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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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…!)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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:
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).
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.
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.)
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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 $0 :)
Also, Holy Bible Search & Cross-Reference API: https://www.rkeplin.com/the-holy-bible-open-source-rest-api/
Made 0$ so far :)
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.
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.
Have some ideas on monetization in the future but for now it's just fun
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 :)
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29106581
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 :)
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.
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.
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)
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 :)
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).
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.
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
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.
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://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
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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 ;)
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).
https://yboris.dev/renamer/ -- FREE
MIT Open Source: https://github.com/whyboris/Simplest-File-Renamer
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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 :)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
Currently $0 revenue but we have some affiliate links to humanely certified delivery services, so hopefully the ball will start rolling!
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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...
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.
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 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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
Not everything needs to make money, especially for community projects.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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).
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.
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:
Right now results are shared manually, but eventually this will be automated.
https://joeldare.com/how-to-lose-money-with-25-years-of-fail...
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.
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
- 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?
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)
Definitely been costing me more than any earnings! :)
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 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.
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)
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:
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
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:”
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).
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."
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
Next step: Content!
Note: Currently not mobile-friendly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But it's not really a get-rich scheme.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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...
// 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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€.
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
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.
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.
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://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...
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.
Goal: make $1kUSD/mo
Making $0 :-)
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 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.
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.
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
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! :)
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.
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.
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...
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!
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.
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 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.
Also a kanji learning app if anybody is interested: https://github.com/Livinglist/Manji
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.
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.
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
C++ implementation: https://github.com/pauldardeau/cpp-cloud-jukebox
Original python implementation: https://github.com/pauldardeau/cloud-jukebox
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 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'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!
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.)
- 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
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 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.
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!
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.
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).
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.
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.
Better code reviews for GitHub. It integrates with GitHub to provide a better reviewing and commenting experience for pull requests. Free for open source!
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
2. Open vision API https://github.com/openvisionapi
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.
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.
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)
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...
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.
Follow us on LinkedIn if you'd like to get an update when we launch. https://www.linkedin.com/mwlite/company/conceptionary
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.
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.
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.
Create weekly plans for your pupils in primary school. Again, for people in Switzerland.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
I am making a minimal Pocket/Instapaper/Pinboard replacement. It supports tags as a first-class feature and no-feed as an anti-feature.
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
I call it a side-project turned in to side-expense
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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).
It makes a little revenue with ads and Amazon referrals due to the traffic volume but it operates at a loss.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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...
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.
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.
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.
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).
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’m also hesitant to post it here because I don’t want it to go down if it gets too much traffic!
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.
Put your read-later links into a custom weekly newsletter.
Availability: iOS, Telegram
Price: $2/month after a free month trial
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!
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 $2 and hit the brick wall that is paid app user acquisition. I lowered the price to free for a bit to see if it catches on at all.
Nothing special really, the app gained little traction but I use it personally.
As a person who has often wandering thoughts, I found the best way to capture them is to write them down.
So I have basically 30 project ideas (mostly mobile and web apps) and I don't know which one to start and keep track of them, so I decided to help myself and built the app.
I can rate my own ideas on some parameters, label them, and sort them by their status. It helps with having a clear mind.
https://myspeed.ai Gives speed & signal quality of wifi/mobile. 30$ 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.
Currently looses money and causes me stress, but it is pretty cool.
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.
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
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.
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
I’m gonna use it on my next travel for tracing routes and saving some points of interest.
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 :)
There's a demo video on the homepage: https://www.zdone.co/
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.
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.
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.
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).
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. ;-)
Deck of Cards Workout for iOS and Android. Pick a card, get the 3 of Spades, do 3 pushups.
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!
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 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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
(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.
Feature flags as a service. People use it but not necessarily making money right now
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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/
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
It's 95% done. Most of the (unedited) content is available for open review: https://nymity.ch/book/
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!
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.
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.
Current revenue is less than $5 per month (just me), and costs are less than $100 per month.
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
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.
Always thought that it can't be too hard writing something like postman and it wasn't... Just time-consuming
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).
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Currently rebuilding all of the tooling for greater stability and better connectivity.
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.)
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
It uses stable diffusion under the hood.
Episodes get some views. Spend about ~250 a month of tools and editing costs.
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.
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
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.
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 :)
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!)
I have created this for my personal use. Basically, I want something which seamlessly search through my notes content and filter them.
Still early on, but been a fun excuse to learn some new tech stacks and serves my needs well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
A small side project to help me as a dev to name colors. Might be useful for designers. $0 on hosting (Netlify). $0 earnings.
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.
It's been running for a bit more than a year. Hosting cost is low. Content is manually generated.
I’m eventually planning on o do more with it, but need some free time in my life.
Let's you play chess with your Slack workspace mates.
burn rate ~$30/month
If there's demand I plan to implement tournaments and maybe a MS Teams version.
https://prose.sh - a blog platform managed exclusively from the terminal.
I never really made any effort to market this SaaS. If someone wants to help me grow it and partner up, feel free to reach out via support@qrcode.com
Runescape server playable on browser.
Made it a while back. Was fun learning WebGL and porting over code.
It costs me 12$ a month to keep 1 server instance. AWS spot instance + static IP
wander for Nomad is as k9s is for Kubernetes.
This was a business, once. Now I'm running it as a free service, so it costs some hosting plus maintaining the domains.
Medium for developers and other tech folks. Or like dev.to, but "hopefully" better UX for driving discussions etc. Also supports live audio sessions.
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.
Link aggregator / RSS reader with real-time commenting. No plans to monetize it. I mostly built it to learn Phoenix Liveview and TailwindCSS.
Similar to wordle. Thinking of putting this in App Store. Do you think it's worth it?
About 7 years in building a touch-oriented performance interface intended to focus on both audio and video output.
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.
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.
Allows you to create the commands that generate formatted text in Minecraft.
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.
This is a new project, so I don't expect to generate revenue yet, but I want to turn it into a useful resource.
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.
A basketball fantasy app, made for my friends and I, and catching dozens of random users.
Cost me ~ 60$/month
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.
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
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.
Idea: renders your resume as pretty terminal output. Others can view it in their own terminals:
curl -L ancv.io/heyho
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.
I don't have anything fancy to show, so here's a link to my personal website with all my projects.
> //i.ibb.co/gSqWh5K/10382-NET-EFFECTs-FINAL-Mail.png
(weekend-modus ^^) regards
It's a UGC map of Murals and Street Art. I pay ~$60/mo for image hosting fees via Imgix.
Personal tasks with estimates and focused on “local first”/desktop usage.
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...
its just interesting to see how the globale economy is doing, although nobody seems interested :)
I'm experimenting with RL. Not gonna lie, it's hard and time-consuming.
Battle your code against others, was a quick weekend bodge that turned out kinda fun
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.
Every dev needs to build their own personal budget tracker... right?
Haven't got enough traction for me to want to implement payments
I'm doing Pet AI. Like AI portraits but for your loved pet.
Find local food trucks. Now to convince food truck owners to use it ...
Pretty much like Pocket, but open source.
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!
Record your work based accomplishments
Like AI portraits but for your loved pet :)
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.
an experimental coding puzzle in typescript.
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)
So far no epiphanies, but I'm <$0 revenue so I think it still counts.
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.
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'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/
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.
I soft launched it between jobs and that's it.
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.
A database of 70000 startups sortable and searchable by investors, valuation, funding amounts, funding dates etc.
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.
..
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.
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.
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.