clone the gh repo?


You can build it from the source on Github, or download the latest alpha release here: https://github.com/Thorium-Sim/thorium-nova/releases/tag/v1....

I've got a quick demo of the current alpha here on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=li51J9c1Wpo


Download a release. They're right there.


https://codeatlas.dev - codebase visualisation tool

Takes your git repo and generates a beautiful visual representation of the code. Sort of an alternative navigation tool (in addition to IDEs) for large codebases. Can also run it as part of CI with our Github Action (https://github.com/codeatlasHQ/codebase-visualizer-action).

We made this because grokking complex software projects is really difficult and we've found that a visual overview of what's in a codebase can be quite helpful to get started.

E.g. checkout https://codeatlas.dev/gallery/kubernetes/kubernetes for the generated visualisation of the Kubernetes Github repo!

Currently making -10$/year to pay for the domain :D We slowed down active development after our initial attempts at dissemination didn't really go anywhere (bragging about side projects on the internet, ugh), but I'm still really keen on getting some feedback on whether this is actually useful to anyone else!

Note: The site works somewhat on mobile, but is much better on desktop!

Also, funny there's a post like this again, just like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34531989 yesterday.


Very cool! You could probably sell some kind of low-effort physical product, similar to: https://shop.lasertweets.co/. I bet there's some folks who would appreciate the coasters of their favorite repos.

Or, even lower effort, sell nicely-formatted digital prints of the repositories, so folks could hang them in their office.


Looks like this would be great for analyzing Yandex leak


https://www.twitch.tv/watchmeforever - AI-generated (aside from the artwork) parody of '90s sitcoms, running forever (24/7/365).

We worked on this w/ a very small team for the past four years, in-between our day jobs. When started, OpenAI didn't have an API, and Stable Diffusion definitely wasn't a thing, so we had to come up with novel methods to thread cohesive content together. Most of the "creative" details e.g., laugh track, dialogue, frequency of dialogue, camera shots, and so on, are all tunable on a per scene basis.

We're in sort of a holding pattern right now -- no clear path to monetization for the project, and it hasn't garnered enough attention for us to probably get funding based on the technology backbone. Hope you enjoy it! Labor of love. :)

(posted this in the similar thread yesterday but I’ll take any exposure I can get…!)


I couldn't figure out how to link the comment, but it was at least 9 months ago I said this, and someone was already working on it?? SUPER cool!

I feel like AI/ML and some pre-rigged models could be used to build a web-hosted sitcom. It would take a lot of technical work, and a lot of writing chops to make it watchable, but it could be done.

Look at Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, a show that was made by reusing old animations. If someone writes a script (use humans for now), then the AI/ML can stitch together the animation.

Once there's a corpus of material, start letting the AI determine plot points, and have humans vet and write it. Over time, let the AI take more and more control over the direction of the show, making sure to introduce new characters or events as needed.


I think you rightfully pointed out the "watchable" criteria. This is where we got to with 4 years of working on-and-off on it. The hard part is continuing to iterate over the structure to make it passable as a sitcom. The easy part is actually the language model stuff... we have an OpenAI integration, I just don't keep it on because it's a lot of $$$. We have lots of ideas about how to expand the show's structure, but it's mostly backend work that we simply don't have the resources to finish right now.

Luckily, our "goal" with this project was for it be nonsensical (hence the parody part), but I'd love to spin off a new show that focused on making it watchable for hours at a time. Our system is extensible enough that it wouldn't be hard to pop in new art assets and have a brand-new show in a month or two.


How do you generate your dialogue? Is it tuned as "conversation between characters", or was the model fed sitcom scripts?


Saw some articles about this and see you have 10k viewers right now - any clue where this burst of attention is coming from, or did this comment do it?


Oh lord, this is delightfully odd.

I believe some generate slapped bass licks interspersed would be nice. S*****d’s signature bass licks were actually played on a synth keyboard. Ideally the Melodie’s would be even more odd and sometimes go for very long stretches, always referencing the previous luck but elaborating on it in an annoying free jazz sort of way.


This is very unsettling to watch (a compliment)


This is hilarious! cool idea!


How do you do the dithering?


Jobs with Pride: https://www.JobsWithPride.com

Premise: Handpicked jobs from LGBTQ+ friendly companies.

It's a curated job board of the best jobs for our queer community, using publicly available information to source jobs at confirmed LGBTQ+ friendly companies - Verified by our 100% LGBTQ+ team.

Availability: Web

Price: $0 (Paid packages are available)

Cost to me: ~$100 per month

Why do it? - Finding jobs at LGBTQ+ friendly companies is hard, clunky, and time consuming - More than a 3rd of LGBTQ+ people feel they need to hide who they are at work - 1 in 3 employers won’t hire a Trans person - The LGBTQ+ community has kept me alive before, this is a small way I can payback the love


This might sound dumb, but aren't most corproate employers completely accepting of LGBT people these days (well, LGB people at least)?

What makes one company LGBT friendly and another not?


If only that was the case, specific industries are far worse than others as you'd imagine. Anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric is also currently growing in the United States.

As far as the definition of "friendly" is concerned, that is a spectrum so I imagine we need the creator to respond.


Oh, I can definitely imagine issues being a gay man on a construction site, or something like that.

What sort of professional industries are homophobic, though? Genuinely asking, not trying to disagree or minimise what you're saying.


This discussion should probably be much, much longer... but I'll give you my take based on my experience as a queer person having worked in MANY industries from service to technology to government to private to recruiting/hiring to consultancy ad nauseum.

Generally it's not an industry or company that is homophobic but a person. This is why we have created nondiscrimination policies to protect from unlawful termination. It can be illegal, based on where you live, to fire someone based on Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity, but there are unfortunately many ways to subvert those rules.

93% of all Fortune 500 have a Sexual Orientation Nondiscrimination Policies, I'd say that's pretty good but that's only for Sexual Orientation. As you move down in revenue below the wealthiest companies, they are less nondiscrimination policies in place. Even some companies that claim to be LGBTQ+ friendly. So you can see why someone who has grown as a pariah and then later accepted by the majority of companies (because duh, money) would be skeptical of any company protecting their livelihood.

That is only one example of how a company can be LGBTQ+ friendly, another one that comes to mind is partner benefits (permission to attend company functions, relocation expenses, etc.). I personally have been prevented from attending a company dinner with my partner.

Again, this is just my take and I don't speak for everyone but I'm really happy to see a Job Board like this!


>I personally have been prevented from attending a company dinner with my partner.

Wow, that's insane. I'm not even sure that would be legal here in Melbourne.


Gay marriage only became legal in Melbourne in 2017. Completely legal to say that only spouses are invited to company functions.


If it's generally not a company that is homophobic then how can some companies be LGBQ freindly?


Some companies actively enforce their rules on discrimination and/or bullying due to homophobia, some turn a blind eye.


This is great, thank you.


Keep Close Friends: https://keepclosefriends.com

One day I noticed I was slowly losing touch with old friends - I moved, we all have busy lives and don't hang out just by chance any more. Those people used to be loved ones and now I wasn't sure. It felt like grief.

So I built a simple website where I can list relationships and ideal meeting frequency (say, 2-3 times a year), then get a few relationship stats and a reminder when it's time to reach out again.

I see it as a reminder that my life is short, and I like that. No other users yet but it feels right to try to help share that perspective around, for those who might want it.


do you really not have any subscribers? seems like this is making more than $0 :)


Thanks, I try to make it look nice! I started building it this Christmas and this HN thread brought the first users apart from my girlfriend and brother. All on free trial, we're 17 now!


When attempting to register on Firefox Mobile, the register button doesn't do anything. With all data filled in.


Thanks for reporting. I'm on Firefox android and can't reproduce. No sentry error so I assume the front is not sending the request.

The email is an 'email' field and apparently firefox mobile will block sending if the email is invalid (missing @, ...) without showing any warning, is the email standard?

(Other obvious steps: is it still happening after a refresh, the stack is vueJS (+ laravel/inertia) so I assume you have JS enabled already? ublock shouldn't be an issue.)


Disclaimer: This project isn't currently publicly available.

I was using Simple as my primary bank, and their Goals feature made it possible to do envelope-style budgeting really conveniently. Unfortunately the bank that backed them, BBVA, sold to PNC. This lead to my Simple being shut down, and my account was converted first to a BBVA account and then to a PNC account.

When I lost access to the Simple app I first built myself a spreadsheet, and then started work on a webapp called Complex to replicate their functionality. Currently you have to enter all transactions manually, but I eventually plan to integrate with Plaid so I can automatically pull in transaction data. Without automatic transaction imports, I'd say Complex currently falls about halfway between the original Simple app and a spreadsheet in terms of convenience/ease-of-use.

I don't have any kind of business model for this, but if I eventually make it public I'll probably charge a monthly fee to allow automatic transaction imports so I can cover Plaid's fees. There's not much server load required to run something like this, so I expect I'll be able to keep server costs below $20/month even if I pick up a couple hundred active users.


I won't use Plaid to connect bank accounts so entering transactions manually would be my use-case. There are some of us out there. :)


You'd be competing with the likes of YNAB, that provide a lot of features already today (including auto-import in most countries). Tough job.


YNAB is $100/year and though it is polished and well-designed, it's a pretty simple system that hasn't changed much recently. I think there's a lot of room to compete on price, particularly for users like me who still enter all of their transactions manually.


YNAB is too much hassle


yeah I also don't want any third party getting ahold of my transaction data. My solution was to have my banks send alert emails to me for any transaction. Then the alert emails are forwarded to a Dockerized email server I set up. The transaction data is automatically parsed out of the emails and loaded into a database. The only cost for me is the server.

Honestly the email server could be gotten rid of if someone was willing to directly access their gmail email account via IMAP, or whoever you use for email. I thought it would be a fun challenge to make an email server x_x

My goal is to make it so people like you could write some regex for their bank alert email parsing, spin this up, and be off to the races with no third party interference.

Here's the repo (WIP): https://github.com/katefike/sage


Check out Finta.io it’s a nice simple service by a solo hacker and could be a great partner. She wraps Plaid and streams it to popular destinations like Sheets and Coda, where users are given some starter content in their account and are free to go from there. Check it out, the connector is slick, but the budgeting and analysis tools aren’t there yet.


Share your email somewhere, or send me one (cf profile). I'm working on an app which you could be interested in :)


Have you seen https://dasbudget.com

It's a near clone of the Simple interface with new enhancements like CC Integration. Currently active in the App Stores. Web App is coming soon. uses Plaid and MX for integration


Man I miss Simple. I'm honestly shocked and saddened that nothing took its place, though they were a major pain about getting my wife an account so we could join finances and then they closed a few months after I switched away.


A Plaid developer account is free and will let you connect to up to 5 bank accounts.


It's 5 by default, but you can actually connect up to 100 accounts for free if you submit a request for full development access.


Yes, but it also comes with giving Plaid all the data and history about your bank account transactions.


Have you heard of the Lunchmoney app? I found it recently and find it to be a nice in-between of spreadsheet and full automated budget app. Plus it pulls transactions in


created an account here just to say i would pay for this service if it worked near real time. my wife and i were so bummed when simple went away and we haven't found a bank or service yet that feels like it provides the same feature set effectively.


another person who was crushed by simple going away and would love to pay for something like this!


CoolModFiles: https://coolmodfiles.com/ (just awaiting sponsorships)

CoolModFiles is a web player that will introduce you to the most obscure and legendary tracks hosted on the internet's biggest module archive, modarchive.org!

The web player works by simply fetching a random module from modarchive.org and playing it. No black magic involved!

The idea for CoolModFiles originated among two programmer friends who used to send mod files to each other, which lead to the creation of a personal mod archive - one which had hundreds of cool modules at the time! Being in possession of those rare works of art (all the way from 80s!) was a privilege... When the awesome tracks started piling up, however, it naturally brought about a storage problem. The solution was simple: using a web archive!

The programmer friends' idea, unfortunately, was beaten by modarchive.org many years ago. Realizing how unnecessary creating another internet archive was, the project evolved into a cool web player instead. A group of 3 came together to create what is known today as CoolModFiles.com. With it's modern look, it continues to surface thousands of long-forgotten mod files to introduce newer generations to the world of old-school digital music.


> fetching a random module

Ow, yeah, but a lot of 'em are really lame.

I'd love a setting for like "x% of plays should be in the top Y% of popularity" to guarantee some bangers every now and then. Or the bottom, if you're just 2kool4us.

To introduce someone new to the format, say, 100% of plays should be in the top 5%, melt their face off and then let 'em explore the obscure stuff later.


>The programmer friends' idea, unfortunately, was beaten by modarchive.org many years ago.

Sorry about that :-) Glad the API has come I handy though, your thing looks very nice, but “mobile bad desktop good”? Get with the times ;)


Nice work, I hope you find that sponsorship!

Feature request: button/key to randomly swap through those awesome backgrounds :)


I love that interface. <3


Great!


AWESOME


This isn't public yet, and almost feels like the kind of thing I'll never ship.

I've been working for a while now on the idea of a card / board game. The concept was bouncing around in my head for a while, and I started taking a lot more notes on the idea after my second kid was born (4mos ago). All of a sudden, I had a lot of time to sit quietly in a dark room with my laptop (and help the kiddo get to sleep). I eventually came up with a list of ~200 cards for the game, about 4 different decks, all stored in a big-ol spreadsheet I'd been editing on my phone (as I pace to get him to sleep).

But eventually with the idea, I kind of got it as far as I could with my mind's eye, and had to start actually playtesting. That would be practically impossible for me. There just isn't the time in my life right now to set up a small board game, play through it, take notes, and iterate on the balance.

So what did I do? I took that spreadsheet, dumped it to JSON, wrote a script to convert the JSON to placeholder .pngs of each card, and then built a dummy webapp with a canvas to simulate a virtual tabletop. Yes, I could have used TTS or something similar, but I felt the inner loop of changing the stats for cards, re-exporting them, then removing them and re-adding them wouldn't scale well.

This has ended up working great! I've been able to play through my game 20+ times now, all with a sleeping baby in my arms. I don't need to worry about leaving the game out on the table (for the 2 year old to find) - it's all just saved on my laptop. I don't need to futz with re-printing cards any time I want to change things, I just edit the "database" and reload.

I finally feel happy enough with the balance to show friends and family, which I thought would be a pipe dream just 3 months ago.


Stumbled on someone's workflow for creating AI cards/tabletop materials using stable diffusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsTQY3VMJ78

Might be interesting to you for playtesting when you want to show to others! Good luck on the game - I'm a big tabletop/board game nerd, so would love to play it once you get the game ready!


Holy GOD that's way better than anything I have. I'm definitely gonna follow that, thanks for the link.

Ultimately, I'd want to have the art _not_ AI generated, but for the sake of prototyping, I could care less :)


For playtesting, this might be helpful: https://boardgamelab.app/


You should post a screenshot of this!

I'm also impressed you're able to edit while dealing with a fussy baby; I find it impossible to be productive on a smartphone, and my son wouldn't go to sleep if I was standing at my workstation (keyboard noises and the screen are too interesting).


It's a very careful balance haha. I mostly just do spreadsheet updates on my phone at this point. I've got a very delicately balanced laptop next to the rocking chair, so I basically use a pillow to support the baby in one arm, and work with the other.

It's been an _incredibly_ slow process, as you might imagine :p


* slowly chants in the background *

ship-it-ship-it-ship-it-ship-it!


<3

Maybe I'll make a writeup and post it to HN. That's the least I could do haha


Funny, I did almost the exact same thing for a MTG app I’ve been working on, and similarly also started messing with the idea of using the same software to soft launch my own rtcg. I would be very interested to see how you did yours.


Honestly, I would almost rather _not_ share the code, because it's Bad. Like, I just have one big <canvas> element and redraw all the entities (cards, tokens, etc) anytime there's input. It's got terrible performance for being what it is.

I'd kinda rather that no one in their right mind copy what I did.


Nobody.live: https://nobody.live/

Filterable interface for finding streamers with zero (or one, for StreamLabs etc.) viewers. Surprisingly intimate, in my opinion.

I run it at (little) cost but got some solid coverage: https://www.pcgamer.com/this-website-only-shows-you-twitch-s....


This is just so wholesome. I love it. And that's gotta be a cool thing for someone to randomly get a viewer. I know when I randomly stream (only when I play MSFS...), it's really cool to get even one viewer! (It's usually zero)

It reminds me of a similar site for YouTube awhile back that would show you videos with zero views[1].

[1] http://www.petittube.com/


https://www.bootstrapsite.com

I've been working on a Bootstrap 5 landing page builder for almost 1 year now (mostly just weekends though).

It's like my pet project than any money earning business but it gives me pleasure to work on it so I just keep at it.

My plan is to open source it soon so people can create their sites and landing pages for free and host it on their own servers. Initially I made it create my own sites and learn Vue 3 but I'm kinda hooked on how it's turning out to be.

Right now everything is free including ssl hosting. Maybe to support the hosting cost I will charge a one time fees later on, but except a small "Powered by blurb" there will never be any difference between paid and free plan.

It's work in progress so I don't think it's ready for a Show HN just yet but that's the next big thing on my list.

The main USP of this builder is it's targeted more for developers and people who know what Bootstrap 5 is than just another website builder (need to update the landing page to reflect that soon).

If anyone has 5 minutes to spare and want to play with it I would really appreciate your good honest feedback about the builder and everything. No signup or cc is needed for trying by the way.


Looks pretty cool, one thing that would be nice is the ability to delete, copy, and paste from the canvas. Also on trying to signup with my email I got a server error followed by a message that my email already exist.


> would be nice is the ability to delete, copy, and paste from the canvas

Yes it's possible. Please see this image

https://imgur.com/a/zgnmF0E

> Also on trying to signup with my email I got a server error

Yes the server error was due to SES not being able to send emails (fixed now) but the account was created.

Thanks for the feedback


I am definitely going to try this now.


I have been looking for something like this.

I will play with it over the weekend and I will ping you my feedback.


This should be a regular feature on HN, somewhat akin to "Who's hiring?" and "Who wants to be hired?". Maybe not on a monthly basis, but it would be cool to see periodically on some cadence.

There's a lot I could say on this topic, but TBH, I don't want to go into most of it in detail Right Now for various reasons. The main reason being simply that the side project stuff I might want to call attention to is largely not in the state where I'd want people looking at it right this minute. And the reasons for that, in turn, are manifold...

The good news is, progress is being made, and I should have some projects ready to put "out there" kinda soon'ish. Yay for being vague, I know. But I've learned to be leery of making hard promises on stuff like this. So much shit happens that you can't control. See above about "manifold reasons".

Anyway, we're not making any money yet... in fact, we've been losing money since day one, but thankfully the amount lost is relatively small since our expenses are small. Nothing that I can't just pay out of my $DAYJOB salary.

All of that notwithstanding, if you want a somewhat outdated view of what I've been working on for a while, see:

http://fogbeam.github.io/

https://www.fogbeam.com/

If things go well, this year will see lots of improvements to the underlying projects, videos, blog entries, and tutorials explaining how to use everything, and entirely new stuff not shown at the above links - as well as finally having everything available in SaaS form.

Sadly my backlog of "ideas to implement" remains far larger than my bandwidth for implementing stuff, so FSM only knows if/when some of the stuff I want to do will ever see the light of day.

NOTE: the "demo" links you may find if you click through the above links are offline at the moment. I'm in the middle of a big infrastructure migration / automation effort; moving a lot of stuff from Linode and "other" to OVH, consolidating DNS at Route 53, automating deployments with Ansible, etc. And one thing that hasn't been done yet is to bring up the new demo server(s).


What is your audience for this? I'll be blunt: I have no idea why I should pitch this enterprise thing to my boss.


Yeah, the material that's out there right now doesn't do a good job of explaining the uses for this stuff. I had, at one time, gotten pretty decent at giving the pitch F2F and had it down in my head pretty good, but I doubt I could do it justice now. Part of the problem here being exactly that a lot of this stuff has lain largely dormant for a few years now due to external forces. Back when I was actively trying to sell the stuff to people, we had some interest from some people, and probably would have had some revenue already if A. I were more of a natural salesperson and B. I didn't have a heart-attack at an inopportune time.

That said, I totally hear you. There's going to be a lot of stuff coming to better articulate the vision of how this stuff can be used and how it delivers value.

To answer your question though:

What is your audience for this?

For what is really the core of the vision:

"Large companies (where we still need to refine exactly what the threshold defining 'large' is) with many disparate IT systems who want a more unified "knowledge layer" on top of all of those disparate systems, such that they can find content without having to jump from system to system so much, find useful connections between disparate bits of knowledge, and manage actions associated with content".

The genesis of all of this was an observation I had years ago, which somehow amazingly seems to still be true, that pretty much all enterprise search solution are a shit-show, and coupled with a belief that "social" tooling (things similar to FB, Reddit, etc.) can be useful tools in an organizational setting. Add semantic web tech to the mix, and I think there's a way to build a much better KM solution.

Now, pretend I just said all of that 10 or 15 years ago. It would have sounded better then. One unfortunate aspect of how all of this has played out is that the world has moved on in some ways. Things where we had interest a decade+ ago won't seem particularly novel now. But the key, I believe, is that many of those ideas still hold value even without being "cutting edge" anymore. The upside, if there is any, is that at one point some of the stuff we were talking about was actually pretty innovative, so the Rest Of The World has caught up to us, but perhaps not too much more. The "knowledge graph" stuff in particular is something that people are still talking about. OTOH, "social" tooling in the enterprise is pretty passe now.

So where I'm at now is working to update all the "old stuff" from a tech currency standpoint, get everything back to a good stable place, and then start thinking more about what has to change (if anything!) to represent something we can sell in today's world.

Sorry for the long ramble. Not wanting to do just that is why I almost didn't post in this thread at all. I've said before that I could probably write a book about my experiences, and at this point I probably should. :-)


https://gif.so

Every subdomain gets its own gif, so you can query by url (i.e. https://hackernews.gif.so). Anyone can change the image that loads on a given page... one day I'll make it a voting system. Useful for quickly putting a gif of an arbitrary thing in chat apps as most will unfurl the image directly. If you just want a static image, use https://jpg.so instead.

Someone else made this years ago and hosted it at jpg.to. That went down a while ago and I recreated it because it is fun and sometimes useful and not owned by Meta.


Small bug I've noticed, with gboard keyboard when you select a suggestion the keyboard adds a space after.

So it'll input "dog smiling " and your website will give a 404.

A trim of trailing spaces should be an easy fix.

Thanks for this page, I find it much better at recommendations!


Can we do projects that we know will stay at $0 but we still hope might gain traction?

OSS: typed-graphql-builder https://typed-graphql-builder.spion.dev/ is a TypeScript based graphql query builder. No more writing untyped strings and running a watcher in the background - generate the builder from the server schema once then write any queries in TS with the help of the language server

It was inspired by tql (https://tql.dev/) but generates a much smaller client and has full, automatic type inference for query variables used in input objects.

(Side note: I feel bad about how similar it is to tql, but the code generation approach was so different (mainly inspired by graphql-zeus) that it felt like poor form to just send a PR changing everything.)


This is very neat, and I've actually been planning on building something similar - just never got around to it. I wasn't aware of tql, though, so it's not unlikely I would have just used that instead.

The only "downside" I can see is that all my projects are already set up to use graphql-codegen, and switching to this or tql would just not be worth the effort. This is because 1. it's really not that much of a hassle to run graphql-codegen on the side, since i'm already running other things on the side anyway 2. I'm also using graphql-codegen for other things, such as generating types for cache updates and such in urql.

I might give this a spin in a fresh project, though. But it probably won't let me drop the codegen dependency completely.


Having banged my head against the guilds graphql code gen tool for the past two days, I will pay you 10 in the am, if this thing works and you explain to me how the f to get their config file to read both schema and ops files.


I built an Hreflang testing tool. https://app.hreflang.org

Hreflang is an arcane SEO concept. If you have sites in different languages then you can tell Google/Bing that site.com/page.html and site.fr/page.html are basically the same page only in diff languages.

The way to specify this is using meta tags in your HTML, and it's quite complex and error-prone. My tool checks if you implemented this correctly. It's running on a VPS so my cost is quite low.


Holy schnikees, I learned something new today. Thanks!


Wanting to experiment with Shopify, I decided to make a t-shirt shop for cyberpunk and sci-fi stuff. So I registered a short sci-Fi sounding domain: https://hex7.org and proceeded to toil (many many mouse clicks) away stocking my shop with with hand-designed shirts and coffee cups and then waited.

2 years in, not a single sale :<

Partly I wanted just to add products and see if the combination of Shopify, Google, and my super-niche geeky products would generate at least one lonely customer… but no.

Did I buy ads? No. Did I SEO? No. Did I use ChatGPT to write tons of shitty Cyberpunk stories and blog them? BRB…


Thanks for sharing. I like! One of my own current side hustles involves creating and selling t-shirts, hoodies, caps, etc. just like you. And also like you, I had ZERO luck trying to sell them in my own store (Shopify, WooCommerce). However, when I listed them on popular DTG-type sites, they started selling, and now sell several hundred $ per month. I'm talking Teepublic, Redbubble, Spreadshirt, etc. I didn't initially want to go that route because I thought making $2 or $3 per shirt sounded pretty crappy when I could have my own store and maybe make $15-$25 per garment. And also have control over my client base. But hey, a few hundred $ per month at $2-3 per shirt profit is almost infinitely better than $ZERO per month at $20 profit. I dunno, maybe give it a try? :-)


Wow that’s amazing. Thanks


If you are interested, I'd also recommend that you check out Michael Essek's YouTube channel (no affiliation, just like his stuff). He is a very successful t-shirt designer who sells books and materials to help people design stuff like this, but he also dispenses a LOT of free advice on his YouTube channel, if you are lucky he'll even critique your design on his show and give you advice on how to improve! Check https://www.michaelessek.com/ or on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@MichaelEssek


I run a SaaS service for large POD merchants (basically, people doing what you're trying to do, many of whom are making a living at it).

Shopify does not give you organic traffic. You don't want to start with Shopify unless you already have a dedicated audience.

If you're just getting started, places like Redbubble and TeePublic are the easy way. Low margins, but it's "fire and forget". Amazon Merch used to be the hot ticket but it's pretty saturated. I would say that Etsy is the most popular place to make money in POD right now - it's a little more involved (you pay listing fees) but you control your pricing.

I've been in this space for about 6 years now. Happy to answer any questions.


Was going to say almost exactly the same thing. Etsy is a far better place to start for this kind of thing. Makes it easy to add some level of internal/external advertising as well to get started.


To be honest the t-shirts don't look that great. Maybe there is room for improvement.


FINALLY some product feedback!! What would make them better?


Maybe GP is not the target market and I guess I'm not either? The only thing that appeals to me at all is the hacking the Gibson poster. Pretty cool. I have zero idea what all the other stuff is, if there are references I don't get them and the designs aren't interesting enough to intrigue me.


Maybe it's not my style so take my opinion with a pinch of salt. Hal9000 and Ono Sendai design are too basic tbh. Broseph feels much better. Also the black color really feel like it's for teenager or maybe metal vibe people (could be the customers you're targeting?). Maybe try to show different tshirt color in the front page so we know there is more than just black. Try to add more design? All the best!


You have a sale. Maybe the most expensive mug I've ever bought :) I look forward to it.


Wow thanks Kevin! ;) now I am longer in the $0 club!


I just bought something too!


dunno if its just me, but i think a dark site would suit a cyberpunk theme better. the photos with the plant and chair don't look very cyberpunk either

the other thing i noticed is that the graphics on the main page are hard to see when on mobile. the graphics are small enough so when you include the models head in the photos then the graphics are even smaller. maybe the thumbnail/first photo could be zoomed in. threadless.com for example just crop at the models neck.

also, maybe if you could find stock photos of people that look more cyberpunk that might help


Is there a particular reason you didn't buy adspace?

I imagine it's the main way that most shopify stores make their sales, and is probably a good way to realise some gains from your time investment.


Have you heard of CyberDog, its a clothing brand in London


Do you supply a feed of your products to Google Shopping? It's free now.


Hmm how does that work?


https://typeracelive.com/

I wasn't satisfied with other type racing sites because they were not real time enough for me. I wanted to be able to see exactly where the other racers' cursors were and where they made errors.

I don't expect to make money any off of this, but it was fun to build and I find it fun to play with my friends every once in a while.

The stack is React and ChartJS in the FE (that's it), and Rust with Warp in the BE.


Really nice, I especially like the design of the stats.

One thing that throws me off quite a lot is the smooth cursor animation, good to see that you already allow to turn that off.


The website looks amazing! It's one of the nicest type racing website I've seen. :)


This is really well done. I completed it on my phone. I wonder what the gap between typing on a phone and keyboard are?

Anyway awesome project!


Not exactly my project, but I have been helping a friend of mine work on his pet project for the last couple of months: https://limeline.app/.

He currently makes no money from it and has no intent on making any anytime soon, hosting cost are pretty low and it was pretty much just created out of a need we both had: being able to aggregate all our sources for our morning technology watch.

In the end, with feedback from a couple of friends, he built a simple "no inbox" RSS aggregator with some nice extra features (account-less page management, sharing & forking of feeds, ...).

It is still in a pretty early stage, but I really like where this is going and feels like it deserve more visibility.


I just checked it out, very cool. Always wanted something like that.


I'm working on a TUI Jupyter Notebook editor, euporie, which allows you to run and edit Jupyter Notebooks in the terminal:

https://github.com/joouha/euporie

It's useful for editing and running notebooks on remote servers over SSH, or inside containers where setting up port forwarding is not possible or too difficult, or if you just like working in the terminal.

It's open-source, and I have no idea how I would go about monetizing it!

I've spent a lot of time recently working on euporie's HTML renderer, which I'm planning on using to make a new terminal web-browser.


Impressive. I started working on a similar project, it's a NodeJS debug environment embedding a console, a debugger, and network & performance analysis tools. A bit like the browser dev tools but in the terminal.

Hope mine will reach the same maturity someday!


This is incredibly cool. Unfortunately, I don't think it's something I would pay for. But the bit I tried out seems great! I like to live in the terminal and this seems like a nice way to keep doing so :)


I’m building https://polyglatte.com a language learning website (and app) for learning with real content like YouTube videos, subtitles, and text articles. Ideal for intermediate and advanced learners.

Some neat features are that we fully parse the text and part of speech tag it, we have a system to prepare for difficult articles/videos with clips from easier ones, and the core idea scales really well to more types of content like chat messages and images (not public yet).

Our focus is now shifting to on-boarding and marketing. We have a few users that have figured out how to really use Polyglatte and they love it and use it a lot but for the most part, many users leave without seeing most of the value we can provide.

It’s a self-funded 2 person project and we haven’t monetized it at all yet.

I have no problem charging for it but I need to figure out how to help people really understand the value we provide and reach more people before it would make sense to do so.


Wow! This is really cool, will definitely be using this for learning french. Thank you!

Just one question, is there a way to make words by default known? I’m at an intermediate level, and don’t really want to tell the program that I know all the rather simple words.. or does that not really matter?


Glad you're enjoying it!

Currently the best way is just that there's a "mark known" button at the bottom of articles to mark all remaining words as known. Also on the wordlist view you can select many words and mark them all known at once. But we're also working on integrations now to help make the on-boarding experience easier and leverage existing study workflows.

The main challenge is that in Polyglatte a word is defined as (lemma [the root word], part of speech, language) and most other systems don't use part of speech, so there's often not a 1 to 1 mapping when importing. So we've delayed having much here so far, but it is definitely a solvable problem. Is there a specific place/format you would want to import that data from? If not then perhaps we can add a "mark wordlist known" button and add some French word lists.

> I’m at an intermediate level, and don’t really want to tell the program that I know all the rather simple words.. or does that not really matter?

That's a good question, due to the way typical word frequency distributions are, the problem becomes less annoying pretty quickly if you mark words as you see them. But solving this problem is also an important part of making Polyglatte fun and a smooth experience for new users. And helping people to spend more time enjoying and using their languages is one of our major goals with Polyglatte -- bulk marking words you already know isn't very fun.

Feel free to reach out on Discord or our new community forum (https://community.polyglatte.com/) for help or for feature requests by the way -- we'd love to make Polyglatte better for you and everyone else.


Wordle Race: https://wordlerace.vercel.app/

Just built this to get more familiar with Real Time tech (Use Supabase under the hood). In this version you and your opponent race to get the word while being able to see each others moves! This way you can use each others words to gain advantage. :)

Would love for you all to try and appreciate any feedback. You can just create a room and invite anyone you want to play against.

I have a lot more (unprofitable sigh) side projects I keep at: https://www.hackyexperiments.com/


https://thechillypony.com

Allows you to configure a zip code and alert temp, and you'll get an email if the forecast temp falls below that alert temp, so you can know when you need to blanket your horses. Built it to scratch my own need. Makes $0 :)


I don't live in the US and don't have a horse, but I love this site. Such a simple site and a focused idea, it's refreshing.


Ha, interesting and simple site.


Holy Bible Study & Cross-Reference Tool: https://bible-ui.rkeplin.com/book/kjv/1/1

Also, Holy Bible Search & Cross-Reference API: https://www.rkeplin.com/the-holy-bible-open-source-rest-api/

Made 0$ so far :)


Nice! I did a few projects like this, but with more modest UIs:

- https://github.com/juliend2/data-bible , for french translations

- more recently: https://1mbible.co

Have you thought about using some AI techniques (like Word Embedding) for your search engine? I'm interested in toying with this a bit in my next Bible-related project.


Nice, - I like the simplicity of your UI. Though I can't read French, it looks like you've got some nice features there.

No, I haven't thought of thought of that. Very cool idea.

I'd like to make the API accessible via JS from all domains, but using an API token. I'm starting to get a lot of requests to use the API, however, most everyone wants to call the API directly via JS. Right now they have to go through a proxy like NGINX or some server side proxy.


Nice work. When I change the version after a search, it resets to Genesis. I think it should keep the search results.


Thanks, - yeah I agree thanks for catching that


https://github.com/DustinBrett/daedalOS

My passion project is building an OS in the browser. I've been at it for 2 years now. I've had interest from people who want to turn a profit with it, but I am happy to just keep adding features and polishing it forever.


This is impressive. If Firefox has resist fingerprinting config option enabled, timezone is forced to UTC. You may want to allow a custom offset.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1322612


This is really impressive!


It actually feels really polished!


I work on NES homebrew projects, mostly involving chiptune libraries that can be used to make games on the original hardware. I'm especially happy with the visualizers for turning musical creations into videos. I'd love to spend more time on it but I have to pay the bills, but still... figured I'd make good on the desire and try to turn it into a Patreon.

https://www.patreon.com/zeta0134

Here's like... pretty much all of those projects running in the browser at the same time: the music engine, the emulator, piano roll, and some of my own covers as demo tracks.

https://rusticnes.reploid.cafe/wasm/?cartridge=bhop-2a03.nes...

It's an extremely niche thing to even be into, and I'm very new to this whole self-marketing thing, so I'm still learning the ropes. Right now I don't make enough from my own patrons to offset the amount I happily pay each month to other creators. I enjoy the work on its own merits, so that's fine, but it would be great to one day connect with enough of an audience that I could justify spending more time on it than I already do.


Not sure if you know him, but there's Remute, an artist from Germany who does... hm... electronic music and publishes it on vinyl and most of the time in some kind of cartridge format (Hucards, Gameboy, SNES etc...)

Not sure if he's done anything for the NES yet...


3D dice rolling with friends https://dddice.com

Have some ideas on monetization in the future but for now it's just fun


Very cool! I'm curious: How did you render the 3d dice? What's the front end stack?


Thanks! Frontend stack is React, Three.js, and Cannon.js. We use FBX for the models mostly but started to support GLB files recently which open up a world of new options for customization.


This is dope! Whats the tech stack behind it if you don't mind me asking?


Thank you :)

Laravel, MySQL (Planetscale), Redis. Hosted on fly.io

Total monthly expenses is somewhere near $30/mo which is less than I've paid for personal hosting at times.


Very cool!


I have an open hardware project (libre, technically) to develop a solar powered phone. It's more of a concept, or a framework, rather than a list of components that I'm assembling outside of research. I would be more than happy if someone forked the idea and made something of it. https://hackaday.io/project/177716-the-libre-autarkic-laptop Anyone could manufacture it since the PCB, open cores (royalty free), blueprints and STL and PCB design would all be open sourced to anyone who wanted to make it, thus it encourages collaboration.


I'm not ready to show it off yet, but I'm working on a workout and nutrition tracking service.

No other tool or service out there matches the feature set I want so I decided I'd just build it.

My goal for workout tracking is mostly to make it crazy simple and super fast. As close to 0 barrier between you and your tracking. I want PRs to be more than just "moved a bigger amount of weight". I think volume PRs from rep records, etc are also important.

For nutrition tracking, I want the ability to save some commonly used foods to my local storage to make it faster.

I want discoverable meal planning. The plan is to basically let the user pick a protein, then a cooking style, which expands into different recipes and then side dishes to fit the remaining macros of a given individuals macro goals.

For calorie tracking, I think its important to display that weight change isnt a day by day thing. You need to look at the caloric deficit or surplus for the week or the month vs weight change to see how you are doing. Most other trackers just give you feedback day by day which doesn't really represent reality. They also don't automatically adjust your TDEE over time with weight change.

Not sure if anybody will pay for it, but I want it so I'm going to build it :)


A few years back I built a tool that pulled your data from MyFitnessPal and calculated a running TDEE for you, so that it was easy to adjust week to week. It was very useful to me and I managed to get somewhere in the range of 100 active users before I ended up moving on to other projects.

I say that to say good luck, I think your app will be useful!


LunaTrace: https://lunatrace.lunasec.io/

Premise: Open Source[0] alternative to GitHub Dependabot and `npm audit` that focuses on helping you prioritize where to patch first (since only 0.1% of CVEs are used in cyber attacks).

Short YouTube demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugdSyR2L6sY

A newer video showing off the Static Analysis engine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPd4MSUJ98M

Price: $0 for Open Source repos. We're hoping to charge for private repos in the future, but we need to build out the billing features first lol. (We're at $0 in revenue currently.)

If you are filled with rage because of CVEs spamming you, come vent your frustrations on Discord: https://discord.gg/2EbHdAR5w7

We're looking for early customers that are interested in working with us. My email is on my profile. Cheers!

[0]: Source Code, https://github.com/lunasec-io/lunasec/


Looks awesome!


I made an App to help find out food intolerances. Basically make it super easy to enter what you have eaten. Not even based on individual items, just basic foods like soy, tomatoes, onions... help me figure out that it was garlic which was causing all the trouble.

https://app.foodolyst.creatness.studio [Web]

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=studio.creatne... [Android]

Currently trying to release it on IOS, but Apple is very strict with these types of apps.


Ah great, I always wanted to do something similar. Will check it out.


https://www.budgetable.io/

This feels like the 3rd budgeting application post on here lol, but here we go.

A next-generation budgeting application, offering everything YNAB does, except at a lower price point, mobile application available (iOS & Android (soon)), plus with added features such as balance projection into the future as well as the ability to input fictional transactions and see outcome of those transactions on disposable income, etc.

Integrates with Plaid for banking, AI categorization and recurring transaction detection, auto-syncing transactions, the whole bunch.

I have a lot of features in the works to bring it much further than YNAB, although I think I already have feature parity. I don't have really much free money currently (saving for something big), so I don't really have much to allocate to marketing, so currently just spreading via word of mouth.

I really just made it as a budget replacement for myself, as I was running out of a google sheet which made it difficult to really use.


https://font2png.com to create PNGs from icon fonts like Font Awesome. SVGs are usually the way to go, but sometimes you need a PNG. A previous tool that did the same went away, so I built my own.

Also https://frt.rip, a whoopie cushion with spatial audio, because I had the domain lying around.

Both don't make money, but they also have no users besides myself so they can run on my cheap server for free basically.


> Also https://frt.rip, a whoopie cushion with spatial audio

This may be the most magnificent phrase I have ever read on the internet.

But when I visit in Firefox (mostly vanilla, on Pop!OS), a scary warning pops up that the site is trying to do something to my machine, with no context of what. I presume that "spatial audio" requires some support beyond just whatever my browser already knows how to do, but.... what?

Hey, it works with no warnings on my phone! Oh, and that audio is glorious. Juicy. Extravagant.

This is going on my smallest most concealable Bluetooth speaker...


Thanks. The spatial audio is just a feature of the excellent https://howlerjs.com/.

But I added MIDI keyboard support to the secret fart piano recently and thus Firefox throws up a scary warning. It's now disabled unless you access https://frt.rip#midi. But you can also use your computer keyboard to play/fart a little tune, see Web Inspector for instructions :)


> https://font2png.com to create PNGs from icon fonts like Font Awesome.

Would you consider an extra slider for the corner radius? That would allow to download icons with a background which is not completely square, but also a squircle or circle (maximum corder radius).


Alright, the background can now have rounded corners with smoothing / squircles like in iOS, using Figmas algorithm. Thanks for the suggestion! → https://font2png.com


Nice! Thank you for taking the request and for the fast turnaround.


Good idea. I never really use the background color, but since it's there, a corner radius makes sense. I'll play around with that soon.


I have a bunch of those.

https://writingstreak.io - a tool for developing a daily writing habit.

https://screenplays.io - a library of free screenplays.

https://startupideas.io - a newsletter where I research and analyze startup ideas, opportunities, and trends.

https://rpgadventures.io - a discord community where we a group of Game Masters brainstorm, create, and publish adventures for roleplaying games together.

https://improvgames.io - a discord community where I run free weekly improv workshops.


Ah I love this ask HN!

I'm building an iMessage app (www.pigeon.ooo - nothing here yet, I just get a hoot out of the name) that brings note taking into iMessage. I built it because I wanted to be able to save/pin messages so that I wouldn't have scroll up to find important pieces of info. You can also share the lists directly through iMessage so that the others in the conversation can update the notes, which has been particularly useful for grocery shopping lists and weekly planners with my S/O.

Currently working on a companion app so that I can view all notes not segregated by conversation, or ordered by due date etc.

It hasn't been publicly released yet but it will definitely be net negative. Doesn't matter though because it's useful to my friends and I plus has been fun to build.


You should add a clickable link. Also, it seems to just lead to a placeholder page as though it was just registered.

http://www.pigeon.ooo


Thank you! I would do if it wasn’t just the place holder page. I just like the domain name we chose, I have clarified in the original comment.


Is www.pigeon.ooo a typo? Doesn't seem to go anywhere


Nope! Nothing there yet, I just get a kick out of the domain and wanted to share it, even if a bit premature.


Doing that for decades.

An app for Windows phone, downloaded 140k times: https://github.com/Const-me/SkyFM

Cross-platform graphics library for .NET: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac

Recently, offline speech-to-text for Windows: https://github.com/Const-me/Whisper

At this point, I consider side projects like that as a hobby.


I just tried out your Whisper Windows port and it worked perfectly for what I was looking to do, thank you so much!


The whisper implementation is awesome. Thanks for creating it.


https://www.tabletopunglued.com/

This is a collection of original papercraft designs for helping people have fun playing D&D. It's a way for me to get some hobby time away from the screen and keyboard. All the designs are available as pay-what-you-want, most people pay zero, and anything that people do pay goes to me supporting other creators on DMsGuild.com.

Unlike most papercraft, these designs are meant to be pretty sturdy and useful rather than just decorative. Most are about as strong as an empty soda can, so you can handle them and toss them around or even stack a couple books on top without crushing them. And, the source diagrams are included, so you can customize the art.

If you check out the "About" page you will see that the purpose is to explore inclusive accessories for D&D that people can enjoy regardless of their disposable income, and with less environmental impact than typical plastic, wood, or leather accessories.

Also, each product page ends with a haiku.


initiative.sh[0], a web-based text interface for creative D&D play. After a promising response on HN[1], I had hoped that I might be able to monetize the project, but traffic has since crashed to almost nothing. I would say that after six months of full-time development it is about halfway to being complete as a freemium product, so instead I've opted to open-source it.[2]

It turns out that the challenge with launching a freemium product is that you need something that's both useful as a free tool while also having a compelling value-add for paid users. That's a lot for one person to build. I don't think I'll be aiming for that monetization strategy with future projects.

I have to confess that I'm (barely) missing the qualifying income bracket - some kind soul is supporting me for $5/mo on buymeacoffee.[3]

[0] https://initiative.sh/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29106581

[2] https://github.com/initiative-sh/initiative.sh/

[3] https://www.buymeacoffee.com/initiative


Interesting idea. Might be able to pivot into a world-/knowledge-builder of sorts. Plug in gpt3 or Ai on the generating side; add links between nodes and graph visualization... And it could be useful not just as a GM tool, but for research for creative writing - or even for a wiki-like system (assuming another wiki-like mode for view edit).

I'll try and play with it to see if it fits me for writing a small campaign I'm starting.


Nice work! Saw your previous post about jumping to doing your own thing full time in 2021, kudos on shipping.


Thanks, I appreciate the support.


https://alive.is a service that checks if you’re alive and sends a message to a person you specify if you fail to it. I create it for myself, in case something happened to me while travelling alone to make sure my family would have all necessary information. The service encrypts the information on server-side and end to end and doesn’t store any historical data. Didn’t thought about monetization yet.


https://universe-dawn.com

a browser based mass multiplayer online game with a sci-fi "the expanse" like setting.

remember the old school (2004) games you used to play with your browser. play it again with new technology but old flair.

currently there are 150 players, but no money made so far because I don't like pay to win and without that it's hard to monetize such a game

I recently translated it into english so everyone can play with us :)


You can might be able to monetize by adding things like probabilities or in-game calculators. One of the early Facebook mmos I played had this, and I was happy to pay $5 a month until they decided to be p2w instead.


As a hobby project, I run Code::Stats[0]. It's a website that tracks what languages you are programming in (via editor plugins) and gives you a profile page with various statistics[1]. It's ad-supported (with EthicalAds) to deal with server costs, or you can buy a support account to remove ads. The site and all the editor plugins are open source, the site is written in Elixir (but I'm looking at integrating Gleam in the future).

Currently it's completely a free time thing; I make negative money on it. My dream would be to have enough paying users to work on it part time (even a little), but that's far away and may never happen. But I like using it myself so I'll keep running it for the foreseeable future.

[0] https://codestats.net/

[1] https://codestats.net/users/Nicd


I just saw this and as a project this looks great. But the more(maybe most) popular version of exactly this tool is Wakatime[0] and I've been using it for quite a while now. So my question here would be what "new" feature you plan to add to this so you can standout from other similar but popular services?

[0] https://wakatime.com/


Honestly, I don't know. I think WakaTime is great (based on what I've read), and it does time tracking which Code::Stats does not do (and probably will not do). Other than that, I don't really know its features because I've never used it, so I don't think in terms of how to compete with WakaTime. I just think of things that I'd like to see in my own service. I know people who use both, and why not?

Code::Stats started as my own version of an old site called Codeivate that had a similar XP based tracking system. Codeivate disappeared from the web completely for unknown reasons, so I launched my own because I liked the idea.

As for future ideas, one of the more requested things is user groups that would have combined statistics and internal leaderboards (with heavy disclaimers), so I'm definitely doing that at some point. I'd also like to do more gamification side things, like badges for reaching certain levels in languages. As a third, I want to look into monthly/annual reports that could be emailed.

If you have ideas, I'd love to hear them. :)


https://lilhash.com/ https://github.com/jackbow/lil-hash/

A simple temporary URL shortener that produces easily rememberable and speakable URLs. The links expire after 24 hours so there's always a one word shortening available. Receives approximately 20,000 visits each month.

Useful for sharing a link in a presentation, or between devices when you don't want to login to your email, etc. When its easier to remember or say a link than send it.

Fits in cloudflare workers free tier.


Would you consider selling this site?


hyperspace

https://hyperspace.so/

My 3rd attempt to reinvent the web platform around an open & easy-to-use core.

The idea is simple: what if HTML was the source of truth for web applications?

• Every app would be a front-end site that's remixable

• Anyone could copy a site and use the tools you built to help you change it to edit it themselves

• You could edit a site at any level of abstraction -- in the browser's devtools or with a site builder -- anyone could participate in the platform at the level they're comfortable

Still early days, but I have:

• CodeMirror/devtools editing

• Read-only backups on every save

• Quill.js plugin for content/blog editing

• Copying other people's sites

It's meant to be a no-consequences, lightweight way to make and share apps, ideas, and interactive sites (where every possibility fits into your head)


it sounds a lot like you're reinventing what Beaker Browser had built on top of DAT, except that it could do more. For example, they made a distributed Twitter clone as a proof of concept, but folks actually started using it. Definitely included blogging stuff.

Really cool stuff around taking sites and things other folks had built and using them as a basis for your new thing.

https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker/ If you're not familiar i'd recommend starting with some of the YouTube videos giving an overview. It was pretty cool.

Alas, the main dev was hired by BlueSky and is now working there... but wonders if maybe you couldn't take that idea or its tools, and mush it together with yours.


Hey that's me. Thanks for the shout out

@panphora yeah you're project looks like (IMO) a smarter version of what beaker was doing. Smarter because the p2p element ended up being a bit of a tech-fascination that got in the way. Hyperspace seems to be doing the actually-cool-UX of self-editing sites and then getting out of the way otherwise.

The beaker team made a distributed twitter clone, but the cooler one (Rotonde) was made by 100 rabbits and you "made your profile" by forking somebody else's profile It's messy but fun (the software itself is viral!).

If you create js apis for reading other sites and enumerating the files in them, you can get a lot of power out of that.


ngl it's pretty cool but I can't find a use case for it


What about a simple blog?


Any links to cool sites already made with this?


The home page is made with it :)

No cool sites made by users yet though, the creator (me) is still the only user haha


I'm developing calculang, a language for calculations: https://github.com/calculang/calculang

I've made some examples here: https://observablehq.com/collection/@declann/calculang

Some tooling work for visualizations and for showing the workings will be released in the next weeks.

There are no positive money flows; I've spent many years experimenting, developing, and now 1 year after a public release the twitter page where I make announcements has 24 followers: https://twitter.com/calculang

I'm a modelling consultant - I work with numbers, I think they should be simple, but they are disjointed across systems and entities and programming languages and spreadsheets. The friction accumulates everywhere: to get a simple result, to follow the workings, to do any analysis, to share one or the other. calculang can consolidate calculations/numbers and is also a tool for transparency, understanding, and education.

I haven't done introductory documentation beyond the technical README which I think is vague (feedback accepted), and I plan to do a Show HN introduction to the community when I fix key snags: documentation among them.

For me the project is rewarding on many levels. In my client work - mostly financial sector - there is usually limited scope to take a really fresh perspective. There are no restraints here, it is useful to broaden my interests and thoughts in modelling, visualization, and wider more-grounded things like education and transparency, and I also get to be enthusiastic about a project that's tangible and simple at its core. In other words, plenty of positive flows besides the direct $ number :)


Momenial https://momenial.com — a mobile app for creating certificates for webinar attendees.

Currently making $0/mo. I'm actually building this app as a "case study" for my upcoming book, an opinionated guide to building mobile apps, from ideation, dev, ops, and marketing. I've been blessed with working at various company sizes and wearing multiple hats: founder of two failed startups, VP Eng at a telco and a large retail conglomerate, and now CTO of a medium-sized fintech.

The book won't promote microservice, Kubernetes or anything Google-level. It's a modern-but-practical guide "for the rest of us". If this sounds interesting, please create an account in Momenial—I will send updates about the book there (because it doesn't have a landing page).


Strong concept. One of my clients does CE training and I currently have to create new PDF certificates whenever they create a new course or move info a new state. Have you thought about casting this as a simple API and charging devs like me for it? I would just pass along the cost to the client, maybe with a bit of a markup. Or maybe even better (for you), I'd instruct the client to bank $10 at a time with you (recharge their account) and maybe that would allow me to generate 100 certs (or whatever makes sense here) before they have to recharge and deposit more.


Bulwark Passkey: https://bulwark.id

It is an open source passkey manager that allows you to export your passkey credentials in an open format. I built it because I think passkeys are much better than passwords, but all the currently proposed solutions (like Apple and Google) lock your login credentials to the device, which is a non-starter for me.

It doesn't make any money, but I personally wanted it to exist, so now it exists. I'm hoping that it will help open source passkeys to take off.


I work on a Python game engine called Arcade[1] and other projects within it's Github organization such as pytiled-parser. We also help to drive continued development and improvement within Pyglet[2]. Recently, my efforts have been focused on creating a version which can be run in web browsers by using Pyodide and WebGL[3], though that is still fairly early stages.

Arcade's primary focus is on being an educational tool for beginner programmers, so my hope is that with browser compatibility we can lower the barrier to entry further and make it more accessible and easy to get started with. In a similar vein to the goals of browser compatibility, we've recently enabled full compatibility with Raspberry Pi through the use of OpenGL ES(and this was largely only possible thanks to the huge amount of work that everyone involved in the Mesa project puts in)

I'm not the original author of Arcade, but I am a current maintainer and put a substantial amount of time into it and it's community.

[1] - https://github.com/pythonarcade/arcade [2] - https://github.com/pyglet/pyglet [3] - https://github.com/pythonarcade/arcade-web


I've made a bunch of projects that hit about 80% completion that I never end up finishing. My current projects that I have most recently put in some time are:

https://cruisedirector.io/ I have it running on some of my sites. It continues to run but I have no customers, and I haven't tried to sell it as a service. Tracks user actions inside an application. Every click is tracked so you can make rules based on any user clicks and show prompts made with a graphical editor. For example: Someone is button smashing, you can ask them for feedback. Popup a message on first login in the past month... Really lots of fun stuff.

https://ezdataloader.com/ I recompiled some old c# code from about 10 years ago, and with a few tweeks the backend now can run in mac, windows, or linux. Pretty sweet, other than the interface. I used electron for an interface and got it working a bit. But, I haven't put too much time into this one either. I'm tempted to scrap the downloadable executable, and turn it into a saas app. Might be a bit easier for customers I'm targeting. I've been pretty busy at my day job though, and haven't had time for this in the past year or so.


https://spotify.smithy.dev/

Built it in a few hours in 2021, my girlfriend and I have a collaborative Spotify playlist, and as everyone knows Spotifys shuffle feature sucks. When on a road trip we'd constantly have the same songs play while on shuffle mode, so I built this, it basically just does a Fisher–Yates shuffle on a selected playlist and allows you to save this new order back to the playlist on Spotify (non destructive on Spotify, which unfortunately means an API call per song order change). Now no need to use Spotifys shuffle! Its worked well for us, we actually get a properly random playlist order.

Price: €0 Cost to me: Like €7 a month for a VPS than runs other stuff as well.


An open source Deno starter template that includes session handling and e2e Puppeteer testing that runs on Github Actions:

https://fresh-strapi.deno.dev/ https://github.com/Hyprtxt/fresh-strapi.deno.dev/actions

And this site uses the sessions and e2e testing, but not Strapi: https://videopoker.academy/ https://github.com/Hyprtxt/videopoker.academy


Sheetmailer: https://sheetmailer.io/

It allows users to create personalized emails from the data in an Excel sheet. They write a template like

   Hello {Name}
   Your grade of todays exam was {Grade}.
   Best regards
   Prof. X
The mailer automatically fills out the gaps with the corresponding column of the Excel sheet.

Since it's been running, I got a single one-time payment (about four years ago). I'm using it a lot myself though.

Luckily, it's almost free to run (on a 13$/m Hetzner machine, shared with about 10 other applications). And as a teacher, I used it to send over 4000 emails containing grades and similar stuff to my students.


If you could include a generated PDF using the same simple template concept which gets attached to an (also templated) e-mail and ensure the e-mail isn't flagged as spam, and doesn't cost 60 dollars per user or some other such nonsense, I promise you there is a market for this. Big market.


Automatically replacing text in PDFs is not easy sadly. The problem is that the text doesn't automatically reflow if a long text is inserted. What exact application do you have in mind? It might be possible to use a Word file as a template, and automatically generate a personalized PDF from that.


You interested in selling this?


Automated Python utility to collect Zaptec EV charger usage and invoice details. Calculates a price per kWh and sends an invoice to the registered charger user using a third-party invoice solution.

Zaptec has a decent API. Invoice retrieval (electricity) and invoice distribution is done by faking browser sessions with Python.

I live within a housing association (townhouses) where the garages are separate from the houses. All chargers are on the same fuse box.

Commercial solutions providing the same service are typically $5/month for each user plus a 0.01USD fee for each kWh. I figured I could save myself and my neighbors some money.

Currently hosted on GitHub, but private repo as I am not too proud of my 3 evening rushed code.


NoraSector: https://app.norasector.com/ -- real-time police/fire/EMS scanner for the Seattle area. Uses custom SDR software that can capture entire radio systems and streams with sub-second latency to clients, along with recordings.

For all sorts of reasons I decided not to monetize it. I've had some inquiries to use it for newsrooms and in certain states that have laws that require radio traffic be published online. I explored some of that but could never come to agreement on a price that would be worth my time to support. I also considered monetizing with ads and having a premium membership, but it's a little too niche and expanding to more regions requires more investment than I'm willing to make.

King County is migrating to a new digital system in the near future, and if they encrypt everything then it's dead in the water anyway.

Costs me about $200/mo in hosting fees to run, plus about $1400 for the machine/SDR that captures the radio traffic. I use it myself and don't mind sharing it with the handful of people who listen to it. If/when the access is cut off, I'll shut it down.


I spent a large part of 2022 building an async p2p networking library for Python. The main reason I wanted to do this was because years ago I tried to write a similar library and it didn't go well. So yeah: I wanted to see if I'd be able to do it any better with my current software skills. It was really important to me that I finished something for once, too.

I worked hard on the project and I do feel that every aspect has been a significant improvement from what I tried to build in the past. It really makes me appreciate just how much sacrifice it takes to build good software. Like you can't be lazy and just be like 'yeah... this kind of works so the code stays.' I had to re-write code multiple times. I lost track of the number of re-writes for some of the more complex modules.

I will also say the most significant reason the project ended up successful was due to an emphasis on testing. I spent months writing a test suite and increasing 'code coverage.' In doing this I found many problems and re-wrote code until it worked how it was supposed to. My emphasis on testing is what ultimately made the software in any way stable enough to use. Where ever possible -- live testing was used with real infrastructure so I know all features work in the real world.

The software is on Github and Pypi: https://github.com/robertsdotpm/p2pd https://pypi.org/project/p2pd/

Taking a brief break from the project to recharge. So if you find a bug it probably won't be patched right away.


PeaceFounder: https://peacefounder.org

For the past few years, I have been exploring the idea of building an e-voting system around the anonymisation of voters rather than votes. In contrast to existing systems, the design enables the publication of all election evidence, verifying the legitimacy of the votes without sacrificing either privacy or transparency. Election administrators only need to take care of server identification secrets. It does all complex ElGamal re-encryption mixing before elections without the voters' active participation by simply shifting a relative generator on which voters would cast votes. This would make the Price/Security for running elections small compared to what is already out there.

Currently, the project is in a heavy development stage. I have settled on making a microservice which would be easily integrable into existing systems allowing members to enrol for voting by simply scanning a QR code. At the same time, the admins would be free to choose how they want to present data. REST API for the user and server, which onboards users, is now finalised. Now I am working on UX for the client application and, hopefully, will start to code a prototype in GTK in the coming weeks.

http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/PeaceFounde...

The feeling is much like playing a game of chess with oneself. Trying to finish it while I am young and can still keep the scope of the problem in my mind. If anyone is interested, I do enjoy a friendly argument ;)


I've spent the past two years or so working on Tachi (https://bokutachi.xyz/) (https://github.com/TNG-Dev/Tachi), which is a modular tool for tracking rhythm game scores.

Generally, everyone was using their own personal spreadsheets or ancient "just render everything" tables to analyse their scores and progress before this and I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out.

What I'm probably most proud of is that adding support for a new game is adding a new module for it - all of the other features automatically work with it. This turns a "each game needs to have its own full-site tracker" into a "each game needs a configuration for this one tracker", not unlike how LSP simplifies adding language support for editors!

Taught me almost everything I know about scaling a codebase, and despite being a niche tool it's picked up a lot of momentum (2k users, ~3m scores).


Simplest File Renamer - batch rename files with your favorite text editor (and see the diff of the changes)

https://yboris.dev/renamer/ -- FREE

MIT Open Source: https://github.com/whyboris/Simplest-File-Renamer


I need this thanks


My works over the years are accumulated on https://www.nayuki.io/ . Lately I finished writing a new PNG library ( https://www.nayuki.io/page/png-library ), and now I'm revamping a DEFLATE library ( https://www.nayuki.io/page/deflate-library-java ).


Do I need an Umbrella Today?

https://umbrellatoday.app

The idea has emerged from my personal frustration with having to carry an umbrella (large or small). Large umbrellas are heavy and cumbersome to carry, and are often lost at events, while small umbrellas provide insufficient protection and are prone to breaking. The conclusion is that there is a need to minimize interactions with umbrellas as much as possible, and therefore we need a simple yes/no answer before leaving our premises.


It looks pretty good, I’ve been looking for something like it. Though in my case I want to know of full days. I.e. I want an alert for “will it rain at all tomorrow”? When checking the current day, it’d be useful to see all hours of the day and if it’s going to rain in any.


Thanks for the feedback! Something that is similar to what you are mentioning, is the setting “How many hours should we look ahead?” which can be found when you click on “More” during the setup of the alert. Then it will give you per 3 hours the forecast. Cheers!


https://conservationhub.nz/ - Very likely not applicable to anyone here because it's a very specific target market but I've been working on a platform that helps conservation groups in New Zealand record field data and work with local volunteers.

A lot of conservation groups in New Zealand have a similar problem where they need to record their data on-site for bird monitoring, trapping, etc to get funding. Some went and built their own apps to achieve this, but I noticed the groups that did ending up spending tens of thousands building essentially the same thing with minor differences in the data captured. For a while I helped groups get set up on a low budget with existing tools but none were really customizable or intuitive enough for volunteers recording their data and admins managing that, so we ended up creating a web/mobile app for it instead.


I built https://courses.so.

The concept: build courses with Notion.

The idea came from my partner in the project, who runs an e-learning community centered around no-code tools and wanted something simple and no-code-y to host their material.

I built it during a bad main-project burnout day and we've been improving and marketing it ever since.

We have a bunch of people using the free plan to publish their courses for free, but not enough users pay the 9€/month plan, which allows you to charge for the courses, to pay for the infra.

So we're in the negative monthly profit.

Still, it's a fun side project and we enjoy improving it and listening to user feedback.

If you want to offer or sell courses and you like Notion, check it out. Especially if you are a maker type, we offer API access and are working on full access to statistics and event webhooks so you can integrate it with your systems. We even have first party integrations with Zapier and Make.com.


Geoquest: https://geoquest.wout.space/

It's a geography game focussed on learning all countries in the world.

Had it online for about a year now. It's completely opensource [1]. Only accept donations through buymeacoffee, no ads, no paid version.

I don't spend any money on it as it's hosted on Cloudflare Pages and all data is stored offline in localstorage.

[1] https://github.com/woutdp/geoquest


Very nice indeed!


Semantic Paint will be a system for annotating text that does not rely on filenames or URL's or any other naming system. Instead it uses fuzzy hashes to identify where in the text to attach the annotation. If you peer your node with other people, you'll see their annotations too.

It's like the web, except you don't need permission to create links between data, and whether you see other people's links/data depends on whether you explicitly subscribe to their "brushstrokes" in that "color".

"Colors" might include:

- this-javascript-is-malicious-and-here-is-a-patch-that-neuters-it

- this-is-a-claim-and-here-is-evidence-for-it

- the-food-described-by-this-menu-entry-causes-allergic-reactions-for-people-with-this-kind-of-allergy

Ideally, users (or aggregations thereof) will emerge as authorities on these topics and we can figure out how to pay them for being useful curators.

Since the references (this and here in the above example) are anchored to other pieces of text by CTPHs and not by name, you can find text in the world and point your camera at it and now you have links to follow.

There's a mapping between CTPH identified text and cryptographic-hash identified text, so we can use a DHT to move content around, I'll probably have plugins for different network constraints (i.e. Bittorrent, IPFS, Freenet, SSB, etc).

Since I'm solving the hard problem of naming things by just not naming things, I don't need an always-available DNS server (for instance), so I might as well see what else I can do without. I'm shooting for partition tolerant and latency tolerant, to run over secure sucttlebutt protocol (which presumes that the user is moving around gossips over ad-hoc networks), so it can be useful in a world where the ISP's are unusable for some reason.


I run a ton of things! The one I work on most right now is International Persuasion Machines: https://ipm-corporation.com/

The product, as it is right now, is a battery of tests of different browser configurations used by bot-makers, targeted at a URL, and then a ton of measurement around the cost of different theoretical implementations, which implementations are able to get through to a site, common themes among current working attacks, and how far into your stack bad requests might get. As an example, here's a scan of Kelley Blue Book, which I imagine tons of scrapers hit regularly: https://vulnerability-assessor.ipm-corporation.com/dashboard...


Thank you for this thead!

I am currently working on a new open-source project, completely free to help enterprise manage their authorizations on a ce realized application: https://www.authz.fr/

Main benefits whereas existing projects is the simplicity of use and the frontend web UI which is generally in paid offers.

It comes with Service Development Kits in multiple languages (Go, NodeJS, PHP, Python) and more to come soon.

I hope someone could find something interesting here :)


https://qwerty-fr.org/

Note: This keyboard layout is not just about English/French anymore. You can now type pretty much every latin language in the world: Spanish, Portuguese, Irish, German, Italian, Català, Dutch, Danish, Flemish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Czech, Polish, Romanian, Lithuanian, Serb, and many more but my fingers are already hurting.

Now… Time for the sales pitch!

~~~~~~~~~

Are you tired of the limitations and inconvenience of the AZERTY keyboard layout when trying to type in French? Introducing QWERTY-fr, the ultimate keyboard layout for French and English language users! This layout is based on the widely used QWERTY layout, but with added symbols and diacritics to make typing in French easy and fast. Plus, it's easy to learn! With QWERTY-fr, you'll no longer have to rely on autocorrect to fix the shortcomings of AZERTY.

QWERTY-fr also eliminates the frustrating letter swaps and shuffled symbols of AZERTY, making software shortcuts and remapping a thing of the past. Plus, you'll be able to type special characters like "É" and "Ç" with ease.

Our layout follows a strict superset of the QWERTY layout, meaning all keys are in the same location, so QWERTY users can easily transition to QWERTY-fr. To type special characters with diacritics, there are simple rules to follow. AltGr corresponds to Option on macOS and Ctrl Alt on Windows. With AltGr and the corresponding letter, you can type characters like the grave accent, acute accent, circumflex, diaeresis, cedilla, and ligature.

So why settle for the limitations of AZERTY when you can have the best of both worlds with QWERTY-fr? Try it out online without installing it and join our Telegram community to discuss and provide feedback with other users. Don't miss out on this game-changing keyboard layout!

(Courtesy of ChatGPT.)


Watchflix: https://watchflix.group

I made this extension to watch stuff together with my girlfriend during the pandemic. All the other extensions had a lot of flaws, didn't work with Prime and Disney+ Hotstar, so I decided to build one for my own use. I moved to the same city as my partner, so I don't have any use for it anymore. Few people still use this daily, so I'll probably let it run on my VPS as long as I can.


You might be able to eliminate the VPS by making it P2P using something like PeerJS [1]. PeerJS provides a free shared connection broker server.

[1]: https://peerjs.com/


https://payload.app/ is a cross platform desktop LAN file transfer app with drag and drop UI, directory support, resumability, e2ee, and auto discovery. It’s designed to be easy to use, fast and ephemeral. My philosophy is to take transfer seriously, as opposed to hosting and sharing (which in my purist mind should be treated separately, and has less overlap than people think).


My friend and I have been working on a replacement for Facebook events in our social circle. We found that a lot of people are not using FB events anymore and were having a hard time planning social events. Not making any money (yet) but we hope to someday! We designed our app to make it easy to share invites on any social platform/chat group without being tied down.

https://dateit.io


Look nice. Can someone with a dumb phone and internet on a computer use it ?


Thanks! Yeah we support iOS, web and android! We are still adding support on web to create events but you can view and respond.


how did you launch this? to your existing social circle/friends or did you do any marketing?


We started with our friends and family. We have been running ads on the App and Play store. Nothing too crazy. We are starting to look into more local advertising to drum up interest!


Drive Declutter: https://drivedeclutter.com ,

A snappy disk visualization tool for Windows 10/11 similar to DaisyDisk on MacOS. Developed in C++ from scratch without any frameworks, whole download is about 3 megabytes. A few hundred downloads and much fewer sales, it's currently a free download everywhere except for USA, where it costs a few bucks after a 24 hour trial. Downloadable directly from the Microsoft Store: https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/drive-declutter/9P54...

It's only making beer money but I enjoy maintaining it and adding features over time.


Music Tonight: https://musictonightapp.com/

Makes a Spotify playlist of artists playing near you, tonight.

No revenue. I really just made it for me; make the playlist in the am, listen during the day, and maybe see something that night.


Honestly this does a better job of letting me know who is playing nearby than any other event advertising I've seen. I have no idea who these people are near me today, but now I get to sample and discover them. I actually just bought a ticket for a small show at a school near me that I never would have known of otherwise. I dunno if you're into making money off of this but it's the sort of idea that has some legs. Thanks!


A little encouragement goes such a long way. Thank you for trying it out, and especially for coming back here to let me know how it went!


This is really cool. I don't use Spotify so I'm curious if there are any plans for branching it out to other services like Apple Music?

At any rate, I've shared it with some friends that do use Spotify and they all love it.


Oh, thank you! I don't have any plans for expanding to other music services. But skimming the Apple Music API, I think it's possible. Particularly if you think you'd use it, I'll investigate a bit more and let you know. :)


Valar: https://valar.dev

It's kinda like a private SaaS platform. I just run it for me and a couple of friends right now and just hosting a ton of little fun side projects on it.

e.g. https://tim-efa.valar.app which brings Munich's public transport schedule to your terminal (try it with curl, looks way better)

It supports all kinds of things like bring-your-own-domain, e.g. I run my portfolio page https://espe.tech on top of it. It is partly open-source (actually only the CLI for now) but I plan to fully open-source it in the future after cleaning up the code a bit and improving testing and stuff :)


https://tvdatanow.co/

We're an Ad Tech startup - cross device attribution measurement aimed at CTV specifically... and we have very few clients, just enough to pay the server bills and expenses but not enough to actually pay ourselves. Been like this for 3 years now.

It's hard, because the job is fairly demanding and it takes effort to keep this kind of big data apparatus going, but at the same time it's never quite dead and almost just barely always on the cusp of getting big enough to support ourselves with it.

We tried (and failed) to raise last year, so still entirely bootstrapped. With funding down right now another attempt at a raise doesn't seem like it's in the cards.


I almost forgot I run this project. It makes less than 1€/month average :D.

I built https://banco.surf, which gives you API access to your european bank account's transactions and balances.

The eu-only restriction is a matter of the PSD2 provider I use.

Price: 1€/month per account. Prepaid. No subscriptions.

It's mostly (and openly) a thin wrapper on top of that Account Information Access provider. The selling point is that it abstracts away a bunch of auth and PSD2-specific processes giving you a trivially integrable HTTP API.

I also offer a first-party Make.com integration.

I use myself a bunch, and occasionally some people use it for some scripting, but not much in terms of MRR or real traction.

Still, costs me next to nothing so it's cool.


An online music locker: http://inter.tube/

You can store your music in The Cloud (mp3 and FLAC supported). Includes a barebones web player and is compatible with the Subsonic protocol so you can use native apps with it. It doesn't do any re-encoding or mess with your files at all so audiophiles might like it.

Inspired by Google Play Music shutting down. I haven't had time to keep adding features but it supports almost all of the Subsonic API. It uses DynamoDB, Lambda, Cloudflare Workers, and Backblaze B2 so it's pretty cheap but I only have two customers. I'm considering moving it to Cloudflare's new storage thing which should simplify it a bit.


Bannerbox: https://bannerbox.io

Embed banners and modals onto your site with no code.

I spent the last 7 years as a growth engineer building banners and modals. Each time there was a custom requirement. I've always thought there should be a Wix kind of experience for tiny components that can be embedded anywhere on a site.

Currently I have 0 users. This year I plan on spending more time on marketing and improving the product. It cost me about $50/month to run. Most is for storage (postgres and redis). A large chunk is for a custom email address through Google. I spend about 1-2 hours working on it every day. I'm thinking long term. Slow and steady.


If I can offer some advice, I'd put some info about what you're actually committing to when you sign up. Your site looks lovely, but there's no info as to whether there are paid or free options or what signing up will actually do (in terms of emails or commitment). I almost never sign up to any service unless they do this, and often if they are open about costs or provide a free tier or trial, I'm much more likely to test it out.


I've made yet another magnetometer, but this one its free and no ads. It helped me locate a strong magnet in a hole I had put 5 ft underground. I was then able to excavate to it and install my main water line without digging a huge hole. check it out at: https://www.smartbrosltd.com


I didn’t even know this was a thing that was possible, let alone yet another, and Free!?

Thanks. I’ve been looking for something like this or some sort of sensor setup to do the same.


Thank you!


Sounds like an interesting story that I'm curious about... how did putting a strong magnet in the ground help you install your main water line?


I had the main rupture under my floor which is a concrete slab. so Instead of breaking the concrete I routed a new line from the outside directly to the back of my bathroom wall, where there was a small space behind the shower to access the plumbing. Luckily there was no concrete underneath the bathroom tub so I made a hole with a power washer and a very long extension wand for it, directly vertical. In this hole I put the strong neodymium magnet. Now from the outside I was able to locate exactly where my other hole was with my app. This way I was able to install a new main into my house with no damage to my structure.


Neat! Thanks for sharing!


I'm actively working on two projects currently making $0 (and I don't necessarily mind):

Mastodon Chirper - A browser extension which injects Mastodon posts into your Twitter timeline. Great way to transition to Mastodon without leaving Twitter. https://chirper.picheta.me/

Mousetrack - A price tracker and deal finder for Walt Disney World holidays. I hope to make it the best source of data for how prices for these holidays change (especially during our current high-inflation times). https://mousetrack.co.uk


Not really expecting a revenue, just hacking around.

Almost all grateful dead and Jerry Garcia concerts in telegram https://t.me/gdvault it would be nice if someone can remake all of it because it ended up quite ugly with song listings and overall structure. It's all in bash and code quality is quite bad, but I can throw it on GitHub of somebody interested.

Xscreensaver with imgui https://github.com/yekm/imscreensaver only one for now, made it in a weekend just to proof of the concept. Help wanted


My latest side project is still in figure-out-how-to-get-users mode:

https://feelers.online/

The idea is to give content creators (authors, YouTubers, webcomics, bands, etc.) a way to inform their fans when new content drops. It also gives the fans a lot of control over how the notifications arrive.

I made this to address a problem I experience myself. I operate a website that publishes on an irregular schedule, and it can be hard to let readers/listeners know when we have something new.


I just launched Find Humane, a free website and app for finding humanely raised animal products: https://findhumane.com/

Currently $0 revenue but we have some affiliate links to humanely certified delivery services, so hopefully the ball will start rolling!


I think this has potential for a certain target audience. Not a criticism, but feedback: if I stumbled on this site I'd have no idea what it was about based on the current landing page. Will you be adding an intro/description about what the site is for? :-)


Thanks, great feedback. I'm using the same code for web and mobile apps (Expo/React Native), but mobile users have gone through the app store landing page, so I agree it makes sense to add a landing page for web users. I'm thinking of a small little pop-up on first visit, but let me know if you'd prefer something else.


Small side-side issue, it seems you have a typo, without Javascript I get:

JavaScript is required to be not enabled in your browser.

Reload


Thanks! I'll fix that in the next release.


I've been working on a videogame project for the better part of a year now (a construction and management sim inspired by Factorio, Stardew Valley and similar games, combining concepts and mechanics from all of them), writing my own engine on top of SDL2.

It's not the most original idea and I doubt it will ever actually see the light of day but the main point of this project was to get into C++ (coming from Java) and I think it served its purpose very well.

In reality it didn't cost me anything but I technically "wasted" many thousands of dollars of my time on it...


https://kindmind.com.

It's an online journal with a focus on mental health and wellness I've been building since 2015. I gave up trying to find my version of the perfect online journal and decided to build it myself.

I started accepting donations earlier this month to help offset operating costs, so technically I've made a grand total of $15 income over these last eight years, minus about $8k expenses give-or-take out of my pocket.

Overall, it's brought much joy and purpose to my life. Hard to put a price on that.


During covid I wanted to take a 'digital vacation', so I thought: why not an online chess lesson with grand master Ben Finegold? But arranging a time (across busy schedules and time zones) and price was too much effort for a once-off catch up, so I made a tool that would have let me google him and book (and pay for) a time in under 1 minute (with trivial effort from both parties). Of course, it works for anyone, not limited to chess GMs.

https://www.hangswith.com/


Surprising you don't make money off this. Works well with Humble Bundle style pricing, with a tip or portion given to charity.


https://gatesnaplabs.com

Idea: Make software for the Olympic sport of bicycle motocross.

Execution: Flawless. Built the app in Elm + Ionic Capacitor. It looks great and works perfectly. There's even a Web version at https://gearbag.bike

Marketing: lol

Result: I have spent five digits of money (paid my friends market wages for their help, particularly with UX and design) and made $6 from Google AdMob and have ~100 installs.

Worth it. Doubling down on the next project this year.


https://acos.games

I created a platform and simulator for developers to create multiplayer turn-based browser games using JavaScript. It's been in development for about 2 years and online for 1 year.

The plan is to allow all games to have ranking and competition features automatically built-in.

It has tons of carefully crafted features, but I have failed to gain any interest in the project, so its just sitting there waiting for someone to love it.

I am losing $60/month on the dedicated server the whole infrastructure runs on.


I played one of the games after seeing it on HN a while back, and it’s very polished! But… I don’t have a lot of free time to play games like that :(


Thanks =)

Web gaming seems to be a niche area these days.


https://wishy.gift - A privacy friendly wishlist service, made for my SO after she got 4 thermoses for Christmas a year and only needed 1. Costs ~$30/mo, but is used by my entire extended family, which makes it all worth it :)


So I just started on this a week and a half ago, but thanks to a recent layoff, I'm able to churn through it a little more quickly than I thought I might be able to, and I don't anticipate it ever making any real money, so I think it counts.

The gist is that it's a site for imagining who would be cast into the roles of comic books, anime, books, or old TV series (or film) if they were adapted into modern a modern movie.

It was originally born out of the idea when The Dark Knight aired, and I was pretty confident that Heath Ledger was going to be good, but when I was chatting with a different group of friends than those who had already heard me say that, nobody believed it. So the first pass of it was just a simple form of social proof, but the more I've thought about it over the years, the more it's evolved.

It's pretty useless right now, but at the pace I'm going, I should be able to have a workable MVP in the next few days before I have to start looking for another job.

https://fancasting.com

The frontend is Next/React, and the few 'backend' pieces are also Next API functions (which isn't something I've really delved into before, so kind of fun, ignoring the weird latency effect of functions) - the only thing that currently resembles what I'm used to as a backend is the Planetscale DB, which it speaks to via Prisma.


endoflife.date: https://endoflife.date

Created it because I was frustrated having to lookup information on multiple sites, and having to dig deep and read through terribly written support policies. No Ads, no tracking, all hosted cheaply on Netlify OSS Plan.

Now at 100+ contributors, with 3-5 maintainers on the project. We have a long roadmap for the next year[0]. A contributor wrote a EOL Scanner that is based on a fork of grype[1].

[0]: https://github.com/endoflife-date/endoflife.date/issues/2108

[1]: https://github.com/noqcks/xeol


This is awesome! I would love is Swappa pulled from your api and could show device support. That could be an idea for a little browser extension.


Thanks for that! That looks extremely useful...


great resource. thanks!


https://privtracker.com/ Private BitTorrent tracker for everyone

No plans or even ideas how to commercialize it, so it will stay at $-10/month.

I made it just for fun, but noticed that there are some users, so I keep it running.


https://www.reciped.io

Wikipedia like recipe site. Drag and drop meal planning, and automatically creates grocery lists sorted by grocery aisle. Grocery lists are built for mobile, swipe right to slide that item off the list.


https://golfcourse.wiki

It's a wiki for golf courses. I am a bit embarrassed to love golf, but want to create a platform for smaller courses to be seen along side their private fancy counterparts. I currently lose a dozen or so dollars per month to run it, but that will increase as the site grows. I'm not entirely sure how I'll run it if it ever really takes off. I've considered trying for c3 status, because I don't really need the money, but I'm not sure whether or not that would be the limitations imposed by that would be.

The one thing I want do want to say is that I want courses that are open to the public to be able to use the materials created on the wiki at their location. An entry can be as simple as a blurb with a link to the course website, or as complex as a detailed mapping of the entire course and greens (the different color flags on the homepage indicate different levels of detail).

So, if someone maps a public course, that course can use that person's work on their scorecards instead of hiring and outside graphic designer. It effectively allows public courses to get detailed course guides for free and sell them onsite to raise revenues, but also provides a free alternative for folks online. I want it to be a way that people can casually spend their time to reduce the costs of golf, especially for cash-strapped municipal courses. Golf is too expensive, and this site should be a way to reduce the costs and make the game more accessible in general.


Privacy-First Jobs - a job board solely for privacy-focused companies and orgs: https://privacyfirstjobs.com/

Direct feedback from users is consistently positive but I’m starting to think a job board based around values is not the great idea I thought it was. Nevertheless it’s still something I think should exist (and I might need it myself one day), so as long as the cost to keep it running is low, I’ll keep it running.


Dollero - https://dollero.app/

Dollero is a personal budgeting web app which doesn't store any of your budgeting data in the cloud. Instead your budget data is stored locally in your browser with IndexedDB and is synced peer to peer with your other devices using WebRTC. It's currently is free and makes no money although I would like to eventually charge a small monthly fee for syncing your budget between devices.


I’m planning to create a privacy focused budgeting app as well. My idea is to have the user data backed up to their personal google drive instead.


This ask HN is great.

I'm discovering quite interesting projects.

Here's mine:

I write a newsletter about mental models for entrepreneurs.

Most content on the topic has too much jargon and is boring. So I'm trying to explain these useful ideas with business stories. And in an actionable way.

After some iteration, started getting positive feedback and just crossed 4000 subscribers.

It's free. But I'm planning to start monetizing it with sponsors soon.

https://fronterablog.com/newsletter


I've been running my website + blog + newsletter + map [1] since 2018, and while I made about $900 in revenue in 2021, last year I generated $0.

The website is a compendium of all the coffee shops I've visited in the metro Atlanta area over the last five years + dozens more in the travel section. The monetization angles I have tried include the Membership (reader-supported) model and the Sponsorship (company/brand) model (with a nod to Packy McCormick's Not Boring newsletter for the "Deep Dive" approach, which I am a big fan of). Coffee shops may also post paid ads to barista jobs on the "job board" section of the site.

I wrote more about publishing content online, monetization strategies, and more in a recent blog post, for those curious [2].

I recognize that this forum is more focused on products, but I think some would appreciate the effort in trying to scale a blog/website with incremental products/services available to a dedicated audience.

[1] https://atlantacoffeeshops.com [2] https://www.atlantacoffeeshops.com/blog/a-brief-update-on-th...


RoadCaptain: https://roadcaptain.nl/

It’s an add-on to Zwift that lets you create your own custom routes and not be limited to the fixed ones offered by Zwift.

I’ve been working on this for a little over a year and I’ve had some good reactions from folks using it.

Even so, apart from one person sponsoring me on GitHub with a one-off that’s it money wise. I’ve been toying with the idea of a paid version but no clue if that’s even worthwhile to do.


Really impressive work, love the runner app and looking forward to going through the code.

I had an idea for using a 3 button keybow for use with the Zwift app for navigation/power-up features.


Thank you!


https://hbit.app

I made this app to inspire people to habitually and spontaneously exercise and to be physically active as an integral part of life. You can use the app solo to discover and share new exercises. And you can use it with friends, family and colleagues to challenge each other and to battle it out in combat mode (competitions of who does more repetitions).

Availability: Android and iOS

Price: Currently free

Cost to me: Time and effort to build, adjust and update the app.

Why do it?

Exercise and physical activity have a very positive impact on my life, especially mentally. I think that a lot of people tend to look at exercise as something that primarily benefits their looks though and hence as something they should be doing, without seeing much (if any) joy in it.

Personally, I have no exercise goals, I don't schedule time to exercise, I don't look at exercise as something that I dread or have to do and I eat what I want and as much as I want. For me, the most important benefits of exercise and physical activity are that being physically active makes me feel good and that it clears my thinking. Physical fitness is merely a nice bonus that comes with it.

So the aim of the Hbit project is to sway people's perception from exercise as a dreadful chore to exercise as playful fun.


I review bad, low budget, and obscure movies on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@calhounsreviews still less than 300 subs but I keep making them because I enjoy it!


Thanks for posting this, I like low-budget and obscure, so you just found yourself a new subscriber!


Thanks!


The Animator: https://theanimator.co.uk/

Originally an experiment when the HTML Canvas element was new and exciting, to see if I could make a website to create flip-book style animations. I have no proof, but I'm pretty confident it was one of the first websites that could do so.

~12 years later, a refactor from PHP to NodeJS and React and LOTS of spare-time sunk into it - it's moderately successful by my standards. Got kids from all over the world creating stuff - some even very impressive. From my logs, I can even see some schools in the USA are using it in some lessons.

It's been a pain sometimes when troublemakers are hell-bent on making, well - trouble! Definitely build your moderation tools from the start folks.

It has a few ads sprinkled over it in a futile attempt to cover my server costs, but probably has a net cost to me of about £20/mo.

Genuinely love that kids and teachers use it - even my daughter is on there. It's been absolutely fascinating and heartwarming to see how some of the kids have developed their art and animation skills over time. Maybe one day it'll be bug-free and "finished".


Do you do any marketing? Do you share/ promote to teachers?


No, never marketed it. Had vague ideas to do so - but thought I needed some more admin functionality first. Things like being able to white label it for a school, upload CSVs of student accounts, those sorts of things.

Those who do already use it must have just discovered it by search or word of mouth.


This is really nice!


Thank you kind guy of physics :)


502 bad gateway


Thanks - fixed. My server died a horrible death when another project spun out of control.


iOS app Blind Compass https://github.com/mltony/blind-compass

I am blind and I developed this auditory compass for blind people that communicates your heading as two tones - musical interval between them encodes your heading. It helps white cane users not to get confused in space or walk straight across large open space by locking heading. It also makes me look like a lunatic, because I put iPhone into phone holder that I sawn to my hat to provide most accurate heading information.

The app is free, but I have to pay for Apple Developer subscription to keep the app in the app store.


This is brilliant! It reminds me of the North Paw anklet, which I think dates from back when phones didn't include magnetometers.

If I keep my phone in a hip holster but get the audio over a Bluetooth earbud, is that likely to be useful? Do you wear it on your hat so you can swivel your neck and "probe" the compass response, or because you get better results up there in some other way?


I do use it with bluetooth headphones - bone conductance headphones, so that I can also hear the street. I tried to put my phone in the pocket, but then heading fluctuates with every step. I assume this might be enough for someone, but I prefer to hear accurate heading, wich allows me to walk straight comfortably.


> I tried to put my phone in the pocket, but then heading fluctuates with every step.

As you're the developer (and a blind user eating your own dog food) I might suggest (for those that want to put their phone in their pocket) looking at using a running filter to smooth the headings and remove the swing of every step.

Savitzky–Golay filters are particularly good for this and (pages of complicated math aside) are really as simple to implement as a straight running average (as you multiply a string of heading values with normalised weights and sum to get the "better heading" .. add a new heading to front of string, drop off the oldest heading from the back, repeat).


It gets into a lot more code, but integrating the accelerometer readings to figure out where in the step you are, and correct the magnetometer readings, could work. It would have to relearn any time the phone shifted in your pocket, but that could become a continuous process while walking.

Probably easier to just put the phone in a hat, though.


https://javascript.onl/

Wondered a while ago if I could make a static website where you could solve interview-style JavaScript problems in the browser. It uses web workers and local storage. There are Amazon affiliate links on the website for some books, but the account is suspended. It's hosted on GCP and I lose a few cents a month to keep it up.


https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font

Being distributed with Debian and downstreams, 11 years old, with 1.5K stars and 60+ forks is, by far, my most popular open source thing. My biggest shame is that it's not software, but a font that mimics the look of IBM's 3278-2 terminals.

And, of course, it's the font I use for terminals on all my machines.


Well, I started my project, a file manager in Java named Ant Commander, in 2003. It was a shareware. It never sold.

Still didn't give up the project, as I use it every day. So last year I decided for a big refactoring (Ant Commander Pro) and to specialize it for developers.

The beta is for free but then I'll be charging again.

https://www.antcommander.com/


https://heylaing.com - just here to help you practice your language. I got frustrated not being able to properly practice Spanish, especially for listening and speaking and did not have time to find a practice partner so started to create something that would allow me to practice my language skills in a more realistic setting....heyLaing was born. There's a whole lot more to the story but that's the tl;dr.

It was great for me to learn how to code and design. I've always been able to code a little bit but this was my first real product. I realised I still suck at both coding and design but it's helped me so much, and helped me learn Spanish far better. It costs me about $5 a month to run this on a droplet from Digital Ocean.

It's been great for my mental health and also concentration, i love putting my Product Manager hat on and solving the 'problem' and then figuring out how I am going to code it.

I also now get about 1-3 new sign ups a day since 'launching' with a few posts on reddit a few months ago.


https://game-watch.agreon.de (I know, my naming is great) is a service to get updates for games that you are interested in.

I'd often watch game release previews like the E3 and put the games that interested me in some kind of list. Now I would have to check manually for news about a release date or in which stores they would be published. GameWatch takes off this work from me and maybe also from you :).

I know it was most probably done before in some similar way, but I didn't even search for alternatives until now. It would have been a good idea if I wanted to create a real market competitor, but that was not my motivation. I wanted to craft something that was my own, and not a copy of some product. I didn't want to spoil my creativity.

I guess the most asked question will be: Why don't you crawl all the games beforehand and let the user search in your database. After all, it would improve the usability as users would not have to wait for the crawl to happen on demand. Also, you could show useful information like price history etc. per store.

Well, besides the limited resources I wanted to invest, the project was born with a different idea than price monitoring in mind. Rather, the main idea was for me - as a user of many game devices - to get updated as soon as a game is added to a specific store (Maybe some games would be nicer to play on the Switch?).

A preliminary crawl would not really have helped in this case. Besides, the on demand crawl results are cached. So if a popular game is searched for often, the overhead won't really be noticeable.

Costs:

- ~5€ DataDog Logging

- ~10€ VPC (but that is also used for other things)


https://scrabble-solver.org/

It's open-source too: https://github.com/kamilmielnik/scrabble-solver

I never intended it to make any money though. What brings me a lot of joy is that some people showed genuine interest in this project.


Game Boy Essentials, my attempt to catalogue the appeal of the Game Boy. I write articles online, and then turn them into a book every twelve articles.

I moved from hand-coded HTML to Jekyll, and published my first book using Pages from Apple to make the PDF, but now use XeTeX and a custom HTML conversion to make my books with a single button press.

I used to use Kindle Direct Publishing (née createspace) but have very wisely moved on to Lulu. Amazon had banned me for using content readily-available online. I appealed and got my account back but they still haven't resolved the problem with my books. I totally blame the recent staff cuts at the company.

Lulu is slightly more expensive for my customers but the books are colour and I don't feel like I'm using the forgotten service of a company who doesn't care.

The website is hosted on AWS using S3 and Cloudfront, my registrar is Amazon and I'm absolutely looking for an alternative if anyone has any.

I'm at https://gameboyessentials.com


I made a real estate thing that basically scraped a bunch of data and then built a NLP query interface on top to query real estate data in natural language.

Couldn't find a customer so it makes $0 haha. Here's an example of the system working, minus a pretty UI: https://imgur.com/a/ITDKtPC


Does ruby have an NLP library or are you rolling your own?


Built a separate service that used spacy


I shouldn't be surprised but the amount of posters heavily pushing for ads or gambling (loot boxes) is disgusting and horrifying.

Not everything needs to make money, especially for community projects.


Recently decided to launch MessageDuck: https://www.messageduck.com after working on a few side projects but never actually launching for many years. It is similar to Mailcharts and ReallyGoodEmail, but for SMS which Mailcharts has as well but the price is out of our range.

Basically it is a library of thousands of SMS messages to help marketers get the latest SMS data and launch their campaign in minutes instead of days. Currently earning $0 and incurring some cost of about less than $100 a month but overall it meets our own need. It was an internal tool we used but we decided to launch it to the open web and see if there was any demand for it. Currently it has all the features of a MVP and already works great for us but we are adding some new features every month as well.


This is actually incredible useful for what I work with, very cool to get a pulse on brand strategies. How did you get the data in?


Thanks for the comment! We started with subscribing to some brands manually with our own number to see if the idea was viable for about a month before trying to do it at scale by looking for which brands offered SMS and using something like a Twilio virtual phone number to get the message they send to us via API to put in the database. We currently spend a few hours every month to do that and to add more features.


I made a couple of clocks:

https://sunclock.net - 24 hour analogue clock showing sunrise, sunset, and twilight times, and position and phase of the moon.

https://bigclock.app - big clock, small page-weight.


I have a wildly unprofitable side hustle as a cattle rancher. Whatever, it’s fun.


How did you get started on this side hustle?


More money than sense.


I built a tool for predicting the outcome of matchups in Yahoo Fantasy Hockey (head-to-head category based leagues). I find it helpful for determining what categories to focus on when picking up streamers/free agents. https://fantasyhockey.fly.dev/

Also, I've seen a few budgeting apps on here. I didn't build Budget with Buckets[1], but I do think it's a great YNAB alternative _except_ that there is no mobile app. So I built a web app that can be used on mobile. https://buckets.goatcounter.com/

[1]https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com/


https://nodablock.com - I create you an Internal Dashboard for your Web3 project with 1 click - I give you Analytics + automatic smartcontract vulnerability scanning + a visualization of transfers between address. A good usecase now is for the Porshe NFT that has some suspicion of wash trading - With my token visualiser [1] you can clearly see the top tokens exchanged between the same wallets.

Not quite ready for a release, but I made it public last week - without talking much about it - hoping people navigating the visualizers and dashboards will reach me out. But it's still not making money.

[1] https://nodablock.com/nft/porche-911


https://wrolpi.org/ Been having a great time on my side-project WROLPi. Its preparedness-oriented software which allows you to create an offline library. Videos, web archives, maps, epub/pdf, etc. Really easy search, low power usage if you run on in a Raspberry Pi. Just put out the first Raspberry Pi image, which makes installation super simple. Hoping to get a Debian image soon.

Currently "videos" is pretty well flushed out. Still some work to do with web archives. Maps has been a huge headache simply because maps are so large. Got PDFs and EPUBs searchable recently.

An abbreviated list of the technologies I've used to built it: Python, ReactJS, Open Street Map, yt-dlp (videos), SingleFile (web archives).


Oh this is super interesting! I've been playing with Internetinabox, Kiwix, yt-dlp, httrack'd websites, mirrors of github orgs... and I have all this data but no frontend for it. Searchability is huge, I will definitely be playing with this.

IIAB, notably, has an offline maps function in recent versions. I haven't looked at how it works.

Ultimately I'd like to put _all_ that content behind the same interface as my local Othernet receiver node, some sort of Piratebox file-upload site, a local-only BBS sort of message-board, and whatever else might be useful if I found myself offline for a long time.

Oh btw, this may be of interest since you're likely to have a pi sitting there, maybe you'd like to bring up some other pis:

https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2018/01/off-grid-raspbian-...

(I've also recognized that, since I'm likely to have a bucket of Arduinos and stuff around but I'm hopeless without example code, I should have that somehow. So I have the kiwix dumps of raspberrypi.stackexchange and arduino.stackexchange, but I also mirrorred adafruit's and sparkfun's entire github orgs. I need to find a way to httrack waveshare's and seeedstudio's wikis, but they're very crawl-resistant....)


Thanks for the reply. Your comment about having it all behind one interface really resonates with my goals with WROLPi.

I skimmed the link you provided. My goal is to do something similar, but use the Debian Blu-ray ISOs. Debian provides ISOs that contain their entire repo. They fit nicely on a 128GB thumb drive.


My pandemic project is VanWalks. It's a walking tour app of Vancouver. There are currently 5 routes around the downtown area. Working on a freemium model, Chinatown and Coal Harbour are free, the rest are in app purchases.

Available in both app stores and the site is vanwalks.ca

I'm currently working on making a web version of the app because my sales model is in a very grey area as to what Apple allows in their store. I want to be prepared in case Apple takes my app down.

I'm working with the BC Entertainment Hall of Fame to provide a free walking tour of the Star Walk on Granville Street. I'm also working with the Vancouver Police Museum to digitize the walking tours that they offer and have them in the app as part of your admission to the museum. Those will both be launched this spring.


Here's something I'm just starting on:

Find your dream RV. http://rvenvy.com

With more people than ever working remotely, many are interested in ending their lease and exploring America – even moreso now that Starlink is widely available.

At this point, it's a directory site, but I aim for this to be the Wikipedia of RVs.

But if you don't know RVs, it can be daunting to figure out what you need. That's why I also created a Bubble app (as a prototype) that offers a wizard to help you find exactly what you want. It asks a series of questions in a TurboTax-style wizard:

https://concierge.rvenvy.com

Right now results are shared manually, but eventually this will be automated.


Hahaha... I like this one. Here's how I lost money for 25 years building failed businesses.

https://joeldare.com/how-to-lose-money-with-25-years-of-fail...


A small team and I made https://woogles.io - we were inspired by lichess to make a site to play crossword board games during the pandemic (like Scrabble, Words with Friends, etc).

We did raise money on Kickstarter - 25K but are purely donations-driven and open source (AGPL3) Most months we just get enough to cover the cost of running the servers. We have around 6000 monthly active users, have hosted several big worldwide championships, have puzzles, and just earlier today released a board editor / broadcast mode for annotating real life games in real time. We also have a top notch bot AI and WASM-based analyzer.

Our stack is Go, Typescript + React, with NATS/PGSQL on the backend.


Who’s Hosting SNL : https://whoshostingsnl.com

Very simple solution cause I was angry I couldn’t just google the question and get the answer without a few clicks and scrolling.

Costs under $10 a month hosted with cloudfront and S3


Partisan Playground:

- https://partisanplayground.substack.com/

- https://twitter.com/PartisanPlayG

This side project attempts to quantify the news cycle and show what each "side" of the media is covering. I've had this for a few years but never attempted to monetize it. It runs every day and is nearly 100% automated.

My goal is to add text to the newsletter that describes the data using GPT-3. Then I will use the newsletter as a POC and pitch to others: I can create fully automated reports that take your data, analyze it, chart it, and describe the analysis.

Any thoughts about this idea?


Thank you for sharing. I really dig the PartisanPlayground site/idea. Very well executed. As for the idea to extend that as a service to analyze other types of data, it sounds fascinating. When you say "others", do you have an idea who your target market would be? (e.g. government? enterprise? SMBs)?


Thanks! I was thinking internal reporting at enterprises would be the first place to start. I could automate reports that analysts manually generate. This would cover 90% of the report building process for them, with the remaining 10% being editing the AI report output.


This is cool! How do you categorize “right” and “left”?


Thanks! I use the media bias ratings from AllSides: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/ratings


https://superstrong.app

Heavily inspired by other weightlifting trackers such as Strong and Hevy and can import your history from those apps.

Includes a heatmap (similar to the github commit one) that shows your weekly history. https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_banners/2888157513/1674607291/...

Its a mobile first PWA so you can install and get a very native feel, but also use on your desktop.

Going to be adding sync with google sheets soon as well to allow for complex weekly programming (e.g. adjust weights based on last logged workout for a given template)


I created https://dropory.com/ - an app that predict the day with the best weather for any location. Good for finding a good event or wedding date.

Definitely been costing me more than any earnings! :)


Golden Squirrel: goldensquirrel.io

Premise: Get all the upfront information you need to know as a software engineer before applying to a job. Accompanying podcast called "Chasing Squirrels".

Price: $0 (implementing stripe next to charge employers for job posts)

Cost to me: $500/mo in SaaS fees + podcast related fees

Why do it? I became frustrated with how hard it is to find information about the engineer you'll actually be working for at the job, which is one of the biggest if not the biggest factor in looking at new roles. I wanted to de-risk the hiring process for devs by providing as much info upfront about the compensation, role, what they'd be working on, etc so I started with the podcast and just build the job board recently.


I’ve made roughly -$400 so far from my jazz sticker business, https://www.jazzstickers.com. Not trying to make money, only to roughly break even and make more of my ideas happen.


Thanks for introducing us to your products. Glad to have found you (and I just ordered a couple!)


Thanks!


Todidlist: https://todidlist.com

I built a web version of my original plaintext did.txt file. Plaintext is great for computers but I wanted a way to do a "did" ritual on iOS devices.

There is 1 user, me. I feel like all the benefits comes from using it like a journal so I never actually read the dids or built any features to query them well.

Original did file post: https://thepatricktran.com/2018/07/11/did-txt-file/ ** I lost the theptrk.com domain because I forgot to update my credit card.


CodeApprove: https://codeapprove.com

Basically CodeApprove is a code review UI for power users to layer on top of GitHub. I find that it really resonates with people who have worked at Google/Facebook/etc before and find Github's code review tools really lacking. You get conversation resolution tracking, auto-assignment of reviewers between 'turns', a personalized inbox, and a dense/fast UI with keyboard shortcuts for almost everything.

(Note: I do have some users, but I just got out of alpha mode haven't yet charged any of them. I will get my first $ at the end of this month)


After reading on Hacker News about Universal Paperclips and seeing someone post that their whole team wasted a day playing it, I thought I would try to create an idle game that was devops themed, collaborative, and time-limited.

Like other idle games, you basically try to make the big number get really, really big. But, unlike other idle games that I have found, mine mixes in silly devrel trivia questions. Set aside exactly 20 minutes to get your team working together to accumulate an absurdly huge number of successful unit test runs in a truly test-centric world:

https://greens-io.appspot.com


Why does loading ("Checking...") on answer submit?


I wanted players to think about choosing the right option rather than just submitting every choice like trial-and-error. If you get it wrong, you can try again, it just burns a little of your time.


Neptunely: https://neptunely.com

I've been building a procedural music generation engine for the last 2 years. It's been a passion project. There are a handful of videos on youtube that showcase it. It can generate pretty good songs and transitions based on established rules. I'm hoping to make it more generally accessible soon, but so far I've just been using it to help me make my music: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3Xtq9IlfA0l3dNPe3lhGAY


Fascinating, thanks for sharing! (fellow musician/composer)


Introducing macOCR - a command line tool that revolutionizes how you capture text on your screen!

With just one command, you can instantly convert any text on your screen into text on your clipboard, making it easy to use in any app or program. Plus, with support for popular launcher apps like Alfred, LaunchBar, and Hammerspoon, it's never been easier to access the power of macOCR.

And if you're feeling really advanced, you can even use it to feed data into an OpenAI large language model for advanced text processing.

Upgrade your text capture game with macOCR today!

Price: $0

MRR: $0

Copy reworked by: GPT

Prompt: “Rewrite for hacker news:”

URL: https://github.com/schappim/macOCR


the anti captcha!


Citybikes: https://citybik.es

A bike sharing data aggregator. Started as an Android app for my local city, then an app for any city and then just decided to offer an API for free and let other people create apps, visualizations or research based on it.

Been running it for over 10 years. Major transport apps use it for bike sharing data (like moovit or citymapper) with zero contributions to our project. I am proud that there is at least one FOSS app for each major platform out there using the API, which kind of was my idea when offering the free API (and not big players leeching from it).


Very cool. I just checked your site after some time and happily saw that my city is now supported. Upon checking in the API, it's using the unofficial GBFS feed that a couple friends and I are hosting (which we're also earning 0€ from).

We built our own GBFS GraphQL abstraction called gbfsQL [1] a couple years ago that makes working with GBFS less difficult.

[1]: https://github.com/mapintelligenceagency/gbfsQL


Thanks for replying and for providing feeds much on the same philosophy as citybikes. I guess the feed you mention is for Aachen [1]? Sometimes I take a very hands-off approach on the library contributions, so I do not know about specifics. At the moment our gbfs feeds come with a 'gbfs_href' field mentioning the source. Is there any way on which I can give more credit to the work you are doing? It would suck for our project to perpetuate the same kind of damage we receive from other projects, so this is important to me.

Will send you an email, happy to chat.

[1]: https://github.com/eskerda/pybikes/blob/86c8cca04b9e747fda1e...


Honestly, I am just happy that someone is using the GBFS feed. We built it for and are using it on Openvelo [0] which I don't think many people use. The purpose was never to somehow be rewarded, but to make working with this kind of data in our city easier.

[0] https://openvelo.org/


https://historicalchristian.faith/

An open source database that pulls up all historical Christian commentary on a verse in the Bible - e.g. see how the early church fathers interpreted a verse, it's often illuminating.

Was inspired by CS Lewis' comments about the "Old Books": "Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books."


This is awesome! I'm certainly going to be taking a look. I've been reading from C.S. Lewis's letters recently and found a lot of value, so it is especially nice to read this!


Not quite ready for prime time, but I've spent the last couple of weeks building a fast, free, parametric part library for makers to use for widget-type parts rather than complex models. I found the current set of part libraries to be to slow and/or cumbersome for my tastes.

It's 100% static and hosted on GitHub pages. It uses WASM versions of OpenSCAD and SQLite for dynamic content with all processing being done in the browser. Parts are added as GitHub issues, and can be added by anyone with a GitHub login

https://parapart.com

Next step: Content!

Note: Currently not mobile-friendly.


Checkout https://make.craftyamigo.com/, might be something on your roadmap. https://twitter.com/navidsafa/status/1604294611278643200


Marqus: https://github.com/EddieAbbondanzio/marqus

It's yet another markdown based note taking app. I wanted something that gave as much screen real estate to the note's content vs navigation so it'd be easy to use on small screens, and I also wanted to save my notes in plain files vs a proprietary format.

I don't plan on charging any money for the app itself so it'll never make me any money but I do plan on offering an optional note syncing service for multi-device support that'll be a few bucks a month.


I'm working on an open source online coop 2d platform game called DDraceNetwork: https://ddnet.org/

A lot of keeping infrastructure running, code reviews for the active developers we have, community management, some development: https://ddnet.org/news/ddnet-year-2021-in-review/

The community is the main reason for me to keep it running. We only cover server costs, but no one takes any payment to work on DDNet.


https://aqi.eco/

Open-source, crowd-sourced air quality page. I’m running it for 3 years now. Owners of private air quality detectors can use it to built micro-communities in their neighbourhoods. Eg. organization registered at https://mosina.aqi.eco installed dozens of sensors in their home town and is advocating for improving the air quality there.

Around 13k unique users and 40k sessions per month. Cost is about $35 for VMs and storage on DigitalOcean.


I released this site for finding baby names: https://mixedname.com/

It got ~2M visits at launch, but after that died down is now doing a bit over 1000 pageviews a day. I tried putting some ads, a baby-related affiliate campaign, or charge for extra features (which unsurprisingly worked the best), but because of the low traffic it was making <$1/day, so I just made it completely ad and premium free instead.

It's a static site so doesn't really cost me anything to keep it on the server I have anyway.


We used this site to help choose our baby name, thank you for building it! If only gratitude could pay server costs...


That's a lot of visits at launch! Was it mostly organic search?


Post to a relevant subreddit.


https://beatyourbookie.app/

Website for tracking betting lines and finding arbitrage between betting sites. I'm currently collecting all the data myself and am working to build a public API to allow others to access that data.

It's currently costing me ~$150 a month between DB, servers, and telemetry.

Even if it never makes a dime I'm really enjoying building it though. At work I switch to a role where I no longer write code, so having a side project where I can still do that is really nice.


Look up Better Collective, a Danish bootstrapped startup on the same premis which is now worth billions.


Oh, nice! I'll take a look. Ty!


At this rate, assuming my work costs nothing and no hardware ever breaks and no prices ever go up, I'll break even with Marginalia Search in Q2 2031. So there's that.

But it's not really a get-rich scheme.


Keep going. Google buy-out in 2025.


https://www.adama-platform.com/ is a platform SaaS which is costing me a few hundred a month while I build it up. I'm focusing on polishing up the static web server so it can be competitive and i can reduce my expenses. It's basically a realtime document store with a special language that is a modern Excel.

I'm happy with where I'm at, and this year I'm going to focus on offering a commodity (static websites) with a realtime database upsell.


Active Trackers: https://activetrackers.com

A fitness web app I built during the first year of COVID to track pull-ups, push-ups, etc. A couple of my family members purchased a subscription, but otherwise it hasn't gotten any traction.

I have monthly goals for push-ups and pull-ups, so I still use it every day to track my progress.

It's built with Laravel, using Spark, Jetstream, and Tailwind. Before building the app, I had only dabbled with Laravel, so building it was a great learning experience.


What an incredible read! Thanks to all who responded.

Thought I should toss my own response into the mix. For a long time I've sent little (hopefully) helpful emails to fellow entrepreneur's websites letting them know about misspellings, script errors, and other issues. Never as criticism, but rather as an attempt to be helpful. I close by letting them know about my service at https://www.picnits.com/ Almost all send back an email with profuse thank you's, but I've still not landed a single customer for picnits. What I thought was a great idea is apparently not. I suppose I can just keep the site live, but it has become discouraging.

I also have a graveyard website littered with the bones of all my past startups, as well as projects I did for clients that either failed to generate positive cash flow or (more likely) never got launched. For various personal reasons I am now starting to offload all of the domains to try and recover some of the time and cash investment. Ironically, this website has ALSO made zero dollars. :-) If you want to see my boneyard of domain names, shoot me an email (address in profile) and I'll send you a link. I don't want to post it here publicly because I started this post out of a genuine curiosity about other peoples' projects, not to try and sell stuff.


https://cubedesk.io - the chess.com of Rubik’s cubes

I started this as a side project about two years ago and now it has about 1k daily active users. Users time themselves solving the Rubik’s cube, practice on the trainer, and 1v1 others.

Technically, it’s generating some money from the Pro feature, but not enough to run the servers. So I pay out of pocket every month. It has a lot of fans and supporters so I’d never shut it down, but it’d be nice to at least break even.


I wrote a children's book: https://www.amazon.com/Exponential-Growth-Babies-Jake-Koenig... The subject matter may appeal to any parents here.

For a bit I had google ads on my blog: https://ja3k.com but I only made $15 in a couple months so now I just have an ad for my book on my blog posts.


I've been making music since 2010 for my own label and curating music by many other artists for the past 2 years on my site at: RuffandTuffRecordings.Com

Getting people to listen is the absolute hardest part of the job, as music streaming sites and social media display everyone's embarrassingly low stats prominently on everything, but the music I've made over time is the enduring payoff, I have even gotten to do some unpaid DJ and film scoring work, would love to do that full time.


I've been working on server side VDOM based web framework in Ruby that streams DOM-patches to the browser. It uses Haml as React uses JSX. The syntax makes it really nice to use. It's pretty fast but it needs a lot more work before it's ready to use for any real world projects. Would be cool if someone tried it out and maybe even made some improvements.

https://github.com/mayu-live/framework


Plane Hunters: https://www.plane-hunters.com/

I've been running this for the past few months. It's a search engine / aggregator for used aircraft. It's really hard to search for used aircraft and sort them across all the different websites, even harder to figure out what's a good deal and watch the whole market. I started this service to try and solve those problems for others.


Theory A: [https://www.theory-a.com](https://www.theory-a.com)

Premise: Plotting market cap rather than price allows fundamentals like earnings & cash flow to be compared against the market valuation on the same Y axis.

The efficient-market "correctly" prices in positive or negative sentiment so this visualizes how much of that sentiment is hyping up or depressing the price.


Imitate Email: https://imitate.email

A little tool for testing out email flows as you build/test apps - comes with an embedded widget so you don't have to context switch (see https://imitate.email/demo) for example.

Earns nothing - spent far too much time researching chameleons, finding and, thanks to AI, creating Chameleon pictures :-)


https://www.youtube.com/@audiosoundfx

I record sounds with a Shure MV88+ stereo condenser microphone connected to an iPhone. I airdrop the WAV files to a MacBook Pro, where a python script normalizes the audio to a loudness level of -14 LUFS with a level of -1 dBTP (dB True Peak ), generates an HD video, and posts it to YouTube. I'm just getting started. It's more of a hobby than a hustle.


I don't make a dime off my art newsletter but I still keep it going:

https://randomdailyart.com/


Looks cool - just signed up!

FYI - I'm not able to expand the FAQs to see their answers.


I tried to subscribe, but it said there was a problem :(


Interesting.

Would you mind emailing me your address? I've heard others say the same thing and I could never figure out what went wrong. (Email in profile)


Strange, might be an edge case, I tried and it worked for me.


https://www.robotdrawsyou.com

https://www.instagram.com/robotdrawsyou

While working at a really cool NYC startup I developed some tools for generating cool photos of people that could be drawn as vector paths.

The website makes it sound like a photo booth, but really its an art project / style / aesthetic I've developed for rendering multilayer pen plotter artwork.

It's been really had to stay focused on it, but over the years I've done maps, repeating pattern artwork and actually did run (slow and inefficient but) LIVE photo booth for four events that were hosted by other people.

Take photo, watch robot draw, walk away with a drawing in your hand. This is the vision.

My career has been in complete freefall the past few years and it's been hard to work on this at times because there has been no real money made. A few years ago I got paid $1000 to be part of a business development program at a local hackerspace and I still feel so shameful that I haven't been able to get this project going. I refuse to give up.

I've since gotten a day job, I'm working to get my professional and personal shit together and re-learning some front-end tools to make presentable looking websites that can serve an e-commerce purpose.

If you want to have me do a commissioned work, please reach out via IG. I want to let people pay me to make artwork through my website eventually.


https://ideastrikes.com/ A project idea and brainstorming app. It's largely in an MVP stage and gets almost no traffic. I've done very little to promote it, and the UX can use a bunch of work, but I find it valuable for myself so I keep it online.

It's a tool that I use, and no one else does, but I get enough value from it that justifies the annual domain name renewal.


https://wordhazard.net/

"Heads Up" but online and in multiple languages at the same time, e.g. even if an English word is up to be guessed, you can enter the equivalent word in Spanish or German, and you will get points for that, too. I created this because I like word games like that but my friend group is quite multilingual and most are not native English speakers.


Looks really cool! Thanks for sharing.

IBM Research has something similar called "Guess the Word!"(https://guessthewordgame.mybluemix.net/), where you can play with an AI agent. Their paper: https://www.katygero.com/papers/2020_MentalModelsofAIAgents....


Thank you! That IBM project is pretty cool, too! I was surprised how well the AI is at guessing!


RoQR: https://roqr.app/

It's a privacy-focused dynamic QR code application. Just got my first paying customer this past week, which I'm pretty stoked about!

The costs of running it are very low (~$15 / month), and it's not something I'm planning on ever turning into my main gig, but the fact that someone is willing to pay for an app I built on my own feels really fun


https://klev.dev

I'm fascinated by the idea of Kafka and wanted to use it like a saas in my own apps, so I made my own take on it. It also doubles as a key/value store, so its useful for a bunch of things. The store itself is OSS and you can find it at https://github.com/klev-dev/klevdb.


I am the proprietor of the OpenEuphoria Group (https://openeuphoria.org/). We make maintain the Euphoria programming language: a general-purpose interpreted programming language with a simple syntax and flexible type system.

The original developer released Euphoria 3.0 as open source in 2006 and the new group was formed to continue development. And they were quite successful for a while. Euphoria 4.0 was released in 2008 with many new features. But after a few more patches, the original group effectively disappeared around 2015 and version 4.1 was never released officially.

I took over ownership of the domain and website in 2018, then migrated the code hosting to GitHub (https://github.com/OpenEuphoria) and started digging into continuing development. The hosting and domain registration cost me about $100/year, some of which is paid by donations from the community. But money isn't really the concern; what I need is time.

I've been using Euphoria for over 25 years but I only started working on its development in the past few years. If I could do this full time I would, but right now I can only put in a few hours a week and I'm not even sure how viable Euphoria could be as a means of income.

We need at least one or two more actively involved volunteers who can help get version 4.2 out the door. And after that we need to rebuild the website, finish migrating to GitHub, and focus on new features and development tools. If you're reading this and would like to contribute, please comment here, sign up on our forum, or email me directly: ghaberek@gmail.com


Great idea because the framing takes away a lot of the pressure I feel when talking about my side projects.

Here are two open-source products I'm very proud of:

* https://getstreamline.app A stream-of-consciousness writer for Obsidian

* https://getpudding.app Have more fun with OSINT analysis for crypto token ecosystems


https://battlemaster.org/

A browser-based roleplaying strategy game that's been running continuously—with unbroken in-game history—since 2001. I inherited it from its original creator, Tom Vogt, in 2020, after several years of being its primary admin and developer.

It's a pretty niche kind of game, and without any fancy graphics or anything, it's definitely suffered since the smartphone revolution. It also doesn't help that it's got a pretty rough learning curve, and a poor new-player experience (addressing that is actually #1 on my TODO list right now).

Still, it's got a good community of players who really love the game, and it provides something pretty unique. Almost all content in the game is player-created, with conflict primarily driven by player character interactions.

I do take donations and have a Patreon for it, but that basically just covers server expenses. Comes to just about break-even over time. I don't expect it to ever be a significant source of income, but I would love to get it into a state where it has a steadily growing playerbase again.


Interactive music theory lessons & exercises: https://falsetto.app/

I tried to monetize the website a while ago but failed, and I realized it sucked the fun out of the project so I open-sourced it instead: https://github.com/ColeDeanShepherd/Falsetto


Firstly What a great thread and such an interesting read I started https://www.stop-n-swop.com about a week ago after spending about 2 years' worth of weekends on it. It's a retro marketplace app (currently UK-only). It's costing about £50 p/m to run and so far it's made roughly £0 . Still early days!


I make small web games, usually by twisting up one or two existing games. Like wordle, but also snake? Why not play both at the same time! Remember that pipe game? What if it was also tetris?

A lot of these projects make for terrible games, but really fun side projects. I've been putting up the more playable ones on https://neonarcade.games


I'm working on a photo-sharing service for groups to replace shared Google Drive folders. Even if a Google Drive is publicly editable uploads count against the uploader's quota unless they select all, right click, change owner to the folder owner which is a bridge too far.

By default anyone can upload to a gallery but they are identified by hard-to-guess UUIDs. This makes passing galleries around SMS or any chat platform very easy but one thing I did not expect is groups forming long-lived persistent galleries. Once you have more than one or two of these they become hard to keep track of.

I am currently working on an app with optional accounts for end users to (1) keep track of multiple galleries (2) allow iPhone live photo uploading (no way to do that within Safari) and (3) allow iPhones to upload pictures with metadata which Apple strips from all Safari uploads.

Here's a demo gallery with uploading disabled:

https://shareable.photo/73f4b812-51bd-42de-99f6-c58f65b18ae1...


Ooo, this is really interesting. It sounds like it might scratch an itch I have.

I've wanted a way to say "Hey if you took photos while visiting our makerspace, would you share them back with us somehow?"

Because a visitor's eye is sure to catch things differently than folks who're always around. And many visitors are here during interesting events when there's lots of fun stuff to photograph. If we could get even a fraction of those photos back under a creative commons license, it'd be a great resource for next time we need to make brochures or give talks or whatever.

But I don't know how to make this happen, either from a tech side or from a social side. It needs to be as low-friction as possible, and I'd like to support both folks who shoot on their mobile phones, and those who tote around DSLRs and process when they get home.

I imagine I could hang a poster on the wall that says something like "TAKE A PICTURE OF THIS POSTER and check it out when you get home. Hey, yeah, would you share the photos you took? Go to some.website.example/i3detroit and follow the prompts, eh?", possibly with a QR code that does the typing for them, but I haven't found good software to run behind it.


I've got a couple of side projects that I've built primarily out of the necessity for them to exist. I'm deeply in the red and who knows if I'll ever get in the black. They have taught me a lot along the way, which if in the end is all that I've gained from them, then so be it.

// CoinFundIt -https://coinfundit.com

Decentralized, open-source, non-custodial, non-KYC Bitcoin and Altcoin crypto crowdfunding, donations, and atomic swap exchange.

It's built as a native reactJS web app. Also working towards iOS/Android apps. There is also a mirror of the service in IPFS and Tor.

The value proposition from the likes of GoFundMe and other services is that CoinFundIt allows uncensorable funding. The payments are directly paid out without any intermediary gatekeeping. We'll see if it ever catches on and helps folks who might live under a totalitarian regime.

// h4x0r army - https://h4x0r.army

I'm deep into infosec, cybersec, and hacking. I'm also a huge supporter of open Web and the fediverse.

Recently, I've spun up a Mastodon server which can support thousands of active members, for the purpose of building a community for hackers and other technologists.

The server name is sort of a joke and my admin account as well is for humour. As "1337 h4x0r" is an obvious joke at this point.

Along with real tips and news, I'll sometimes share memes and funny videos of pretend 1337 hacking. Nevertheless, registration is open, so all are welcome!

Thank you for the ability to share my side projects, cheers.


Ayah By Ayah: https://ayahbyayah.com

An iOS app which I originally released in 2012 as a simple app for listening to the recitation of a single Ayat (verse) of the Qur'an.

I've been performing intermittent upgrades over the years as I wanted to retain its simplicity and ease of use.

It's not much but its nice to have complete autonomy over something.


As a non-Muslim with very, very limited exposure to the Qur’an, I’d be interested to know some of your favorite passages you’ve personally saved and/or read often.

Cool app. Simple, to the point, and with actual useful functionality.


Really appreciate the kind comments, thank you.

Ayah means verse in Arabic but can also mean a miracle. For Muslims every Ayah is an Ayah. There are 6236 such Ayat in the Qur'an.

In the last four months since turning 41, I've restarted my memorisation of the Qur'an and have just completed finishing the longest chapter this morning, all 49 pages of it.

The timeless nature of the Qur'an is such that it speaks to you directly, it challenges you to pause and reflect.

I finished memorising this verse this morning

"God does not burden any soul with more than it can bear: each gains whatever good it has done, and suffers its bad- ‘ Lord, do not take us to task if we forget or make mistakes. Lord, do not burden us as You burdened those before us. Lord, do not burden us with more than we have strength to bear. Pardon us, forgive us, and have mercy on us. You are our Protector, so help us against the disbelievers.’"

https://quran.com/2/286

A humble request is open up Ayah By Ayah or any other Qur'an app or website at a 'random' place and see what you are shown.


Here are few of them

PhotoEditor :https://github.com/burhanrashid52/PhotoEditor An open source Photo Editor library with simple, easy support for image editing using paints,text,filters,emoji and Sticker like stories.

17 episodes series: Testing and Refactoring Legacy Code in Flutter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHrui_vF2hs&list=PLMURwRbZ0c...

Widget Tricks : https://widget-tricks.com Widget Tricks is a monthly newsletter like css-tricks.com that gives you flutter widget tips and tricks which are unknown, underrated, or unheard of.

Notion Template : https://burhanrashid52.gumroad.com/l/DgZCIy An expense tracker template in notion


https://www.atomiclife.app

It's an AI planner that is open source and solves scheduling problems for recurring 1:1's, ad hoc team meetings

It uses AI models to automate the calendar like a vector search engine to create event templates that tells the AI planner how to behave when things don't fit properly on your calendar


https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug

Offline-first bug tracker (and soon-ish forge) embedded in git.

I keep working on this because the idea makes a lot of sense to me, because I learn a lot from it and it benefits me indirectly.

I'm not especially looking to monetize, but I'm curious about what this community think about it.


I'm writing a science fiction novel series. I blog about the writing process here:

https://exanderproject.com/

Note: the first book is currently unpublished, but I'm happy to offer beta reader copies in exchange for feedback on the book. Contact info in profile / website.


BookaBooka - www.bookabooka.com - a multilingual picture book app for children 2-8

In the last 3 years I've been building a child friendly app with a library of 150+ picture books available in 20+ languages. Books can be read in single, or dual language mode, creating the opportunity to bridge between languages.

Research shows clear benefits of children that are being read to. Research also shows parents should read to their children in the language they are most proficient in, which might be a different language from the one used in school. I hope to provide all children, including immigrants, expats and refugees with a library in their native tongue, and the privilege of being read to, even if parents aren't able.

I work with a growing network of language enthusiasts that help me translate / narrate our collection. These people work on a semi-voluntary basis (royalty model + low revenue currently resembles volunteer work).

It costs me less than 150€ / month to run, and I see the impact grow every day.


Just kicked off the beta launch of Flourish, a performance review/management platform that uses a radial based approach to growth frameworks instead of the traditional ladder based. It aims to reduce the impact of bias in performance reviews and reward your individual skillset.

https://joinflourish.io/


I made LootScraper (https://github.com/eikowagenknecht/lootscraper).

It started out with me wanting to see the Epic Games weekly free games in my RSS feed. And since I also wanted to learn some Python I made a small application out of it.

Well, that escalated a bit, so now the app: - Scrapes offers from Epic, Steam, Amazon, Itch, Gog, Ubisoft - Enriches the offers with info (scores, price etc) from Steam and IGDB - Creates multiple RSS feeds out of that - Also runs a Telegram bot where you can subscribe to offers (or follow them as channels)

It‘s not been a great success in count of users I think, though it‘s hard to know how many use the RSS feeds. The Telegram bot has about 100 subscribers and the project hs about 30 stars on GitHub, so at least some people seem to like it.

Anyways, it has been a fun learning experience and I still enjoy using it myself, so that‘s fine :)

Tech stack: Python + SQLite + Playwright + Docker

It‘s running on my Synology NAS, so the hosting costs are close to 0€.


Just wanted to chime in with this. Even at $2000/month, most of the time I'm like "why am I wasting my time on this?"


there is a market for 2k/month apps/businesses. feel free to email me if you want to sell.


Home Intent: https://homeintent.io/

It's a standalone application that integrates with Home Assistant and provides an OOTB voice assistant for your entities.

I'm not actually sure how I would monetize it. I mostly saw all the pieces for it were open and had good APIs and built it mostly for myself. Eventually I realized others could use it and put it out there. I've never put in much effort to advertise it, but got a bit of a following.

Luckily now with the Home Assistant "year of voice" a lot of the ideas are going to be integrated into Home Assistant directly and I'd like to think I helped influence it a bit. (https://community.rhasspy.org/t/2023-year-of-voice/4130)

It's nice to have my ideas out there and let others (far more capable) continue on. Feels like the true nature of open source


https://bigfishquiz.com/

This one was released around a year and half ago. To begin with I was advertising on Google Ads, but stopped about half a year ago when it didn't seem to be getting anywhere. The money I spent on ads up until this point, combined with the low number of sales, means this one is still solidly in the red.

https://easyfleet.app/

This one only went live a few weeks ago and is _very_ much still a work in progress. However; I find it easier to keep my motivation to work on someting when it's in the wild. I haven't done any advertising on this one so far, as it isn't really ready for that yet, I want to add more features first, but I'll probably advertise it at some point. I also don't love the domain name, so I'm hoping to find something better (preferrably a .com) before I start advertising.


I have 2 projects that I'm looking to eventually adapt into a database backend that's API compatible with RocksDB (with enhancements!). The first of which is a Extendible Hashing Implementation in Rust (it was my first attempt at Rust, so it's kinda messy): https://github.com/chiefnoah/MehDB

It achieves very promising performance (~1m writes/s, ~5m reads/s) for u64 sized types, which will eventually be an offset into a log. The core concept here is that it's O(1) for all inserts and queries with bounded database reads. The performance characteristics are not favorable for small datasets, but very favorable for large ones. However I have to use hash digests as pseudokeys for values, which will always have the potential for collisions. To get around this, I plan to use 128b or larger (256b) hash sizes. Right now it's just u64 for simplicity.

The other is a similar concept using modified B+Trees that have subtrees for all writes to a record: https://github.com/chiefnoah/hist-prototype

This one is implemented in Python for fast iteration, as I realized I wasn't happy with how fast I could iterate with Rust. This one is, IMO, a more complete approach towards full historical query-capable systems. I'm slowly chipping away at it, though I haven't had progress lately. I spend no real money to host them, just the code, though I'm certain I've shortened the life of my NVMe drives due to writing and rewriting large files for testing.

My ultimate goal with these is to build a general purpose KV store that can query the entire state of the system at a given point in time (either timestamp, or a TX increment) for the purposes of enhancing graph databases for temporal analysis.


https://sickmartian.com/trackendar/

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sickmartia...

Trackendar, an habit tracking calendar app. Not currently monetized, got some initial traction, put ads which I promptly removed as they made the app look like shit and had some 'add ons' with which I made between 400-500 USD, I didn't get to see that money as getting an USD payment in Argentina was a PITA so the US has them now :/

All local data, so no cost except a lot of time learning 'old' android and constantly maintaining whatever google wants to change or deprecate + updating the date/time library with the latest TZ changes. Has more features that it needs or users want to learn to use like categories, themes, reports...


https://wordmogul.com -- publishing platform for $3/mo. Has focus on privacy and owning conent. Can act as Jekyll/Hugo GUI. You can export all posts as .md files and literally run Hugo on them. Has an AI assistant for content creation / post scheduling etc.

Goal: make $1kUSD/mo

Making $0 :-)


JukeLab

https://www.getjukelab.com/

Free iOS, Android, web app that lets you build a DIY jukebox for a party.

Curate a playlist of up to 100 records, and let your friends browse and queue their favorite songs.

Total passion project. Mostly used for parties and events I host. But available for other music and retro experience nerds.


I had the same idea for a startup. Never moved on it though. On a hackathon investor told me that it would be a mess to break in to music licensing for different companies


It turns out this is a great passion project to work on because I'm 100% sure you can't build a business around this idea for music licensing reasons.

Personal use only!


Bootstrapping a project generator tool for Django and Node: https://apibakery.com

I expect (well, hope for) it to be making some money at some point in the future but don't worry since it's a side project and something I'm passionate about building even if it's just for fun.


This is actually pretty awesome. Unless you attach a cloud deployment setup (with all the complexity it entails in terms of monitoring etc), I don't see a serious monetization pattern for it (even the most hardcore cookiecutter agency probably wouldn't use this more than once or twice a week), but please publish the source if you ever take it offline.


Thanks!

I have some ideas for cloud deployment / testing, without making apibakery into a cloud hosting service (which is a different level of commitment I don't want to do on a side project).

I do know even one-time template projects that charge one-time fee of $200-$500 per template, so the market is there, just need to figure out the best pricing strategy.


I have an existing Django side project. Very simple app, but cool data. The usage is mostly querying the data in the Django admin and generating some reports.

Very little custom code. Do you think I could realistically migrate and get something out of apibakery?


If you already have a Django project up and running, you wouldn't gain much by migrating, as most of the value (for the moment) is in the initial setup, ready boilerplate and sane defaults.

You could give it a spin tho (signup is free, and you can even create a demo project without signing up), any feedback is welcome!


that's pretty cool. Have you considered CLI version ?


I did not, that's an interesting idea, thanks!


I've been building www.steelroad.org to make entrepreneurship more accessible to all. There are so many great businesses that can be built with a little bit of sweat equity and process building. So far it's cost me $12 for the domain, and $50 to integrate it with substack. Haven't made a penny yet but subscriber list is growing.


Zen Note, the self-organizing notebook https://zen-note.com/about

Zen Note is an automatic second brain. Put any kind of notes into it that you want, and it automatically:

* Suggests very similar notes to append a new note to while you're typing the new note and let you append to a similar note with one click/tap * Moves new notes into their correct place in your folder structure based on the folder names and content of existing notes in your folders (and you can use nested folders) * Tags your notes with topics and keywords

It's evolving rapidly based on feedback from a handful of friends I have using it. I plan to open it up to everyone on my waitlist within the coming weeks (need to fix up mobile web experience first since a giant redesign broke it). Then will iterate on user feedback more while creating native apps.


https://textshader.com

Just a fun toy website I spent a weekend on. It costs zero to host (besides $12/year for the domain) and I don't ever plan on trying to make money on it.

I don't think I'd ever be able to beat the equivalent hourly rate of my day job with side projects haha.


Best of the web right here.


Really simple hobby project I built at one point: https://hotkeyplayer.com/

Map Spotify playlists to hotkeys so you can quickly launch them - intended use was for my D&D games - being able to quickly switch the mood from exploring a cave to being ambushed! :)


https://betterpolls.com/

Tool for running online rankings/ratings polls. Use for low stakes stuff like deciding what movie to watch, group outing destination, club elections, etc. Can require google/fb login to de-dup votes, or can allow anonymous votes.


I've created over 100 projects since last year. Most of them were made - from idea to launch - in 24 hours.

I work at ae.studio, in a division called same day skunkworks.

If you like Agency Increasing side projects check out https://ae.studio/same-day-skunkworks


I don't have a website yet, but have a working prototype of a backup tool which allows you to easily and simply backup AWS RDS Instances, Google CloudSQL Instances and (coming soon) Digital Ocean and K8s hosted Databases.

One of the main pain points I see in the DevOps space around managing backups is making sure they are actually valid, working and can be recovered. Now that I have the backup part working on AWS and Google Cloud I am working on validation rules so that backups can also be validated on a schedule so you know they are up to date and can be recovered quickly and automatically.

If this sounds like something your org could use, reach out (Email in Bio) as I am looking for a few organizations to work with for free as I develop the open source core of the product. Once that's more mature I will probably add a paid front-end and SOC compliance reporting feature for orgs that need it.


Gonna.surf: https://gonna.surf

It's a surf forecast website (now limited to Fuerteventura North, Canary islands).

I needed one location to get accurate information about the surf conditions around me - instead of having to check and compare 3 websites/apps. I also figured that other surfers where often confused by the popular surf forecast solutions.

Free, no ads, donations and sponsoring accepted (0€ and 0 deals so far).

The audience is growing slowly 1.5 years after launching, about 800 unique visitors / 5000 page views per month. The features in place and UX are not yet good enough to have people switch to it.

I'm moving very slowly on the business development side because this part of the work is less exciting for me. I would love to find a co-founder (non-technical) who would be a good match to reach product-market fit then expand the product internationally...


Cloud Outdated: https://cloud-outdated.com

Small project made with a friend. Spending a couple bucks each month to keep it up.

Premise: PERSONALIZED DIGEST OF UPDATES FOR CLOUD SERVICES

Get notified when an updated version of a cloud service you use is available by gently nudging you to plan an update!


Cook Wherever: https://cookwherever.com/

Cooking is hard. I want to cook more but I am usually too hungry to focus. I am building a site to help you with all stages of cooking, not just showing you ingredients and directions.

I have also realized the knowledge I have amassed for the “why” of cooking helps me cook without needing recipes mostly. I use ML/NLP to extract entities from ingredients and directions so contextual information can be provided to someone who is curious (ex. “you preheat your oven because …”)

I really like content creators, but following videos while cooking is a no-go for my attention span. I’m working on it, but directions will work as time stamps into a video for a recipe.

[1] https://github.com/cookwherever/cookwherever


https://legiblenews.com/

I have paying subscribers, but it’s not a ton and it mostly covers sever and maintenance costs.

I wrote about why I made this at https://legiblenews.com/about


I've launched a Substack about two topics, and I currently have no paid subscribers, but a sick URL. https://mattd.substack.com

I have two sections:

"Linked" is about our relationship with the Internet. I found that I wanted to do more writing about Internet culture that's fallen out of favour (forums, gaming clans) and also how people are using the Internet to enable their dreams (Twitch, "wanting to be an Influencer") and the psychology behind that. https://mattd.substack.com/p/i-dont-want-mmr-i-want-self-est...

"Ranked" is about competitive psychology, self-esteem, and people who play multiplayer video games to make a number (their skill rating) go up or down. This includes chess, and my own experiences trying to be more comfortable "learning by losing." A pretty apt headline is "I don't want MMR, I want self-esteem." https://mattd.substack.com/p/i-dont-want-mmr-i-want-self-est...

If those are things that interest you, I'm going to be publishing 1-2 times a week, as well as other stuff (thoughts on media, manga, anime, TV, etc) in a third "everything else" section.

I've been blogging for over 10 years, but I've always resisted centralization, and that's kind of hurt my ability to grow. After running Patreons, multiple blogs and other venues, this is my attempt to go "Okay Matt, everything's in one place, stop adding so much overhead when all you need to be doing is writing.

Even posting on this thread is really difficult for me in terms of getting over the self-promotion hump, but I'm hoping I can learn and grow as a person as I do it.


A hacker news client I made: https://github.com/Livinglist/Hacki

Also a kanji learning app if anybody is interested: https://github.com/Livinglist/Manji


metrik.one : https://metrik.one/

Advanced analytics for Mailchimp. It provides deep insights into subscriptions, opens, clicks and campaigns. In addition it comes with advanced segmentation based on subscriber behaviour instead demographic data. And it includes a cohort analysis, that helps to reduce inbound ad cost dramatically by not just focusing on CAC but prospect groups that actually open and click.

We built it out of our own need (running https://8bitnews.io/) and target newsletter senders, who prefer data driven decision making.

Instead of building the next SaaS we decided to build a desktop app. Privacy and data protection were the main drivers behind that decision.

Currently in beta, but close to a release and seeking market validation.


Not currently public aside from maybe a thousand testflight users, but I built a stock and crypto portfolio tracker app focused on design. I'm a designer and developer and this was my first time diving into Swift/SwiftUI. Started as a covid project to learn SwiftUI and became a 3 year side project, complete with full node backend to do some auth, caching, cleaning up data and various things.

It's called Stocketa. Here's the site: https://stocketa.com/

and I opened up a few hundred Testflight spots if you want to play with it:

https://testflight.apple.com/join/3dZwTVhS

Unfortunately despite the insane amount of time I've spend on it (many, many weeks with 20 hours on it) I've lost interest. It's just so hard to find quality stock/financial data that allows commercial use which I'd need to put this in the app store and charge for it. I pay a few hundred a month now for data that always has issues, APIs that don't work consistently, staff that's unresponsive/rude when I tell them their API doesn't work or is wrong. I've dealt with 3 stock data providers already and I still had to build a scraping engine to get certain bits of data. The real providers charge thousands per month for this data for good APIs, which I can't afford. All that and only for US data. International data was another headache I gave up on.

So yea, it's not a fun space to be in. If there was just a single API that was solid, worked and was not insanely expensive this would be a joy to work on. Polygon.io is the best API for this data but they don't understand indie developers and were telling me they had an amazing new plan for developers that was still close to $1k/mo.

Now I'm wondering if I should try to sell it to someone with more resources to build out.


Hi, Would you be open to some collaboration? We are developing an app for net worth tracking (Sumio.app) and bought access to APIs with stocks, ETFs, crypto, and exchange rates... We are indie developers too, our ultimate goal is to create a privacy-first mobile app for financial planning. Technically we are competitors to Stocketa, but maybe we could find a way to collaborate. Best, Lukas


Unrelated to the app your building, I've been reading your blog for a few years. Thanks for the content stammy :)


thanks!!


I created a website that is works like user-forum like Reddit, but to be used to make conversations like Twitter. Part of why I made it was my frustration with Twitter. A side idea is it could be used to store data, in parent-child format. You can use it like Twitter to start conversations or to keep track of lists or personal or project data.

It isn't wholly functional, you can not reply to a post yet, but you can make a thread initial post. Don't have a login/registration yet, just post something. For some reason if i haven't used the site in awhile I get an error, but it works on reload. If you get that let me know. It doesn't have https yet, it is here: http://www.yuyaykuna6.com/gigabots/db


My side project is my cloud jukebox music player. I first started on it in Python about 7 years ago. About a year ago I started a C++ implementation of it and that's where my focus has been. I store my music collection in an S3-compliant object store (Wasabi, about $6/month) and I have it available to me wherever I go. I listen to my music (typically on random play) while I'm working. I have no expectation of ever making any money from it, it's something I do for my own benefit.

C++ implementation: https://github.com/pauldardeau/cpp-cloud-jukebox

Original python implementation: https://github.com/pauldardeau/cloud-jukebox


Tactris: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tactris-tactical-puzzle/id1537...

I've been working on a mobile game called Tactris for the past three years. It's a puzzle game where players build lines and collect points using strategy and quick thinking. The game is available on the App Store, and I've been releasing updates and adding new features to keep it fresh.

However, despite putting time and effort into the project, I haven't been able to generate any revenue from it. I've been charging $100 per year for the game (Developer subscription), my total profit is $0.

I'll keep working on it in the future, but for now, it's just a passion project.


I feel like the screenshots and descriptions make it feel like “just another Tetris clone” and doesn’t really show/explain how it’s different, or even how the game actually plays?

Explaining a bit better how it’s different to Tetris and why that makes it fun would go a long way to convincing people to try it.


Thanks! It's not a tetris clone, may be it can be my selling point :D


https://stockoptions.io/

I'm a value investor and found that most options trading tools out there are focused on day/momentum traders and were missing the necessary skillset that value investors use when selecting options, so I made this.

My friends and I use it daily, it's helped us considerably with our trades (and in that way has made us lots of money), but we haven't done the marketing necessary to get this tool to other value investors. We also might need to put some tutorials on how to use the tools. It'd be cool to get paid subscribers at some point so it could cover its own cost and some other tools we want to make.

If anyone is interested in this type of tool, I'd be very interested in getting their feedback!


Really interesting. I have been looking at building something similar to just educate Apes.

Also interested in building an audit trail (portfolio tracker) for financial analysts in mainstream media, to keep it more honest. Think trustpilot for analysts but with a portfolio tracker curated by volunteers when they recommend trades


I love the idea of tracking people's predictions or buy/sell calls because I believe 99%+ are doing poorly and getting people hyped up just to lose money, it would be great to be able to show them their own record (I think many don't even track their own record).


TV Show tracking / countdown site https://tvdown.co

I built it 13 years ago and has had minimal updates since. The code is shocking. But I maintain it to a functional state because some users use it (as do I). I bet most here could do a way better job in a few hours, but it is what it is.

It runs on a $5/m server that run other stuff, so cost's are minimal. According to Google ~ 60 users use it per day.

I recently patched on top a modern / minimalist view only UI: https://tvdown.co/?style=min It works best when you've selected some shows in the "Personalize" page. I made it mostly just for me, there are a few other "hidden" styles.


I've been running https://chat.dog for 7 years — don't spend any time on it but it's a fun side project. Building https://mailgrid.app now.


Hi! Are you looking for a partner for chat.dog? I'll be happy to work on project. If you want, please reach me ferhat@ekofi.science - Thanks!


Spread the love: https://spread-the.love

Something I put together partly as societal comment and partly to make people a little happier. Turns out making others happier makes me happier.

And no, it's definitely not designed to turn a profit.


Kruptein: https://github.com/jas-/kruptein

A node.js module which implements a standard API for symmetric encryption and does so by providing the requisite key derivation from a supplied secret, strong key and cipher selections, performs validate then decrypt of cipher text while supporting most language character sets and ASN.1 encoding ensuring compatibility with most if not all database engines.

Used best practices documentation and am currently using famous cryptographers throughout history to name each release.

Example: v3.0.4 Étienne Bazeries - He is best known for developing the "Bazeries Cylinder", and is described as "one of the greatest natural cryptanalysts the science has seen".


I recently made https://namegenerator.band, which generates band names. I pulled it out of a game project I'm working on for fun. Just doing my part to create ad-free alternatives to SEO spam farms!


Tapehendge: https://hec.works/tapehendge/

Tapehendge is a phish music streamer I built because I wasn’t happy with the Phish live streaming app (no single song repeat) and the UIs of other tape-based websites didn’t have a friendly enough (to me) interface to just open up and start listening to music. The project won’t ever earn me any money, but it brings me so much joy to open up at work and just burn through some code listening to a good ‘First Tube’ on repeat from my own website that I’ll happily pay the $11/month cost for as long as I possibly can. And it’s so fun to play PM and ask folks what could be better about the site and go implement it.


AudioWrangler: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/audiowrangler/id1565701763?mt=...

Running verrrrry close to $0 net profit factoring in App Store membership costs.

AudioWrangler is a native macOS (native as in not Electron) app that automatically switches to your favorite audio input/output devices automatically. When your computer wakes up in the morning there's a 30% chance it selects my internal speakers rather than DAC. Also has other nice features such as optionally muting your internal speaker when switching to it, which prevents your speakers from blasting out in a shared office if your BT headset dies.


https://github.com/ericoporto/agstoolbox

It's something like the Unity Hub or JetBrains Toolbox but intended to be used with Adventure Game Studio. I do more adventure game studio work, but I really wanted to get the toolbox working good. The idea is to have both a command line and gui application so you can use the GUI application but also use the command line version to set up ags in a CI environment and also in the future to do other things, so it would have some worker functionality too, similar to how game maker can dispatch build/signing to a macOS computer if you are using Game Maker from a Windows machine in the same network.


Translate Thread: https://translatethread.com

translatethread is an online service that quickly and easily makes translated threads available for your reading

it is especially useful when threads are longer than let's say 5 tweets.

e.g. this (https://translatethread.com/thread/1611826522196742144) is translated version of this (https://twitter.com/d0l0h0va/status/1551663292493565957) which had 309(!!) tweets.

I currently make $0 from running this tool.


https://fluent.im

Learn a new language by creating a mind palace. It used to be a flashcard app with dictionary and English only, but now it's for more languages and has different learning approach.

I'm working on it for 4+ years, trying to build a good product people use before placing a price tag.

https://nofuss.io

Blogging platform I built as New Year hacking project, it doesn't have registration and all interaction happens through the email. You can email markdown and get it converted to the website.

I built it to address my own wish for such tool but failed to find any potential customers. I plan to use it though, to host blogs for all my other projects.


re nofuss In case you're not aware, Posterous used to do blogging via email for ~3yrs befoer they pivoted to something else tangentally related (i forget what), and then they went out of business.

It's a great idea, and there may be enough business to support a single person. It was enough to keep them going for 3 yrs before the pivot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posterous

in tangentially related news which might be of interest to you and others reading this: Years ago I wrote a tool to allow folks to blog via email to a Jekyll Powered blog.

https://github.com/masukomi/JekyllMail


Thanks for sharing, I've found out they started https://posthaven.com/, what basically is more polished version of nofuss.

What I find interesting, they sell blogging platform but don't have a blog themselves. I wonder how many blogs they're hosting and how do they acquire new customers.


Lazybug: https://lazybug.ai

Learn Chinese the lazy way, by watching TV. The selection of shows is pretty good due to hard-sub OCR. It's free and open source, with content served through a CDN and a minimal (optional) backend for auth and data syncing. All user data is stored locally in the browser. Not exactly released yet, but it's getting there. Browser extension is also in the works for videos not on Youtube (or not embeddable).

The main idea is gradually hide more and more words in the subtitles so as to minimize the amount of information you need for comprehension. Once you have completely empty subtitles and you can still understand, then viola, you're fluent!


Campah: https://www.campah.com/

A linktree clone, but I was annoyed it was so tiny on desktop, so I made one. No customers, but had a ton of scammers use it for free sites. So I locked it down to paid.


I made and operate a small app called [FishHarmony](https://www.fishharmony.com/). It's a simple app for iPhone that tells you what fish species (fresh or salt, I offer both) are compatible with fish of different species! So if you want to see if Tetras get along with Rasboras, for example, you can check my app/website! I've done no marketing and get something ~200 active users per month and 1K+ downloads lifetime. Not much, but still cool that people are using it!

I pay about 7/month for a Heroku instance and the stupid $99 a year for the App Store. Working on some freemium apps that will hopefully offset those costs.


EditGym - text editing training: https://www.editgym.com/text-editing-training/

It's a website for practicing manipulating text (start -> target, like a diff) quickly (timed) and efficiently (few keystrokes). The allowed keyboard shortcuts are only the "common" ones, that you can use in most "normal" (not Vim, not Emacs) text editors or IDEs.

I made this page not only because I was interested in building it, but also because I actually wanted to have such a training tool. Turned out, I really like using it, but almost nobody else does. :D (There are ads, but the revenue is basically zero.)


AppHunt https://apphunt.org

It’s a newsletter that sends out posts about interesting iOS apps every week. I bought the newsletter on microns.io in December 2022.

It’s a ghost blog / newsletter hosted on a VPS which isn’t expensive. However I’m using mail gun and that part is pricey. I’m thinking about switching to something else soon but mailgun integrates pretty easily with ghost.

I write software at work so I figured a newsletter would take me out of my comfort zone. I have to do things I don’t think I’m great at like writing and marketing. I find the deadline of putting out an issue every Monday keeps me honest.

Also I love these posts it’s fun scrolling through all the different projects!


Hmm, I think you could buy a subreddit https://www.microns.io/startup-listings/reddit-growth-hackin... - but AppHunt is good too anyway!


https://weblum.photos/

Sells a photo sharing app in the form of individual SPAs hosted on S3. People don't like to enter their credit card to buy, but at least the pay wall keeps the bots away.


I haven't touched it in years, but during grad school I created a fully operational browser-based app for integrated note-taking and reference management for academic projects, based on locally stored markdown files, and designed to minimize attentional breaks: https://github.com/rkp8000/hypothesize .

I ended up using it for the remainder of my PhD; however, it was unfortunately a bit too easy to accidentally delete an entire note document, and I never got around to fixing it (although at least one other person ended up using it as the primary tool for their grad studies also :) ).

It definitely earned me no more than $0/month.


https://switchcenter.app/

SwitchCenter aims to improve the experience of managing your opened apps/windows on macOS.

With this, you can display your opened windows grouped in columns (by application). You can also also display the minimized windows in the same column as the opened windows and allows you to pin applications so they always display in the same order. On top of that, it allows for (arguably) better windows control (close, minimize, full-screen, Zoom In / Out, etc.).

It started as an experiment because I was looking for a cleaner, more organized way to arrange the (many) opened windows.

I'm thinking of adding browser tabs somewhere in there (maybe).


Crocodile: https://www.crocodile.dev/

Better code reviews for GitHub. It integrates with GitHub to provide a better reviewing and commenting experience for pull requests. Free for open source!


I think about this space a lot - glad you're adventuring in it.


ArchiSteamFarm: https://github.com/JustArchiNET/ArchiSteamFarm

I've been developing ASF for last 8 years with very active attitude, 10k commits with over 7k commits made by me (98.6% of all excluding bots and automation). While I do offer various donation options, the program was always free and open-source, and the overall amount of hours I've put into this would probably make at least several years of senior-level salary by now.

One of my finest creations that helped a lot of Steam users. The program was used approximately at 2.5 million of Steam accounts overall, having solid 30k downloads of each monthly release.


Love this program! Thanks for making it


I'm making a desktop game to be sold on itch.io for 3$ (currently making 0$ because not out yet and it's difficult to make money with games anyway). I'm using JavaScript with the Kaboom.js library and Tauri as the desktop wrapper.

My game is called HARVEST MOVE and it's a grid based movement game where you have to harvest as many plants as possible without getting killed by various animals.

It's a puzzle game disguised as an arcade game.

The game is still in development but I've started posting gifs, screenshots and some art of the game already on Twitter.

Here is my twitter link if you want to check that out : https://twitter.com/JSLegendDev


Quite a few... Off the top of my head:

- Track emails sent using Apple Mail https://bigballi.com/track-emails

- Add PurpleAir reading to your Apple Watch https://bigballi.com/purpleair

- WhatsApp send message without adding to contacts https://bigballi.com/wa

- Create your own easy to remember zoom landing page https://myzoom.me/

- Extract all email addresses from Gmail mailbox

- Crop & post-process GoPro videos

- Amazon price drop notifier


1. Ask me anything GPT3 https://github.com/pythops/amagpt3

2. Open vision API https://github.com/openvisionapi


https://navbarlinks.com/

i have a sort of a linktree, but the links are pushed out to my satellite sites via js snippet.

i wanted a way to link all my $0 side projects to one another as easily as possible -- that is, add my new project to my 'universal navbar' and have it deployed everywhere instantly.

so, when i spin up my new project, foobar.com, i'll go to navbarlinks.com, log in, add this link, save, and see it show up as a new header menu item on all my zero-dollar sites.

an example of this dynamic navbar of links is at that site itself - at the top for now.

i thought of adding new features, but wanted to see if anyone besides me found it useful. not so far that i know of.


As in the last thread about projects that didn't make into top HN https://collanon.com remains a free web app for your private discussions and confrontations. ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯


I'm working on something that uses immersive/360/vr video for seniors who don't have the ability to travel or see loved ones easily. I'd love some help if you have an interest in the VR space or helping an aging population. SLVR.ca


Early Bird Edit: https://earlybirdedit.com/

I hate scrolling through twitter, so I built a service to email me the best tweets in my feed. It's self signup and there's a discount code in the signup process if you'd like to be an Alpha user/avoid the fee.

A handful of friends are using it and for the most part it's doing what I wanted it to do.

Not sure what the future holds given the recently cancelled 3rd party apps debacle.

P.S. I adventured into writing this on the Firebase stack (Firestore and Cloud Functions). Probably wouldn't again – the cold starts are simply too slow and the mitigations they suggest haven't been effective.


Celestina: https://celestina.app/

A dating app for events (e.g. a party, a music festival), where you can interact with people invited to the same event as you.

The app is for both the event organizer and the participants. Organizers create a virtual event and share a QR code for participants to join. After joining, participants can like each other and interact through the app.

"Celestina" means matchmaker in Spanish. The term is the name of a character from a Spanish literature classic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Celestina)


Emulators! A lot of work and multiple skillsets and needed to make a working emulator, let alone an accurate one, yet most of these projects demand no payment.

I contribute to the BizHawk frontend, which doesn't currently take donations. But when it does, we'll definitely be paying it forward to the many "emulator core" developers whose FOSS projects allow us to claim 40+ systems emulated.

I'd like to shoutout alyosha, who recently left our team but has contributed many bespoke cores and remains active in hardware research circles; and also endrift, the solo dev of mGBA; LIJI, the solo dev of SameBoy; Arisotura, the solo dev of melonDS; and Eke-Eke, the solo dev of Genesis Plus GX.


Not actually a profit-making thing, but a "community service" side project I work on is this, a Ruby community news and blog RSS/Atom feed aggregator:

https://rubyland.news/


We're building a general purpose AI Tutor chrome extension to make learning easier for everyone. It's like a ChatGPT that remembers what it taught you the previous semester. The dream is that students will be able graduate earlier because our AI integrated multiple courses for them. Our first prototype will be out by February.

https://conceptionary.app/

Follow us on LinkedIn if you'd like to get an update when we launch. https://www.linkedin.com/mwlite/company/conceptionary


About a decade back, I had built a Chrome extension[1] to search MDN from Chrome address bar and navigate directly to the reference without opening a search page. It has slowly been gaining users over the years organically and there are enough users that I have to spend a couple of dollars to keep the (Google) search API up.

It doesn't have millions of users, but I'm glad that few thousands of users that use it find it valuable in their lives.

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mdn-search/ffpifae...


https://setwayback.com/

Schedule archive.org daily snapshot. Archive web pages with: weather, environmental and financial data; sport results; twitter accounts and many more.

Made to scratch my own itch.


https://edalerts.app/

A companion tool for the space sim game Elite Dangerous — useless to anyone that doesn't play the game. I have had a couple of donations from kind users.


https://linear-equations.com/

Solve systems of linear equations. A tool I made during/for my studies. No idea if that counts as a proper side project since it took like a day (?) or so to make.

https://sudolver.app/

Solve sudokus by taking a picture with your mobile phone. Only works with sudokus found in Switzerland (?). Not sure if that format is used anywhere else.

https://wucheplaner.ch/

Create weekly plans for your pupils in primary school. Again, for people in Switzerland.


I just launched https://www.formyschool.org

It is a platform for schools to manage Read-A-Thons and other fundraisers. My wife is managing the Read-A-Thon for my kid’s school this year and they considered using a service that wanted to take up to 30% of the proceeds. I’m sure the other platform would be great, but 30% is a lot, so it inspired me to build it. I also tried to incorporate gamification features like unlockable avatars and leaderboards to encourage the kids to participate.

If you are on the PTA of your school and want to try it out, send me a note and I can help get it set up for you. Free.


https://ryanblakeley.net/dogs - I train dogs part-time. I specialize in fixing extreme behavior problems, but I also do advanced training for dogs that are already well-behaved.

I account it as less than breakeven because I do a lot of free sessions and give away equipment. I did not have a web page or a donation link setup for a long time. If I had someone video-taping sessions I think it would do a lot to showcase how I work, and how consistently I get results. But it seems hard to justify asking someone to spend time on that when there's so little revenue.


https://tenki.so is a tabular representation of the 7-day weather forecast across Japan, which I made for traveling opportunistically.

After the JMA updated their 7-day forecast to be harder to read at a glance, I started pulling and processing the data hourly using Cloudflare workers and trying to present it densely and intuitively using Flareact. It’s been fun exercising the limits of workers (streaming XML at first), organizing the data effectively, and playing with visualization… as well as having a great way to pick a destination when a spell of dark weather is approaching home.


https://okzest.com

My brother and I have built a tool aimed at email marketers, allowing them to create images with merge tag information on top.

We are at $0 and now know why you should start marketing on day 1, this marketing stuff is hard!

We have a solid MVP and there are so many possibilities to improve / expand the target market.

Future versions could show a retailers best selling product and have the image dynamically change to 'low in stock', 'sold out' etc. If a retailer has multiple stores, we could show information specific to the closest store to you.

We want to get some customers and let them help guide the roadmap.


Aggregated Crypto Job Board: https://www.arcanecareers.com

I'm getting back into web development after a long hiatus and wanted to build something relatively straightforward. Was pleasantly surprised to see less JavaScript fatigue than before. Stuck with vanilla Rails though (ViewComponent is my poor man's version of React) and Tailwind for CSS which gets the job done, no need for a SPA.

Then started playing around with AI/ML for automatic categorization of jobs into departments which has been a fun and educational exercise.

Will implement the ability for companies to post jobs soon!


I wrote a scheduling and training application for fighter squadrons. Used in a number of active duty and ANG sqs. Not sure how to monetize it. Also have a target imagery generator for training that's widespread on one aircraft type.


Ah yes, the famously cash-strapped military... ;-)


How are you not NDA'd to the wazoo...?


Astory: https://astory.dev/

I started this website about two years ago. Astory’s goal is to reinvent the process of building software to start with the design first. The idea is to have a dev tool which displays a live representation of a system. Astory will create development tasks as a result of altering the system design rather than creating tasks on a board and attempting to visualize the effect.

I hope to make this website collaborative and allow for multiple ingestion formats to create a system design rather than just drag and drop like cloudformation or terraform templates.


Built a password protected daily journal app to encourage myself to write everyday.

Wanted something very minimal and trustworthy and where all my data lives on my device and not on a server somewhere. Also wanted to see stats on how often I write and how much.

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/a-journal-a-day/id1659288235

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.georgejose...


https://getsavory.co/

I am making a minimal Pocket/Instapaper/Pinboard replacement. It supports tags as a first-class feature and no-feed as an anti-feature.


https://wiki.superfamicom.org/

A custom made wiki for documents and resources related to developing software (games) for the Super Nintendo / Super Famicom. Started in 2010 and still going strong, switched software a few years ago from Ruby to Node.

https://sfc.fm/

An online emulator for the SPC700, the sound chip from the Super Nintendo / Super Famicom with a large selection of the game library's OST to listen to. Designed to scratch a personal itch and play with Emscripten years ago.


FIX Parser: https://fixparser.targetcompid.com/

A website which allows people in financial trading companies to more easily understand the FIX protocol.

Obviously this is a very niche app, but very useful! It is somewhat well known in the industry (among the type of people who use FIX).

Amusingly, recently a friend forwarded me a website, run by a prestigious financial software company, which is CLEARLY a copy of my website! They are marketing their site on LinkedIn and, I’m sure, other places.

I keep thinking of developing this firther. I have several ideas, just lack the time.


Blog Streak https://blogstreak.com | BlogWithNotion is taken as of now but will get it I think.

It's an another Notion to Blog integration service.

Who can benefit from it?

This project is for people who running a static blog because of their scary speed and publishing it by git push.

Who can't benefit from it?

People who don't love blogging and hate Notion. Sorry guys I did integrate with Notion because it's one of the tool I come across which can satisfy the hectic Hugo markdown properties.

Price? I set $5 per year and I think that's worth the month to spent for this little integration tool.

Any questions? please.


I've been using RSS-to-Email services for almost a decade but wasn't really happy with any of them. So I launched https://feedmail.org/.

I never really expected to make money (and the service is priced to be very low-cost without a huge margin) but currently we are approximately breaking even (about $20 negative after 13 months). So it looks like in the long-term it will probably pay for itself.

But the main thing for me is that it behaves exactly like I want (although I have already added a few features that I didn't want for other users).


https://logicboard.com - a collaborative code editor, more like < $0/mo considering no revenue + AWS expenses :)

I call it a side-project turned in to side-expense


Themes For App : https://themesfor.app It is a site where you can download free bootstrap templates for your side-projects. I've been running it for over 5 years now and earned zero out of it. First thing that I want to mention is that in the first place, it was not my primary intension to earn from it but from the start of this year I have started looking forward to monetizing it. At the moment it costs me $0 to run except the standard domain cost. But in starting it costs me $500+ for the ESP.


I was annoyed that I had to install FUSE on my Mac just to be able to browse my Borg backup repositories (it's a mildly arduous process of disabling some security settings if it's not installed already), so I made an Electron GUI with the help of ChatGPT and Copilot: https://github.com/Netruk44/borg-repository-explorer

I really don't expect this to ever make money, I just had a need and a desire to learn/explore how Electron works (Sorry! I know people hate it for how heavy it is, hah).


Shorter Shower: https://shortershower.com It's a mobile application that helps you take a shorter shower to save water, time, and electricity.


Comparing EV range from a specific location, e.g. from Chicago: https://www.range.guide/?location=USA,Illinois,Chicago&vehic...

Why? Before relocating I was looking for an electric vehicle that would allow me to commute to work on a single charge and charge the car back at home over night. Couldn’t find a way to do that easily so I created a page that lets you set coarse starting location and see the range to nearby cities. Learned about Svelte and maps in general.


Employbl: https://www.employbl.com/ kinda embarrassing we're not making any money from it. Hopefully that'll change this year


https://paymewith.xyz/

Made this to quickly share payment options across multiple apps such as Venmo, Cash, etc.

No intention of monetizing, just a utility I wanted to exist.


EarTrumpet https://github.com/File-New-Project/EarTrumpet MIT

Price/revenue: $0.00* (a few random one-time donations did occur, which is very kind)

An alternate audio mixer for Windows. Originally built in ~2012 to manage the audio of those new newfangled Immersive apps in Windows 8. (Microsoft shipped Windows 8 without the ability to manage the audio levels of Immersive apps. They were invisible to sndvol.exe! Wild times.) Supports per-app leveling, re-routing audio streams, and some other bits. We even have an add-on framework that we haven't shipped and is in perpetual dev-branch-only status right now due to time/support concerns.

It is now used by millions of folks, made an appearance on a Linus tips show, etc. Am slowly modernizing the app (app development on Windows is a dumpster fire right now) but probably not as quickly as folks want.

Microsoft started work on providing a similar mixer, hidden in development builds of Windows 11. It will be interesting to see what happens there.


My current labor of love is https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/ where I get to share advice (mine and others) with new devs.


I made https://packagemap.co to help me visualise the class, method, and type usages in the codebases I work on.

It comes with a parser you run on your machine which generates a graph of your code. On the site you can use the filter syntax to dig into the code.

I find it hard to understand how code fits together in the traditional file-tree viewer that you get in GitHub or IDE, so the tool helps a lot in code review or exploring code.

I've made $0 from it. But I suspect that's because no one really knows how it works or how to use it.


https://ossdatbase.com

A catalogue of open source software. Recently it is picking up a little steam. (https://www.similarweb.com/website/ossdatabase.com)

Costs me $10 a month in hosting, Rails app. I have a job now, but plan to keep updating it. The site is open source https://github.com/prithvi16/ossdatabase


How do you think of this as different from https://alternativeto.net/


site seems down.


looks like they typo'd, it's https://ossdatabase.com


Thank you! I missed it.


I'm building an End-to-End-Encryption app for Discord private chat, called discryptor.io [0]. It uses a Discord bot to deliver encrypted messages between users, rather than directly using the unprotected Discord chat.

I created an MVP for Windows but unfortunately haven't had the time and resources to make a mobile app yet. I would love to hear not just feedback on the execution, but the idea itself.

Also I'm not sure how monetizable the idea is but I'd like to give it a shot.

[0] https://www.discryptor.io


Ergomake: www.ergomake.dev

Every time you open a pull-request, we give you a link to a preview environment.

Think Vercel previews, but for everything.

The setup takes a few seconds because we simply pick up a docker-compose file from your GitHub repo — if it runs on your machine, it will run on Ergomake.

We've got a working product, and we're now implementing billing and setting up free trials.

If anyone is interested in chatting, I'd be happy to talk through what we do at lucas.costa at getergomake dot com (or fill out the form on the website — no sales person will email you, it'll be me, an engineer, I promise).


I'm not going to go into details for the purposes of anonymity, but I took over a website that is a resource for a community I'm very involved in in order to prevent that website from being shut down. It costs me money to keep afloat, but I keep it afloat to maintain it as an entry point for the community. It does come with some fringe benefits that probably makes it worth paying for as well, but "worth" is very subjective here.

It makes a little revenue with ads and Amazon referrals due to the traffic volume but it operates at a loss.


This year I made a beginners video course for managers to get up to speed on testing, Ready to Test: https://testfromthetop.com/ReadyToTest/

I'm a senior engineer specialized in test automation. I realized the real challenge with testing isn't technical, it's leadership buy-in.

I haven't really launched yet, revising my copy and tweaking everything, building a marketing strategy. If it gets some traction I have more advanced classes planned.


I'm no longer really working on it, but I was developing a "newsbetting" site, where you could read de-titled news articles and place a bet on the political bias of the article (far left, left, center, right, far right).

There's a number of issues with the site, but you can view it here if you'd like. I'll load some articles just in case anyone wants to check it out, but as I said, I'm not really working on it anymore.

https://www.rashomonnews.com/


I created a game where you have to guess the location of a city on a world map.

https://witc.theoi.de/

I created it to play something during covid with my friends in video calls. Now it is still online, costs about 4€/m in hosting and is played by some people around the world. I would love to add some features (other player icon) with micro payments but I haven't found something which allows transactions with ~1cent. And I don't want to make it more expensive.


GuardToro: https://guardtoro.com

Started as plug-and-play security for web apps 5 years ago. The space got saturated so I decided to take on a new challenge and secure firmware. Securing "crypto" came about out of my network and demand, but then crypto took a dive again :)

I feel super grateful to finally have others working on it with me, but we all work on it for free for now...

I'm super excited about this space, specifically about securing ARM firmware. There is a ton of room to grow!


I am building a permanent library whose subject is sustainability, I can't make money on it, because some of the book are copyrighted... So it is a blockchain storage based PWA offline first webapp that uses Arweave as a storage to permanently store knowledgeable books on the topics of sustainability. The goal of the library is to give PEOP;LE A CHANCE TO SURVIVE IN THIS WORLD BY USING OLD AND RECENT TECHNIQUES THAT ALLOWS us TO LEAVE IN A SUSTAINABLE LIFESTYLE - GOOD FOR US, THE FAMILY, THE EARTH AND THE ECONOMY.


Opendoctor: Find practicing doctors based on their research.

For fun I created a project that merges practicing office doctor data with pubmed. If you need a doctor who is published in Mohs surgery AND want them to have an office near you - this is the place for you! And that is why it's a waste of money to host it lol.

EG: https://www.opendoctor.io/research/?research_papers=mohs&zip...


Balto: https://www.getbalto.com/

Repository hosting for Apt and RPM and a couple of other formats. No real customers but I do offer it to a couple notable open-source projects: Helm for their unofficial Apt package (which I personally maintain) which gets 200,000+ downloads/month and Authelia (15k Github stars). The biggest single cost is StackPath CDN's bandwidth (a bit more than $100/mo) so I'm planning to move to BunnyCDN soon.


Second Star

https://secondstargame.com/

Sci-fi game without combat, inspired by games like Myst and Firewatch. Been working on it with friends the last 4 years. I direct the project and compose the music. It costs me around 1000 a year. Before I got into web development I worked in games. Definitely a passion project but eventually we hope to flip the switch on the Steam page. There’s a free demo available but we’ve overhauled much of the gameplay since releasing it.


Feedmas: https://feedmas.com

Collecting feedback and customer support tool. For one of our products, we got tired of using a customer support tool that did too many things, we wanted something simpler but without compromising the core of the intent - supporting customers and helping with their issues. So, we made one of our own and have been using successfully for over a year and decided to make it available for others. Got some signups but not paying customers yet.


https://uidrafter.com

It's free: https://free.uidrafter.com


I'm not really trying to make money on it, but nevertheless I'm losing ~$55/mo running https://www.dailycodeforces.com.

It's kind of ridiculous that's what it costs just to run a service that sends a daily email to its users.

The price breakdown is $20/mo for sendgrid, $15/mo for hosted postgres, and $20/mo for vercel pro so my cron job doesn't time out (pro gives upgrades you from 10 seconds of execution time to 60 seconds).


a few wordle variants

https://xordle.org (two puzzles on one board)

https://fibble.xyz (lies to you once per row)

https://warmle.org (clues based on alphabetical proximity)

i don't have any intention of making any money from them. just my contribution to a fun and ad-free internet

all 3 coded by me but the twist for fibble was from k & r garfield and the twist for warmle was from mike elliott


I launched one of my games http://anagramica.com in 2013, and has negative revenue and zero maintenance requirements. It’s on an ancient cloud instance. It has an active API that powers several other games (probably more than I’m aware of!). It’s so old that it predates free SSL certs like letsencrypt, and I don’t care enough to spend the time on wiring it up.

I’m also hesitant to post it here because I don’t want it to go down if it gets too much traffic!


ShareClinic: https://www.share.clinic

A pandemic project that was supposed to help people post better links on social media. Meaning if you post links to content that you are providing on e.g. Zoom, it doesn't populate your listing with the open graph images and text from https://zoom.us, but you can decide how you want to decorate your post with some relevant imagery and description.


Linksaber: https://www.linksaber.com

Put your read-later links into a custom weekly newsletter.

Availability: iOS, Telegram

Price: $2/month after a free month trial


TurboSearch: A MSVC extension frontend for the excellent command line utility, The Silver Searcher (Ag).

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=CaseyBan...

Price: $12

I use this tool myself daily as my main search tool inside MSVC. I built it because I was frustrated with how slow other tools were, and before I built this I would use ag in my console instead.

I've sold one copy, but I solved my own problem so I'm happy!


Daily Cals: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/daily-cals/id1614789690

An iOS App that provides a visualization of how often you hit your daily exercise goals and compete with friends (using data transferred through gamekit) I initially launched the app at $2 and hit the brick wall that is paid app user acquisition. I lowered the price to free for a bit to see if it catches on at all.


tello.tv was started by Josh Comeau but I took it over and add to it frequently. I have some ideas that can make this better with more users (inherently data) but right now it's free.


I created a mobile app which purpose is to help people keep track of their project ideas..

Nothing special really, the app gained little traction but I use it personally.

As a person who has often wandering thoughts, I found the best way to capture them is to write them down.

So I have basically 30 project ideas (mostly mobile and web apps) and I don't know which one to start and keep track of them, so I decided to help myself and built the app.

I can rate my own ideas on some parameters, label them, and sort them by their status. It helps with having a clear mind.


https://mingleview.com Free meeting software (10$ per month for servers. No paid users.

https://myspeed.ai Gives speed & signal quality of wifi/mobile. 30$ monthly on servers. No revenue so far

https://zerofilterselfies.com Patented AI based Android app to take quick selfies. No paid users. No ad revenue.


The ISP I started: https://gardunha.net/en/

Currently looses money and causes me stress, but it is pretty cool.


BTV Daily: https://btvdaily.com

It's a hyper-local algorithmically generated newsletter about Burlington, VT with about 500 local subscribers (population of Burlington 45,000). I have tried selling t-shirts and sponsorships and although I've sold some t-shirts and had one sponsor, it doesn't cover the MailChimp fees and advertising I've done over the years; which is pretty much okay with me because I see it as a hobby.


Chargabull - EV advertising

https://www.chargabull.com

We want to bridge the gap between local communities and EV chargers in the UK.

We will install the charger for free and subsidise the electricity from local companies advertising on the screens.

Anyone can buy an advertising slot on demand and then update content instantly via WebSockets and out android platform.

We have built a programmatic DOOH platform by accident - had no idea about that space.

Currently have 2 on trial and hope to get 25-50 installed this year


WhatCharitiesWant.org - search charity wishlists in the US

chatgptisdown.onrender.com - a pay per query version of chatgpt, originally marketed when it was often down and you couldn’t pay for use yet


Kowwa: https://knowwa.com

It is still a "Solution in search of further Problems" though. I was looking for good solution of proper placeholders in GoogleDocs for i.E. Employment Contracts to quickly fill in fields, collaborate on text inputs, get suggestions from the past. So I created this tool that nicely interacts with predefined GDocs.

I even created a Raycast extension to generate Documents directly in Raycast!

Revenue 0$, costs about 10$/month.


I'm about break even on a learning project for me: https://chrono.quest -- until you factor in my dev/user support time lol

It's a bite-sized daily history game, much inspired by Wordle.

Why do it?

Every once in a while someone emails about how they play it with their friends or family every day and it helps them keep in touch.

Also, as a data engineer, I wanted to understand more of what goes into deploying a consumer web app. Turns out I much prefer crunching data :)


Spotify + Anki is an app that helps you learn to recognize songs directly within the Anki flashcard program. It's based upon an integration with your personal Spotify account, and uses your followed artists to generate Anki cards. The card itself triggers playback of a given song (at a random location) on your device and asks you to recall the artist.

There's a demo video on the homepage: https://www.zdone.co/


I’ve recently developed a simple web app for taking notes on a map: https://notemapp.com It’s like Google Maps but with drawing tools. Here’s the GitHub project if you find any more bugs/issues: https://github.com/notemapp/notemapp-web

I’m gonna use it on my next travel for tracing routes and saving some points of interest.


Not side projects, but I'm a solo founder with 2 projects not currently generating revenue. So I feel like I'm within range of the request.

LogicTrader: https://logictrader.xyz - automated trading, currently crypto only and demo mode only.

InventAI: https://inventai.xyz - will be a toolbox for generative AI services. Can't say much more before the launch.


For logic trader, remember to factor in slippage and market depth.


Regarding slippage, there is some unavoidable latency, especially since users must run their own clients which contact exchanges to place orders. That's for security reasons. To start with, only market orders will be available. However I can add limit orders as an option, which are likely the real answer.

With market depth, a strategy can include various signals to avoid problems, e.g. volume.


Movienight: https://getmovienight.app/

It’s a chrome extension plus mobile companion app that adds social commentary to Netflix (We’ll add support for other streaming services later). Reason for building this, was well we had an idea so why not build it :)

Have launched it with friends and family and got positive reception. Won’t see this making any money but the process of going from idea to reality has taught us a LOT.


https://pi.ctu.re

Nice domain hack for a photography hosting app. Only one user over the last decade. It made absolutely no money but it doesn't cost me much to host it so it's not an issue at all.

It's open source in case anyone would want to run it and I'm in the process of updating the app.

My only regret is giving up on implementing Activity Pub years ago. It could have been interesting for the app to take part of the fediverse.


https://goodenoughgolfers.com/

It's a little free tool for planning groups with good mixing and various constraints, based on a near-solution to a neat combinatorics problem. Originally designed for teachers planning discussion groups, and I've had folks use it for lunch tables and board game tournaments. Recently I get about 1k uniques per month (but that might be a lot of bots).


Slidge, XMPP gateways to IM walled gardens: https://slidge.im

0$ a month and no plan to grow.

XMPP is considered dead by many but I enjoy using it and bridging other IM services to it is fun. It helps me writing less crappy code at my day job, where I'm not a dev but rather a data scientist or something like that.

For fun I also made it a way to receive notifications on replies to my HN comments.

I'd be thrilled to receive contributions and feedback. ;-)


https://DeckOfCardio.com

Deck of Cards Workout for iOS and Android. Pick a card, get the 3 of Spades, do 3 pushups.


https://www.artdiario.com/

A new piece of art on your desktop wallpaper every day.

Try it out! It's free! Expose yourself to art!

I have no idea how I will monetize this, or if I ever will. I just want more people using it. I think it's such a fun app, and the effect is subtle. You passively get exposed to a new piece of art every day, and everyone who has the app sees the same art, so you can talk about it. Neat!


I'm not sure if many rowers are also programmers, but I'm building a rowing app making $0 per month.

iOS only for now: https://apps.apple.com/ie/app/oxun/id1624866789

Works with any Bluetooth rowing machine (WaterRower etc), currently building support for Concept2 PM5 machines. It's one of the few apps that allows you to row indoors and outdoors.

Cheers!


I've fallen into the chess craze.

I put together www.chessrapid.com for my own use. It's a version of Puzzle Rush / Puzzle Storm that has the added benefit of: 1) filtering by tactical themes and 2) seeing what themes you are frequently slow on / incorrect on. This way I can narrow in on the tactical themes that I need to improve pattern recognition on (e.g. I can take a break from Mate in 1 and Mate in 2; I really need to work on middle game).


Thanks for making this, just gave it a try. You might be able to work with the chess.com people in a way that might generate some $$. Or, better, work with the lichess folks (not for $$). I'd like to be working on something like this. Meanwhile, I think I'll run it some. Holes in my tactics especially in blitz showing up too often at the local chess Meetup.


@chrisco23 can I trouble you to send me an email at vince@chessrapid.com?


Ha ha, none of my projects make any money.

I did a couple free solitaire games to learn Javascript [1]

Also a free moon-lander game to learn HTML5 [2]

And I am currently working on two more projects destined to not make any money.

[1] https://kardland.com

[2] https://www.mooncraft2000.com


Athenil: https://athenil.com

A news publication focussed on providing news that's light and easy to read. We keep things short, while providing readers an easy way to find things if necessary. We don't plan on having advertisements and looking for alternative sources of income. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Do leave a comment or a reaction if you visit the page


I've just released VegLog, a iOS app that helps me track my vegetable growing. I wanted an app that would let me compare my harvest over time, and look for patterns in growing conditions to help me maximise growth. The app has had some downloads, but no sales yet.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/veglog/id6444013681


I made https://profilepeacock.com/ on a whim after messing around with the Twitter API to make a tweet that quote-tweeted itself (quinetweet).

It gives you a lil progress bar on your twitter profile pic.

I don't plan on monetising it and it costs next to nothing as it's just on a cronjob on my laptop. It's a fun lil thing to keep around and spreads good vibes and support.


Wishlist Page: https://wishlistpage.com/

Running it for almost 3 months, but didn't get enough traction yet. I pay $12 per month for the Heroku dyno and another $15 per month for the BTCPay server. Also investing many hours to make people sign up. The catch is that I only start making money when they make money because I take a percentage of each sale/gift.


https://emulator.wtf/

We're building the world's fastest / most scalable / reliable Android-emulators-as-a-service with the goal of reducing everyone's CI time spent on waiting for instrumentation tests to finish.

Two long-time Android devs as co-founders, been working on this on many nights over the last year. Starting to take shape & close to breaking even.


Here's one: I write (wrote is more accurate recently) a blog on unintended consequences (https://unintendedconsequenc.es/). Most of the support for it came from people here on HN, happily. And a bunch of people did buy memberships, but taking the work into account we're probably talking $1/hour. Learned a lot doing it though.


My side projects are about doing science, not making money.


https://jointgreetings.com

(Currently totally free) online greeting cards that can be signed by many people digitally.

Started it to learn sveltekit but fairly happy with how it turned out. Still more work to be done with optimisations etc but the framework is there.

Currently losing $60/month as it’s part of my mongo atlas subscription and I’ve not gotten around to putting it on a free version yet.


https://molasses.app

Feature flags as a service. People use it but not necessarily making money right now


MMKV Visualizer: https://www.mmkv-visualizer.com/

Allows you to view MMKV files in a table-based visualizer, all processed client-side via Pyodide and Svelte!

A bit embarrassing to put up on HN again, but something I'm really proud of as it's my first "major" web project and has been quite useful in my day-to-day work as a mobile researcher.


https://tnxfr.com/ - to send texts/links or maybe files to any device.

I built this 6 years ago when I needed to send a long URL to my smart TVs browser and got frustrated by existing options out there. It's OSS and still sees some usage[1] to this day.

[1] https://tnxfr.com/stats


Simple Video Trimmer:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/simple-video-trimmer/id1593706...

I got tired of editing on desktop, and mobile apps gouging me for money to use their editing app. I thought of the simplest way I can think of to precisely cut parts of videos together, and this is it. iOS only


AI powered transcription and full text search web app: https://polyscriber.com

Started late last year, it works, but has a limited feature set and a basic UI. The core/primary features are there and have some friends using it with free credits. Next planned feature will be an API to enable integrations like transcribing and searching recorded meetings.


Zillion: https://github.com/totalhack/zillion

A python data warehousing / modeling / analytics library that can unify multiple datasources and writes SQL for you. It's alpha level at the moment and I just slowly chip away when time allows, though I'm using it in production in another project (which does make money).


Built a fun side project to learn Vue, https://wheelcarnival.com/ a place to create and share roulette wheels.

I'm not working on it but somehow it still has some traction, it averages 20k users/month (mostly teachers). Unfortunately my day job it's very time-consuming and I never find time to create a better version.


https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/

Been grinding on it on the side for some years now. I make $0/month from it.

I really believe in the idea, so I'm just trying to get it to MVP so I can really prove what it can do. It's been tough finishing the lambdas portion of the compiler.

I need help with some patches to get it finished!


Mine has been a retro news headline aggregator: https://brutalist.report


A website/marketin company https://www.constructioncompanywebsites.com/

I wrote a program that makes websites from an INI file, it handles everything except for the domain name purchase.

Currently working on the marketing/business plan part of everything, which is very different from software engineering.


https://inferoo.com

I have a few engaged users of my daily personalised newsletter, main USP is showing your calendar events for the day. Not monetised yet.

It's been fun to create, dealing with timezones, ingesting, processing and presentation of data etc etc. I use it myself daily, have done for years now so it's already paid for itself.


Bulletyn is a custom news digest creator: https://www.bulletyn.co/

No fees, no ads. Only costs me ~$5/mo to run anyways.

As others here have mentioned, I maintain this because I get so much value out of it personally - it's easily worth the cost for myself. I have ~100 total users who I hope are also getting similar value.


I just launched Watchly[0], which has yet to get its first paying customer :)

Premise: Website analytics that includes tracking for time on each page - so you can report on top pages not just by traffic but by time spent on the page/content.

Sent as a daily report via email, but there are interactive reports too.

Cost: $1.99/mo + $1 every 50k page loads.

[0] https://watch.ly


Trek: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ml.zedlabs.tvt...

this is the app I'm currently most invested in. It allows keeping a very detailed track of one's TV/Movie consumption through stats and weekly usage charts, only for android though


https://sbmkvp.github.io/rta_booking_information/

A simple one page app that shows next available driving test in the state of New South Wale, Australia. The script runs as a container and commits updates to a GitHub repo periodically. GitHub pages then render the latest data.


https://www.jayporeci.in/

I've been working on this CI system for a while.

1. Zero setup. Works on git hooks.

2. Python as the config language. Makes it very easy to do dependencies/matrix jobs/conditional jobs.

3. Offline first. It can work online with gitea as well.

4. Everything is in git. I don't need to muck around in and configure the CI system itself.


Echo Three: https://gitlab.echothree.com/echothree/echothree

Headless commerce platform, focused on product information management (PIM), search, and other core requirements. GraphQL API around much of the platform, but also providing Jakarta EE APIs and a taglib for JSPs.


Steamdb represents what blogs in the 2000’s or what personal websites in the mid 90’s did: the love for internet and for publishing. It can be also for getting money or personal credit. But using pseudonyms and publishing things we love for free, for connecting with people with similar interests… that was the super power of internet that has faded a lot. Yeah, respect.


I have a website that allows you to check the availability of domain names without worrying about registrars "stealing" the idea from you.

So far, it's making 0 from affiliate links. Never did much promotion because I mostly use it myself.

You can check it out here: https://safestdomainsearch.com/


Chaintip: tip Bitcoin Cash on Reddit and Twitter

https://chaintip.org/

Bitcoin Cash is what Bitcoin should have been if they had let the block size increase as Satoshi intended. Bitcoin should have gained dominance with this increase and people would have been freer for it.

I take no profits. Unclaimed tips go back to sender after 7 days.


Grid tool https://www.gridtool.xyz/

A single page app to draw a grid (square or hex) onto a picture. Made with Mithril.js and Bootstrap to scratch my own itch, using it to make battle maps for DnD. None of the alternatives were as simple as I had in mind. Also works for cross-stitching patterns!


Dungeon crawler: https://github.com/larsjarlvik/dungeon-crawler

Trying to build a cross platform (including mobile) classic RPG with procedurally generated maps using Rust.

So far it's playable but not much more. Currently working on more exciting map generation using wave function collapse.


https://www.trackandtrace.tools/

Open source Chrome extension for Metrc, the primary cannabis track and trace platform in the US.

It's free to use, but I'm proud to say that a significant slice of the cannabis industry uses this tool daily when reporting their business's cannabis activity.


Loop Habit Tracker: https://github.com/iSoron/uhabits

Open-source Android app for creating and maintaining long-term positive habits. We have more than 5 million downloads, but zero revenue and near zero recurring costs (no servers, since the app is offline-only for privacy reasons).


https://myweddingseatingplanner.com is a tool that helps people automatically assign seating for their guests. The assignment is made based on the affinity between guests so that only people who are closed enough (that's friends) will be seated at the same table.


I've been working on a book for new Ph.D. students: https://research-power-tools.com

It's 95% done. Most of the (unedited) content is available for open review: https://nymity.ch/book/


https://docsite.io

A dead simple tool to turn Google Docs (and Google Dive folders with many Docs inside) into published websites. It looks good on mobile, is super fast, and it uses the exact same formatting that appears in the original doc.

It was inspired by an HN post, but I can’t seem to find it.

I’d love to get some feedback!


Looks like a good idea! It would be nice to have a video showing the whole process.


https://turbopapers.ie

A very simple website for quickly and conveniently finding state examination materials for highschool students in Ireland.

0 euros put it and 0 euros out. Traffic is low but growing as the exam dates approach. I'm just happy that there are some people out there finding it useful.


https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/library

My passion project is building CLI tools for managing files and curating media. I've been at it about 2 years now.

Most recently I wrote a subcommand for balancing files between disparate disks. Useful for mergerfs filesystems


Yarn.social (https://yarn.social) and Salty.im (https://salty.im) are both projects of mine making $0/month (community driven and will stay that way). Yarn.social is the oldest now at around ~2.5yrs


* Platform to organize internal hackathons: https://hackathon.camp * Tool to create glossaries within your corporations and have them everywhere in the browser with a tooltip: https://tooltipr.com


Smart Kid -

Automatically remove "Liked" Youtube videos and subscriptions based on a set of keywords.

This is helpful for younger kids that have Youtube video feeds full of Minecraft and MrBeast videos.

It helps to balance out the recommendations and give a more diverse video feed of recommendations.

https://smartk.id/


https://zagi.net/ is a pay-for internet search engine, backed by Bing. I have been using myself for over a year. As it turns out, getting a payment system working is super frustrating.

Current revenue is less than $5 per month (just me), and costs are less than $100 per month.


I was interested to understand the concept behind this service, went to the site and clicked the Docs link, but got " Not Found". Can you provide a simplified explanation for the concept behind the site? Thanks!


https://ec2.shop

A website to check price of ec2 instance. support a `curl` to check and compare on-demand, spot and reverse.

I made it because everytime I have to wait for AWS to load their pricing page which takes forever. and require awakard navigation around between region, previous instance


Https://SimplifyRecipe.com

Currently earning negative money on this! It’s a recipe organizer and simplifier…an app to make it easier for people to cook using recipes without the life story.

This morning, I got my first angry emails from recipe publishers and it has me pretty bummed out. I knew they wouldn’t love it, but I didn’t expect this so early.


Milkman: https://milkman.dev/ A Postman replacement with lot more (useful) features and generalized to any kind of requests (e.g. database).

Always thought that it can't be too hard writing something like postman and it wasn't... Just time-consuming


https://www.breckenridge.dev/macrometer/

MacroMeter is a recent project that integrates with NutritionX’s API and helps track each day’s macronutrient intake. Cost is $0 to host because it is 100% client side (uses localstorage).


https://bback.me/ a site to help people finding their lost belongings (marked before). Thought it was a good idea, but did not seem appealing to other people. I'll probably close it in the coming year to avoid maintenance cost.


MyWallAI: https://mywallai.com

Premise: Interior design tool that helps decorate your walls, like how a space in the living room wall would look if it had a floating shelf, wallpaper, mirrors, etc

Working on improving the renders and experimenting with custom models for better results


Bonsai-garden.com

I put this together over Christmas while I had the flu. I just wanted a way to keep a nice timeline for development of bonsai trees.

I have a long list of features I would like to add, comments, likes etc. Some better pictures would be great too!

It is built in Flask. I don't get to code too much at work any more, so this was a fun thing to do


https://charts.town/ - Fundamentals of public companies visualised.

After HyperCharts shut down I started building an alternative. I knew I wouldn’t be the only one building an alternative but I liked the technical challenge. Let me know what you think.


https://thermalmodel.com/

A web tool for simple thermal analysis/modeling. Connect nodes together, classify as conductive/convective/radiative, set their thermal properties and plot their temperatures and heat transfer over time.

Free and open source.


Https://Batsign.me

Quick and easy personal email notifications.

I got tired of configuring email for simple things.

I have one very intensive user.

It's a side-side-project.


Howdy, I currently have a use case for this and attempted to signup :)

Unfortunately, when I click through the verification link in my email I get a 404 -- any advice?


https://speaker.app - Group peer chats with high quality audio suited for audiophiles.

Currently rebuilding all of the tooling for greater stability and better connectivity.

https://github.com/zenosmosis


I’ve been running https://rlhitboxes.com for quite a while.

It’s stupid-simple, but handy. Built it when I couldn’t find the answers anywhere else. (Pysonix/Epic have since make the info more readily available, so I’m not sure how long I’ll continue.)


https://boxtrades.com is my latest project. Got into box spreads for earning greater than Treasury yields more or less risk free and wanted a way to see what the current trading rates are. Costs me about 20/mo for data and hosting.


Selaro https://getselaro.com

Personal/Workplace links and url Organizer and Search. Its a chrome extension. I haven't actively marketed this, but happy with how I can use this everyday personally and have got decent feedback from few friends and family

Price: $0


Grugnotes.com trying to be the lowest effort note taking app. Been working on for four months nights and weekends. Just text, basic html, try to keep anything fancy serverside. Some ways I’m so happy with it, but also such a buggy side project I’m hesitant to share and try to charge. Having fun with it.


Recently got a fun AI wallpaper generator app launched for Mac OS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/diffusion-wallpaper/id16638055...

It uses stable diffusion under the hood.


I run a technical interview podcast. I have eng leaders come on and talk about their hiring practices then they do a live technical with me.

Episodes get some views. Spend about ~250 a month of tools and editing costs.

https://www.youtube.com/@TaylorDorsett


Playtune: https://playtune.app

I made it out of frustration on finding rhythm game with my favorite songs. So I decided to build one and use YouTube as the music provider.

It made $0 as there are no monetization nor ads. Me and my daughter still occasionally play it.


My blog: https://www.bovem.in/, I've started/restarted (used to write on medium before: https://bovem.medium.com/) recently.


https://www.chive.dev/

A cross-platform desktop app that allows you to play local audio files, organize them into playlists, and apply equalizer filters/change speed.

Still in alpha, working on some final features before I "truly" ship it


Semantic search for any video : https://semanticvideosearch.com/

As the name suggests, this allows you to search any video using meaning and context. This is very useful for skipping through the fluff on youtube videos.


PolishPixels: https://polishpixels.com

Just made it in late 2022, in order to preserve some retro-gaming memories in context of early polish game-dev years. Pure passion project, as i was doing some gamedev on c64 in early 90-ties :)


Mood Circle: https://www.moodcircle.me

App to track your mood. Wrote it for my own use. A few of my friends use it too. (Yes, there's a regression in the latest build using hashtags... fixed as soon as App Store approves fix!)


https://focus.gaunt.dev is a simple little site I’ve been using to help me prioritize work each day and track what I’ve done each week.

Still early on, but been a fun excuse to learn some new tech stacks and serves my needs well.


I've been working on my Twitter bookmark tool (https://getbirdfeeder.com) for the past year. I have some paying subscribers, but I mostly give that money to DigitalOcean for database and storage hosting.


I developed and run Wordrow+ a word puzzle game in HTML5. A mix between Wordle and Tetris. So far costed me money on app developer licenses and buying an Android phone to test the Android version (in progress)

https://wordrow.fun.


I created https://10f.io

It's a tool for elementary school teachers to create ten-frames, a common way to visualize the base-ten system in K-2 math curriculums. I want to make it simple for teachers to create their own resources.


https://GymTools.io

To be fair. This project isn't meant to generate revenue. Back when I started webdev, I needed to learn how to publish a SPA so I threw something together in preparation for a larger and more complex app.


My Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMiInY8BhSUtCarO6uu6i_g Videos about Linux and tech in general, I try and be entertaining as well as educational!


LowEndInsight: https://www.lowendinsight.dev

Basic analysis of open source software's source - for things like "bus factor". Started as a research project, probably going to die as a research project.


Funny...I think posting here has generated a few clicks. Am seeing my background worker dying. :)


Why not have a UI where you can enter a specific GitHub repo and get the result back?


That exists, it is just hidden right now. If my intent was to offer this up and a for-the-public-good I'd turn it back on. But like most of the other comments here, at some point it just doesn't make sense for me to foot the bill to run it. It would be one thing if it was a simple front-end, with a simple back-end. But processing this insight is a little bit resource intensive which creates a cost burden. Academically it wasn't a big deal to run this in a true HPC, the costs have already been covered. Commercially is a different calculus.


Started a side project on helping short term renters find a place to stay mexico Riviera Maya that's not gringo priced.

Airbnb and lots of foreigners here with lack of local knowledge are jacking up the price.

Knowledge are generally shared in person or over WhatsApp/FB groups, not the most efficient.


Hacker Brews Coffee: https://hackerbrews.com

I haven't put much at all into self-promotion or advertisement so it's mostly been a pet-project but 2023 will be a better year!

Edit: 15% off for any HN-ers interested, use code HN15


I absolutely love this. Roasting and serving my own coffee beans has been a dream of mine for many years.

What does your setup look like? Are you roasting on a something super small?


Thank you! I'm not self-roasting (not by choice), but working with a roaster to help with roasting and logistics. I got the idea from actually wanting to self-roast when I heard of a friend using a shared roasting space in San Diego to source green beans and do his own roasting without the upfront cost of buying equipment. Unfortunately nothing like that exists in my area of Tennessee but having a private relationship with a family owned roaster is the next best thing.

I went through a few iterations of trying roasters and let me tell you, some were downright bad. I'm happy to have found a partner that I actually enjoy the product of, even if it means slimmer margins.


https://gpsjam.org

GPSJam is a daily map of GPS jamming/interference around the world. It's niche, but there are companies selling similar data for prices in the "contact us" range.


Mastodon for Business: https://calmguava.com

I am helping businesses manage their online identity on the Mastodon network. I literally started on this project 3 weeks ago and am still refining the marketing strategy.


Local Notes: https://localnotes.github.io/

I have created this for my personal use. Basically, I want something which seamlessly search through my notes content and filter them.


Casual Glimpse of China newsletter: https://casualglimp.se/of/china/

It's been running for a bit more than a year. Hosting cost is low. Content is manually generated.


A website which allows you to practice SQL, without having to install databases on your machine: http://sqlforever.com/

I’m eventually planning on o do more with it, but need some free time in my life.


https://magnetoid.com

World news

no ads, cookies, or javascript


I recently launched Chessboard for Slack (https://www.boardwalrus.com)

Let's you play chess with your Slack workspace mates.

burn rate ~$30/month

If there's demand I plan to implement tournaments and maybe a MS Teams version.


https://neovimcraft.com - a sorted list of popular neovim plugins

https://prose.sh - a blog platform managed exclusively from the terminal.


Color Name Generator: https://color-name-generator.com

A small side project to help me as a dev to name colors. Might be useful for designers. $0 on hosting (Netlify). $0 earnings.


Free and opensource jamstack themes: https://ronaldsvilcins.com/themes/ Themes for static site generators Hugo & Jekyll I’ve designed and developed.


Working on a trading (stock/etf) web application (for day traders) built using spring boot, react, mysql, docker, docker-compose, terraform, variety of aws services (s3, codebuild, codepipeline, ec2) Not yet live but will publish in couple of months.


Working on https://dreaminterpreter.ai/ an app that interprets your dreams using GPT-3 and allows you to see the dreams people are having around the world.


Browser Routr is my way of getting some sites to auto open in another browser: https://paulrrogers.com/products/browser-routr


i gotta ask. Why didn't you just use Choosy or one of the many other apps that do this?


I tried many before building my own. None auto opened with a regular, left click on a link within a browser. They required right-click and picking from a prompt or clicks from outside the browser.

Also wanted same app and config on Windows and MacOS.


PDF2QRCoode: https://pdf2qrcode.com

I never really made any effort to market this SaaS. If someone wants to help me grow it and partner up, feel free to reach out via support@qrcode.com


This looks pretty interesting! Could see it being used for concerts, restaurants, or magazine comps ies!


https://play.rsps.app/

Runescape server playable on browser.

Made it a while back. Was fun learning WebGL and porting over code.

It costs me 12$ a month to keep 1 server instance. AWS spot instance + static IP


I'm building a terminal application for Hashicorp Nomad called wander: https://github.com/robinovitch61/wander

wander for Nomad is as k9s is for Kubernetes.


https://flowhub.io/ - visual programming tool.

This was a business, once. Now I'm running it as a free service, so it costs some hosting plus maintaining the domains.


https://wizar.co/

Convert your existing e-commerce store into an Augmented Reality ready store.

Been working on this for 2 years and just about to launch a new integration with WooCommerce.


FIFO: https://fifo.im

Medium for developers and other tech folks. Or like dev.to, but "hopefully" better UX for driving discussions etc. Also supports live audio sessions.


One of my projects is a crowd-sourced audio bible (also open source). Has some cool features like seeking to verses by clicking on them.

https://thereadbible.com/


Nice work, love how you use youtube for the recordings.


https://litchan.com/

Link aggregator / RSS reader with real-time commenting. No plans to monetize it. I mostly built it to learn Phoenix Liveview and TailwindCSS.


A word game I made last holidays that's fully free: https://wordmaze.click.

Similar to wordle. Thinking of putting this in App Store. Do you think it's worth it?


PlanMixPlay: http://www.planmixplay.com/

About 7 years in building a touch-oriented performance interface intended to focus on both audio and video output.


Peer Review: https://peer-review.io

It's an experiment in academic publishing. Can we crowdsource peer review of scientific and scholarly papers using a StackExchange like reputation system?

And can we organize it as a non-profit funded by user donations?

We've known for years that academic publishing through the journals is really badly broken. It hides the primary sources of human knowledge behind a paywall on the basis that the journals are doing the hard work of filtering out misinformation - but the journals are actually manually crowdsourcing the filtering to unpaid reviewers.

And the filtering has broken down completely anyway in a world of self-publishing and predatory journals.

So can we crowdsource the filtering using a software platform, instead of manually using journal editors?

That's the premise of Peer Review. It uses a StackExchange like reputation system to match papers to qualified reviewers. It splits review into pre-publish review, focused on giving authors really good constructive feedback, and post-publish refereeing, focused on filtering malpractice. Reputation is primarily gained from votes on papers during refereeing, but can also be gained from giving good constructive pre-published reviews.

Right now it's a side project and will probably remain so for the forseeable future. But if it ever gains significant traction, I'd love to form a non-profit around it and exploring having it be governed by it's users.

It's an experiment in two ways: can we recreate the wikipedia model of funding with improved governance, and can we solve academic publishing through software mediated crowdsourcing.


My coauthor and I run staysaasy.com which is entirely unmonetized (technically negative since we pay for some hosting and assorted services), although we've met some investing / advising opportunities through it.


https://weblum.photos/

Sells a photo sharing app. People don't like to enter their credit card to buy, but at least the pay wall keeps the bots away.


Minecraft "Tellraw" Command Generator: https://www.minecraftjson.com

Allows you to create the commands that generate formatted text in Minecraft.


Lwan: https://lwan.ws

Been working on this for exactly 11 years today! It's just a webserver on the outside but it has become an umbrella for experimentation.


Market.dev https://market.dev/

This is a new project, so I don't expect to generate revenue yet, but I want to turn it into a useful resource.


https://aicoverletter.me

Simple GPT3-based app for writing cover letters for job applications.

Spent about 6 hours and think it does what it is supposed to pretty well.


https://lightfulimagery.com - a photography project exploring the hidden beauty and showcasing the everyday in a different light


I just made this drum machine the other day to learn some modern webdev stuff. - https://beatmaker.adammenz.com/


my project is PYX - an educational programming language with REPL / shell. It can be used to write programs in functional / procedural and object based styles.

here: https://github.com/MoserMichael/jscriptparse

and here: https://www.npmjs.com/package/pyxlang

By the way: i see a lot of downloads via npm, don't know if that is due to bot activity or if there is real interest.


Gigs4Peeps: https://www.gigs4peeps.com website to find music events in Ireland. I am planning to add UK later on


MPP : https://monpetitparquet.com

A basketball fantasy app, made for my friends and I, and catching dozens of random users.

Cost me ~ 60$/month


Since these things are all the rage, I've made something using Stable Diffusion (but with a twist):

ArtBot: https://tinybots.net/artbot

You can create images with numerous Stable Diffusion models using a distributed cluster of GPUs donated by volunteers -- it's called Stable Horde [1] -- an awesome open source API created by @dbzer0. The service was written up in PC World back in December (with generous mentions of ArtBot)[2]: "Meet Stable Horde, the crowd-powered Folding@Home of AI art".

ArtBot is a front-end interface for interacting with the Horde. Unlike a lot of other services springing up around Stable Diffusion lately, mine doesn't require login information, all images are stored within your browser via IndexedDb and it's free!

It's a NextJS app that currently costs me $5/mo via Digital Ocean. I recently received a single donation through the BuyMeACoffee website... coincidentally, on my birthday! Hah.

Edit: I should note, in terms of tracking, I have some telemetry I built to log errors, tell me what pages people use, and a few events related to specific actions (basically, checking on if people even using a new feature I made). I do use Google Analytics to get some real time feedback on where people are on the site, but I've considered rolling my own solution to get away from that.

Edit2: I should also mention that my spaghetti code is available on Github, if you're into that sort of thing.[3] I also keep a changelog, which I don't think you usually see with web apps, but I've been having a lot of fun with it.[4]

Edit3!: I should also, also mention that LAION (Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network) also wrote a blog post earlier this year on a partnership with Stable Horde for aesthetics training... and ArtBot was featured as well.[5]

Bottom line: This is just a random side project I made, a ton of people seem to be using it (just crossed 3 MILLION images generated as of this week) and I am having so much fun with it.

[1] - https://stablehorde.net/

[2] - https://www.pcworld.com/article/1431633/meet-stable-horde-th...

[3] - https://github.com/daveschumaker/artbot-for-stable-diffusion

[4] - https://tinybots.net/artbot/changelog

[5] - https://laion.ai/blog/laion-stable-horde/


First, happy birthday.

Second, this is pretty cool. I'll be checking it out more over the weekend, thanks for sharing it.


canSnippet: cansnippet.com

It's a snippet/clipboard manager for macOS. I worked on that project a few years ago and sold a dozen copies. I still use it every day and I feel like it could be helpful to many other users. That's why I decided to have a look at it again, start by updating a bit the code and also providing a Linux and Windows version, let's see how much time I can dedicate to it. What makes canSnippet really useful is the powerful keyboard shortcuts to create from and use a snippet in any app.


ancv: https://github.com/alexpovel/ancv/

Idea: renders your resume as pretty terminal output. Others can view it in their own terminals:

    curl -L ancv.io/heyho
Pipe to a pager for best viewing. Yes, it's just a nerdy gimmick with almost no real use!

I provide a GCP-hosted server that works off GitHub gists (where your resume can live in JSONResume form). However, self-hosting is a first-class citizen and easy to use as well.


ProdDuck: feedback for PMs on their user stories and Jira tickets

https://prodduck.buildingbetterteams.de/


https://www.xythobuz.de

I don't have anything fancy to show, so here's a link to my personal website with all my projects.


Yesterday, i was here an read about 100 comments, thought: 'makefile' ....made a comic (german) about...

> //i.ibb.co/gSqWh5K/10382-NET-EFFECTs-FINAL-Mail.png

(weekend-modus ^^) regards


DasData https://dasdata.co Build to solve enterprises data flows problems and became my own prototype playground.


FindMASA: https://findmasa.com

It's a UGC map of Murals and Street Art. I pay ~$60/mo for image hosting fees via Imgix.


https://www.chronos-desk.com/

Personal tasks with estimates and focused on “local first”/desktop usage.


google webfonts helper - https://gwfh.mranftl.com

According to the Cloudflare December monthly stats, I had roughly 57k unique users, 15m requests, 1,3TB traffic. Though, most requests are likely to be bots/integrators spamming the API...

Running on a bare metal k8s cluster (libvirt) on top of a single dedicated Hetzner server, ~70€/month. Not going to monetize it, but will maybe accept donations/sponsorings in the future...


I've created Call Stacking, a modern debugger and code visualization tool for Ruby on Rails.

https://callstacking.com


this looks really useful. Especially when you're looking at new to you code. thanks. :D


It's perfect for onboarding new engineers.

You go from dumping 100,000's of lines of code in their lap, to

"Here's our endpoints, here are the important method calls, and the context for which they're called."

If you'll be a tester, I'll give you a free team account.

jim.jones1@gmail.com


https://www.stoxmap.com

its just interesting to see how the globale economy is doing, although nobody seems interested :)


My mobile game https://smoldungeon.com doesn't make me any money. Was very fun to make though


https://youtube.com/@tendaikon

I'm experimenting with RL. Not gonna lie, it's hard and time-consuming.


League of Legends Build Generator: https://www.lolsolved.gg It's generic algorithm based.


https://discoflip.com aspires to put community owners in charge (especially with monetization).


https://botwars.io/

Battle your code against others, was a quick weekend bodge that turned out kinda fun


turtleSpaces: https://turtlespaces.org A 2D / 3D Logo interpreter written in Golang and compiled to WebAssembly. You can make art, animations and games with it. Been working on it for a few years now, eventually want to have some kind of paid membership option, or the ability to package user-created projects as apps. But until then shipping is its own reward :)


Chedoku Puzzles: https://www.chedoku.com If you like chess, you may like this too :)


eachrecipe.com

You guessed it, another recipe indexer. This is less of a side project and more of just something I did for fun and to learn rails and some other technologies.


https://budgetmyway.com

Every dev needs to build their own personal budget tracker... right?


Write and share recipes with people - https://www.osomatsu.recipes


https://fetcher.page

Haven't got enough traction for me to want to implement payments


https://satya.co/ A collection of million quotes in 80+languages


https://truckm.app

Find local food trucks. Now to convince food truck owners to use it ...


Pet AI: https://petai.art

I'm doing Pet AI. Like AI portraits but for your loved pet.


Linksort: https://linksort.com/

Pretty much like Pocket, but open source.


We've been working hard on rethinking what's wrong with most job boards.

We are focusing our approach around the #1 point of our manifesto: "a working relationship is just as much an opportunity for the employer as it is for the job seeker"

Currently we are in a closed beta, reviewing profiles and making them public soon.

Check it out: https://moonka.space

If anyone is interested in a (free) developer profile or a (free) company profile with a VIP treatment as an early user, hit me up!


https://accomplishments.app/

Record your work based accomplishments


My question to those that are not making money or loosing money? I've been there before. How do you stay motivated to work on it?


It can be a struggle, for sure. Personally, I am driven (for some unknown reason that seems bigger than potential income) to create new things, and am swamped (plagued?) by dozens of new ideas every week. Not just in tech, but also in art, writing, music and more. I'll be the first to admit, I've had plenty of stinkers, and on occasion it took someone I trusted to be bluntly honest with me before I would give up on an idea. For an embarrassing, personal example of this, see nubbers.com, which made exactly THREE sales over 3+ years before I finally shut it down. Although my friends and family still use the product - for free, of course.

But I guess in the end, it comes down to what you believe. Do YOU think it's a good idea? Are you willing to fight for it? If your answer is "yes", then keep going. Ask yourself what you would do if someone cloned your product overnight and started selling it... what would you do to make your original product or idea better and compete against them? How would you reposition and regroup to fend off this tedious interloper? Or would you just throw in the towel? Ask yourself if you might be able do some guerilla marketing. Take a group of your friends to pertinent trade shows, all of you wearing shirts emblazoned with your website or product name, just wandering around. Make business cards with special offers and leave them in random office building restrooms (or bars or clubs or whatever makes sense for your product). Find a related product with whom you can partner and ride each other's coattails. Hire some social influencers to mention your brand. Create giveaways and contests. Yada^3.

If you believe in it, don't give up and do what it takes!


I keep seeing problems in the wild that it solves and it's like an itch that I can't scratch. If I don't occasionally put work towards it I get all depressed and start having dystopian nightmares about the unscratched itch.

It's not exactly healthy.


I'm doing https://petai.art

Like AI portraits but for your loved pet :)


http://paganre.com/

an experimental coding puzzle in typescript.


iCalNinja https://ical.ninja

Wanted a non-Google way of easily embedding iCal calendars into a website. I needed to embed a TeamSnap calendar on my kid's sports team Squarespace page.

Cost to me: ~$10/mo (piggy backing off of my real job's servers)

Revenue: 2 customers - god bless 'em ($24/yr)


I bought yo.wtf five years ago hoping an idea would come to me.

So far no epiphanies, but I'm <$0 revenue so I think it still counts.


interviewedWith: https://www.interviewedwith.com/

It's a website to share and read anonymous experiences on (mostly tech industry) job interviews. Hoping it helps future candidates and fixes companies' processes that are just wrong.


I'm forking over 200 USD a month for a few thousand users on mastodon. I get about a third payed in donations.


https://spacehey.com - a MySpace-like retro social network without any tracking or algorithmic feeds. Including customizable profiles (with HTML & CSS), bulletins, and more.

I started it 2 years ago and it's pretty successful with about 600k registered users so far. I really enjoy building it and looking through all the creatively customized profile pages! It's so much fun!

It's currently funded with donations and merch, but it sadly doesn't cover the costs atm.


www.timeblocker.dev

A webapp to manager your tasks and your time. No other todo app has a view that combines these things.

I'm overhauling it now and hope to launch it in a few weeks. Currently it's making $0.

If anyone is interested please let me know, I'm looking for a first 1-5 customers to use it for free and give me feedback.


I'm making a PaaS thingy / Docker Swarm GUI called Lunni. It helps startups, small businesses, and self-hosting enthusiasts deploy and manage apps on their own server: https://lunni.dev/

I've done a Show HN last month [1], but it didn't get any traction (well, apart from 4 upvotes!). Perhaps because I didn't really capture what the project is about. I've reached out to dang and he gave some really valuable feedback (thank you!) and encouraged me to try again, but I'm still overthinking stuff :')

I've also got an email from Rishi with Pioneer [2], saying I've got a fast track to their accelerator program. I'm still looking into that but I've tried their Tournament thing and got some nice and encouraging feedback from other founders.

Overall, I'm not sure where this project gets me but even if we don't get any revenue at all, the experience of working on a passion project full-time is really nice.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34068557

[2]: https://pioneer.app/


twofergoofer.com - just a fun daily word game. no monetizing, no plans to monetize. wanted a new "daily brain game" for my grandma's arsenal and have had fun making a celebratory piece of art with midjourney each day.


Gary Tan, get some of these frickin' people hooked up on making startups. Damn


foodbatch.com A recipe site where the data format of the recipe is strict. For now I’m just keeping some of my own favorite recipes there. Anyone can upload a recipe. I have multiple features in the backlog…


Protip: If your aim is to make any money at all, avoid B2C like the plague


www.showertexts.com

Sends you a daily SMS with the top upvoted /r/showerthoughts of the day. I've been running it for several years and people seem to really appreciate it.


iolify - The DynamoDB console you wish you had

I soft launched it between jobs and that's it.

https://iolify.github.io


Discord and Slack Notifications for Terminal Commands

Nudge Notifier: https://NudgeNotifier.com

Availability: MacOS, Slack, Discord.

Why:

- Builds at my current monolithic architecture employer take forever and I often notice failed builds too late.

- I don't like pausing Seinfeld to go check on my terminal.

- Developer Productivity is on a lot of companies' minds and Nudge pings developers when they can resume their work.

- Reminded me of https://xkcd.com/303/

Features:

- Effortless mobile notifications for long-running terminal commands.

- It'll even notify you when your builds running over ssh finish execution without installing it on the ssh target.


Also built completely in Python

Here's the Slack Bot: https://slack.com/apps/A046S38NNE8-nudge


I have a newborn.


Ah yes. Those types of projects can be expensive but - with care and attention - will reap tremendous reward in your lifetime (and beyond).

Congrats! :-)


thank you! i sometimes forget that the internet has nice people, too... hope you're doing great


First, I thought there was a typo, but then I looked at myself, losing hundreds on side-projects... yes, < 0 is very much possible.


https://blocvox.com

tl;dr: crowdsourced microblogging platform that encourages inter-community dialogue. I.e. wrest the very fate of your causes back from self-serving officials, celebrities, and mass media!

It started as a side project 10 years ago, before I took some time off to try to build it into something more. Alas I knew far too little of marketing and customer development.


Sound interesting, tried checking on it but getting a "NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID" notice (NOT a criticism, just an FYI)


I just helped a startup exit successfully. I wore myself out doing so and it's not the first time I've felt worn out. I keep letting myself go too hard and forgetting I'm a human being first and foremost. I'm tired of feeling caught up in the cyclic bullshit and want to do better. I quit my job to focus on creating a personal, artistic expression, through software, in an attempt to help me grow myself. Hopefully it'll help others, too. My software is tentatively called Symbiant, but doesn't exist yet.

..

I'm creating a web-first colony simulation game. I'm inspired by SimAnt, RimWorld, idleRPG, and Tamagotchi. My goal is to establish a strong, daily, mental health hygiene routine which promotes box breathing, gratitude journaling, and improved awareness of my health, fatigue, and motivation.

The game unfolds on an alien world covered in a thick sea of fog and asteroid impact craters. Huge fog waves roam the planet, splash against the crater walls, and continually intrude with frigid moisture. A damaged terraforming satellite orbits the planet and directs its limited energy towards one crater which keeps that crater habitable. There are three entities in the story: an AI powering the terraforming satellite, the consciousness of a biologist uploaded into the satellite's computer, and a fledgling ant colony within the barely habitable crater. The player fills the role of the protagonist, the biologist, and the hostile weather plays the role of the antagonist. The goal is to terraform the planet without throwing it out of balance.

The ant colony simulation runs on ~autopilot similar to idleRPG but with slowly unfolding visuals like 1x speed RimWorld. It's a real-time simulation which "runs" even when the tab is closed, but is only able to be controlled when the satellite orbits overhead and has line-of-sight with the crater. The queen hatches workers, workers expand the nest, navigate the fog, and search for food. The ants lay pheromone trails to food, but every night the fog rolls in and wipes clean the pheromones. Each day the ants begin searching for food once more. The colony grows optimally given available information, but is not omniscient or even opinionated. The colony will never push itself out of the local maximum of a single crater and struggles with attention due to the fog. Surprisingly, during initial nest expansion, the ants discover a rectifying crystal which allows them to sense electromagnetic waves emitted by the satellite. They develop a ritual around attempting to interpret these electrical impulses which provides a very rough form of of one-way communication from the satellite to the ants. The biologist leverages this communicational channel to assist the colony by providing high-level environmental awareness and opinionated responses.

Each day, the player is asked to show up and check-in at a consistent time. The player wants to be able to nurture their colony, but they need to unlock the ability to do so. They begin by engaging with a guided, box-breathing routine while "awakening" the consciousness of the biologist. It's effortful for the biologist to take autonomy from the terraforming AI in the same way waking up is effortful and so the player is guided through that process. Then, the player is greeted with a technophilic UI which provides in-depth stats and charts of their colony and the planet. Based on current and projected resources, the user makes a decision to encourage the colony to push harder or to ease up. This influences whether the colony will push out of a local maximum, but comes at the cost of damaging the health of the ants. The player needs to balance pushing the colony to expand into additional land with tapering their exertion to avoid long-term negative effects. Finally, the player is given an opportunity to self-reflect and journal on the goals and progress of the ants. Gratitude journaling provides a means of keeping attention on high-value food resources such that the ants don't lose track entirely due to the fog. Non-gratitude journaling (i.e. venting, daily reflections) provide a source of entropy for the weather system of the world.

Outside of check-in time, the player is only able to watch their high-level decisions slowly play out over the course of the day. The interface is calming and provides an opportunity for brief respite similar to taking a moment to observe an aquarium.

Overall, I am building software to help me be more consistent and diligent in my personal growth and mental health hygiene. Sometimes when I get depressed I stop caring for myself, but I'm always good about showing up for others. I want to leverage that to promote self-care. Conversely, when I'm firing on all-cylinders, I tend to think my motivation and determination are limitless. I take on significant personal growth goals only to eventually reach a mental breaking point because I never identify a good time to push less hard until forced. So, I would benefit from a visual indication of where I am at on a motivation/determination boom/bust cycle so that I don't find myself surprised by burnout.

I've never really responded well to software that implies I have problems which need fixing. Instead, I do much better when someone tells me a story, I contrast that story to my own, and I succeed in identifying personal growth areas through the reflection. Instead of creating "yet another mental health / journaling app" I am interested in telling a compelling, sci-fi story where the protagonist struggles to succeed in their goals due to a failure to acknowledge their humanity. I believe telling this story, while providing tools to participate and a pet to stay attached, is likely to instill long-term changes in those who engage.

There's a discord link in my bio if you want to hang out and watch my insanity play out in real time. :) No significant software written yet, but happy to have help once I'm capable of providing clearer instruction. Currently working through discussions of potential game mechanics and trying to define the scope of the mechanics.


Urban DJ: https://urbanpoll.com/dj Wordle for music! A fun poll for music experts.

TL;DR - I'm bootstrapping a web-based music game that's a mix of Wordle and Dixit. It's an entertaining music competition where the community ranks 5 songs on daily bases.

Background - My partner used to manage a similar game at work as a team-bonding activity. They would set a music topic for the week, and then everyone would add some songs to a Spotify list. Then, once everyone had suggested a song, they would vote for the top 3 songs and compete amongst one another. It was a bit time-consuming to manage and count the votes, though. I thought - yeah, that's cool, and it could be applied to many types of companies. One day I should build something similar and start selling it to tech companies. A year later, more or less, I found the time to come up with an MVP and present it to some of my friends. Most people that like music love it and have been taking part for a few weeks or a month at least. After several iterations and feedback-based adjustments, I've now "upgraded" the project from MVP to "Beta" and would be happy to have more people onboard.

What I built - Urban DJ is the main stage where everyone can take part. You rate today's 5 songs (from 1-5) and then nominate one song on the next round's topic & suggest the topic after that. Your goal is to guess the community's vote. The more your vote matches the public, the more points you make. For example, if you position Song A as number 2, and 42% of the community has voted the same way - you earn - 42 points. It's an entertaining way to come up with "the best" songs on a given topic. I promise you that you will have fun if you love or know music. At the end of the day, as long as there are 5 persons playing the game - it is refreshed every day. The tech stack is Ruby on Rails + Turbo (hot-wired) & some Alpine JS.

What's next - Given that the game has reached a good level of stability, my next goal is to attract more people playing it. After that, I will focus on the business element - allowing people to set up private music stages to play with their group of friends, classmates, and colleagues. There could be a one-off fee or a monthly subscription for companies... I haven't decided yet.

My appeal - Please give it a go for a few days share your feedback on the process. I believe it should be able to be further simplified.


working on a project management software ._.


just commenting that i like this thread


Agree


DevEstimates

I made a tool to turn my spreadsheet for project estimation into a slightly better web app experience. The premise is that project estimates (how long will feature X take to ship) tend to be extremely inaccurate and moderately toxic BUT if you don't /try/ to make them accurate you can still get useful project data.

This is essentially the 2 outside estimates from the "3 point estimate" project management paradigm -- I ask everyone working on the project for two intentionally extreme estimates - a mythical ship date if everything went impossibly well (works on the first try, the designs don't change, nothing pulls you away, etc) and a date that is intentionally after the ship date if absolutely everything goes wrong. These are extreme enough it tends to take the stress out of picking a date, they can be given from the hip in 30 seconds, and they obviously can't be weaponized as 'actual estimates' so there isn't as much fear that some manager somewhere will try to hold anyone to them as a deadline.

There is no resulting "this will probably ship on date X/Y/Z" answer but it has been extremely helpful on my team so far since you can learn a lot from the relationships between the guesses - big gaps between team members means we're not on the same page, everyone jumping up means requirements just got changed or discovered, the guesses growing at the same rate week over week means we don't feel like we're making progress, etc.

It has been a surprisingly effective tool when using it this way but I'm the first to admit it isn't for everyone since it does NOT spit out a "when will this ship" date and it actually just tells the project leader where to go do more legwork (and I think it takes a rare, mindful person to like using a tool that tells them to go work more - doesn't feel like a pain killer OR a vitamin). As a secondary benefit it has also been helpful for folks (me included) to reflect on our estimation accuracy after the project ships.

I've made it in a "maybe this could make money one day if other people unexpectedly want this too" but I don't expect that and I honestly kind of love the project being just for my use case and not having customers - the writing is snarky (eg, "Estimating sucks but most businesses still demand estimates from their makers anyway..."), the ui is brutalist and minimal (no design framework other than the ironically named classless.css), and it is not very feature bloated yet. I have had fun throwing spaghetti code around and not worrying about breaking things for customers or impacting other team members.

At this point the project is (minimally) feature complete and I'm using it for my real life work - I'm in the last stage of deciding where it is going to live in production so hopefully it can 'go live' next week instead of living on my laptop. I'll make a proper HN post at that point so y'all can roast me into oblivion since I need to be taken down a peg every once in a while.


I'm not even trying, but my income dropped to like 1/10 from my record levels, I wonder when it will stop dropping. Luckily for me I am very frugal and not splurging, so I didn't need to adjust my expenses at all, since whether I earned 12000 USD per month or 1200 USD I still spend same, I guess will start doing something about it if I will earn less than I spend so I don't need to touch my ~13 years of expenses worth savings.


Throughout my life I have found that hard times like what you describe are often the best motivator to start something new. This is an OPPORTUNITY my friend, so don't guess, just get out there and DO. :-)


https://mymood.today

I don't make money from it. I was curios about how People around the world are feeling?! So I built that minimal website: mymood.today




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