A while ago, my girlfriend and I moved in together, and at first, it was total chaos with household chores and the move. We had no routine, and that led to arguments.

Being a good programmer, I started developing an app to fix it. The first version I made (a year ago) was rough, buggy, and had very few features, but we started using it anyway. Over time, and thanks to my girlfriend's help, I kept improving it and adding new features, bringing me to today, where I believe it's at the exact point where I can recommend it to others.

Right now, I'm going through a "marketing" phase, trying to attract users little by little and without rushing all organically.

If you're interested in the app, feel free to comment on the post and I'll gladly answer any questions, suggestions, etc. I'm open to everything.

I quit my job this month to find a business and I've been building Pipley, an app for people with ADHD who can't START things. You tell a duck named Pip what you're avoiding and he gives you one tiny step.

Today I got my first paying customer. Not a friend. A stranger. I looked at the event log and the whole thing took 2 minutes:

- opened the app, named their duck
- tapped "my messy room"
- got a step, tapped "easier step" (it was still too big)
- did it
- saw a "$19 lifetime" offer on the win screen
- paid

Then they came back and planned their whole day in it.

Biggest lesson: they paid AFTER the app worked, not before. The paywall shows up right after the first win, not at signup.

Stuff that's broken/hard right now: almost no comments on my posts, and I can't tell yet if they came from Instagram or Facebook because I used the same link on both (fixed that today lol).

What would you change about the app's first 2 minutes? Roast it.

Back in march my cousin who runs a grooming van asked if i could make her something better than the paper calendar she kept in the glovebox. I built it in lovable over 2 weekends, mostly to stop her texting me screenshots of double bookings

She showed it to 3 other groomers at some trade thing. Then those showed it to more. I never posted it anywhere and didnt have a landing page until july when someone asked where to sign up

Now its 140 groomers, 23 pay $19 a month, and i get feature requests like im a real company. Invoicing, SMS reminders, a field for which dogs bite. One lady wants it to work offline becouse she grooms in a barn with no signal

The support emails alone would have buried me by now. I use https://airfive.com/ for those, it reads the code and answers the how-do-i stuff in a chat widget so i mostly see the real bugs. Still a lot of real bugs

I have no roadmap. I have a notes app with 60 requests and a day job

Last week someone asked for my company phone number. I gave her my cell and then sat there for a while

10 months ago, I was at the lowest point of my life.

I’d just lost my dad to cancer. Months earlier I lost my job too - for missing one senseless Zoom meeting while I was caretaking. I was struggling just to survive.

But in all of it, I still found the strength to do the one thing I do best: create.

I designed Pandora - a smart lid that turns an ordinary jar into a self-sustaining little world. I built the 3D model in Blender, rendered an animation of it, put up a landing page, and posted it right here on Reddit.

Then 24 hours happened that changed my life.

The post went semi-viral: 100k views, 1k upvotes, around 300 people on the waitlist. And then a DM. Someone (anonymous at the time) asking a simple question: how much would it take to get this Kickstarter-ready? Days later, he and a colleague - at one of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley - wired me the first money.

An autistic no-one from a country most people can’t find on a map got a life-saving investment based on a single Blender animation. A Christmas miracle, basically.

I promised them 4 review prototypes in 2 months. They said, “Take 3, there are always delays.” I started the very next morning.

They were right about the delays. Tariffs, chip shortages, supplier nightmares. 10 months of around-the-clock work. One sandwich a day (we don’t have ramen over here). But I built a dream team along the way, including someone who’s worked on some of the biggest Kickstarter campaigns there are.

And today, I’m holding the first fully working, virtually production-ready Pandora in my hands.

• A slick machined, brushed and anodized aluminium case (I’m told it’s aluminum, but I’ll keep spelling it the right way 😄)
• A gold-plated PCB covered in shamanic symbols (SHMN, read “shaman” is our brand name)
• A bunch of state-of-the-art sensors and actuators
• A black glass top
• 4K HDR Sony camera for timelapses
• And an ML agent inside that keeps whatever lives in the jar alive and thriving

It’s real. It’s not vaporware. People want it.

So here’s the hard part.

The delays burned through the budget. My angels and investors have already extended my runway three times - and I’m endlessly grateful for that. But the money has hit zero again, and I need a four-digit amount for the finishing touches before the marketing push for the Kickstarter. I asked for a 4th extension. They said no. I don’t blame them. It’s fair. It’s on me to deliver this time.

I’m running on fumes. My ISP cut me off over unpaid bills (I’m burning mobile data to write this). My team’s Google Workspace gets disabled in a matter of days. It genuinely feels like a dream I’m about to wake up from - straight back into last December's hell.

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I AM at the end of the tunnel. But there’s a thin, invisible, bulletproof wall between me and it. I’m stuck, I’m scared af, and I honestly don’t know what to do next.

So I came back to Reddit - where all of this started. Maybe the Universe gives you one last chance when you’re this close.

I’m linking my original post and photos below as proof it’s all real. If any of this moves you, drop me a line.

Fingers crossed. And thank you for reading.

Sincerely,
Seb

Original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1pkspec/i_lost_my_job_and_my_dad_last_year_so_i_channeled/

Imgur gallery:
https://imgur.com/a/lfU4BcQ

I’m a Physics, CS and Math student. Every problem set, I was retyping equations from textbook PDFs into Overleaf, symbol by symbol.

Mathpix solves this, but its free plan stops at 20 snips a month with a .edu email (10 without). I’d hit that in one problem set.

ChatGPT and Claude can do it too. But opening a tab, pasting the screenshot, waiting for the reply, then copying the LaTeX back out is too much friction for something I do twenty times a night.

So I built Snip, and then I did the math on how much I could give away.

The economics:

• Each snip costs me about $0.0005 in model costs.
• A free user who uses all 200 snips costs me about 10 cents a month.
• Most people won’t hit 200, so the real cost is lower.
• Paid plan is $2.99/month or $19/year for heavy users. After Stripe fees and model costs, that’s still about 80–95% margin.

So a free tier 10× bigger than Mathpix’s costs me almost nothing. The real costs are my time and support.

How it works: download, open, press ⇧⌘2, drag a box over any equation on your screen, and the LaTeX is on your clipboard. Every result is checked to compile before you paste it. No sign-up, no account.

Honest status:

• About 3 seconds from drag to clipboard. I want this under 2.
• Simple printed equations and screenshots work well. Long multi-line equations and handwriting are still rough.
• Mac only for now (Apple silicon).

What I’d love feedback on:

1. Does the economics hold up, or am I missing a cost that will bite me?
2. Is skipping the chat window worth it to you, or is pasting into ChatGPT good enough?
3. Is $2.99/month or $19/year fair after the free 200?
4. Send me an equation it gets wrong. Those are the most useful thing you can give me.

If you’re in STEM and it’s actually useful to you, I’ll give you lifetime access for free. DM me and I’ll upgrade your account.

snip.rojinsharma.com/?ref=reddit-sideproject

Every app today wants me to create a profile, even the ones that have no reason to know who I am. It started to annoy me, so when I built my gym tracker I made a decision: no account, no login, no email. You open the app and log your first set.

I also didn't want to build another social feed with posts and likes. Our brains are fried enough already. I wanted a workout tracker that is actually useful: log your sets, see what you lifted last time, track progress, done.

What it costs me:

- data lives on the device, so I built export/backup instead of syncing to a server

- no cross-device sync (yet)

- I don't have users' emails, so it's harder to reach them

I'm still not 100% sure it was the right call, but for a simple tool I think it is.

For other builders: did you ship without accounts? Did you regret it, or would you do it again?

Some context the video can't fit.

Pipeline: WhisperX for transcription, an LLM writes the script with timestamps, CLIP plus a vision model picks the shots that actually match each line, Qwen3-TTS narrates, ffmpeg renders 9:16 with burned-in subtitles. Runs on a rented GPU, about $0.20 and 7 minutes per video.

The parts nobody warns you about:

• The narrator literally laughed mid-sentence during a funeral scene. Whisper writes [laughs] into the transcript and the TTS performs it. Had to strip those annotations before the script step.
• Scene matching. V1 picked random pretty frames. Now it anchors on the timestamp, verifies with CLIP, then re-ranks with a vision model.
• Loudness. The hook was always quieter than the body. Fixed with two-pass ffmpeg loudnorm.
• 60 seconds is a brutal budget. 11 lines max, and long lines get split.

279 people tried it, 0 paying so far. Free tier is 1 video, no card.

What would you fix first: the voice, the scene matching, or the pacing? Video is compressed hard, so sorry for the quality.

https://reddit.com/link/1xh5je6/video/klfmn6bhw2yh1/player

For years I used a paid clipboard manager. I bought a license, then the developer changed everything: a subscription, a pricier paid version, sold elsewhere and differently. My license stayed stuck on a version from years ago, no updates, no support. After a while I got fed up and built my own. It's my first real macOS app.

It's called encore. ⇧⌘V opens a shelf of your recent copies: text, links, images, files, colors and code, each as a card you can recognize at a glance. Return pastes into the app you were in, Space previews, ↑ opens the full library with search and filters.

Version 0.5 came out today:

- Snippets: ⌘S on any card gives it a name, a language (guessed among 85) and tags. They get their own tab and never expire

- {{placeholders}} ask for a value before pasting

- Favorites and snippets sync between your Macs, peer to peer on the local network, end-to-end encrypted, no cloud

Everything stays local: no account, no subscription, no telemetry. Native SwiftUI + AppKit, 30 languages, MIT licensed.

A few things I learned along the way:

- Pasting into "the app you were in" is harder than it sounds: you have to give focus back to the right window at the right moment

- Without a paid Apple developer account, a stable self-signed certificate is what keeps the Accessibility permission across updates

- Pairing two Macs safely with just a 6-digit code took more reading on ECDH than I expected

Website: https://kamasoutra.github.io/encore/

Install: brew install --cask kamasoutra/tap/encore

Source: https://github.com/Kamasoutra/encore

Not notarized yet, so the first launch needs System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway. Feedback and feature requests are very welcome!

Hey everyone! 👋

I'm a solo developer and I just released my first app, PushDuel, on Google Play.

The idea: put your phone on the floor, and the front camera counts your push-ups, squats and curls on-device. It checks the depth of every rep, so half reps don't count 😅

What's inside:

💪 Camera rep counting (push-ups, squats, curls)

📅 A 30-day coach plan that adds reps gradually

⚔️ Live 1v1 duels with friends

📈 Progress history, ranks and achievements

🌍 10 languages, works offline

🆓 Free, no subscription (ads only)

I'd love honest feedback: does the counting work well for you? What would make you use it every day?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.repduel.repduel

Thanks for reading! 🙏

been building opennmind for about 4 months. it's an ai workspace for validating startup ideas before you write code. launch is nov 16

the waitlist is past 800 now which sounds good until you remember nobody on it has paid me a single rupee

i've drafted a $12/mo pro plan and i keep not sending the email. part of me thinks if i ask now half of them leave and i find out the 800 was fake

did you ask your waitlist to pay before launch or wait till they actually used it?

also curious if a cheap founding plan worked better for you than a normal price

opennmind.com if you want to see what it is

I posted the hub here last week, and the calculator I keep coming back to since then is the NRI property one. I own a 2 BHK back in Hyderabad, and on paper the rent looks fine. Then you factor in the 31.2% tax withheld from the very first rupee, the rupee sliding against the dollar year after year, and a second tax bill over here in the US when you eventually sell — and the "good yield" suddenly isn't.

So I built the keep-vs-sell calculator to run all of that together: rent after withholding, the real return in dollars, what selling actually nets after both countries take their cut, plus a stress test for what happens if rent stalls or the rupee slides further.

It's free, no signup, same as the solar one: https://worthitcalcs.com/nri-property/

Hub is at https://worthitcalcs.com/ and the solar calculator at https://worthitcalcs.com/solar/

If you've actually sold a property from abroad, I'd especially like to hear where the math feels off — that's the part I want to get right.

I recently became a parent and wanted a simple place to keep track of feeds, sleep, diapers, pumping, medicines, and appointments. I started using Nido, then built it into the tracker I wished I had for families like ours.

I’m the developer, and I want to be upfront about that. Nido is free, with no ads or subscription. It keeps the diary on the device; optional sync and partner sharing use your private iCloud account. I can’t access family data, and the app has no analytics or tracking. It’s available in 30 languages.

I made it to help, not to sell anything. If you’re willing to look, I’d appreciate feedback on whether the core tracking flow and privacy explanation are clear. The App Store page has real screenshots of the app: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6816756744

Our water tracker app, Waltermelon, has been on the stores for a year now. Two of us, both with full time dev jobs, working on it in the evenings, usually until midnight.

Real numbers: $391 MRR, 254 active subscriptions, about 17K users so far (roughly 11K on Android, 5.5K on iOS), 4.7 on Google Play and 4.8 on the App Store. All organic, apart from a few hundred dollars of test ads early on that didn't pay off.

We're not vibe coders, we've been building apps for clients for 12 years. We do use AI a lot though, because it's just the two of us and we do everything: Flutter, backend, design, the mascot animations, store pages, TikToks.

I know a lot of the "$200k/mo app built in 2 days" posts on X are bait. They still get to me sometimes. We spend most evenings looking at data, changing something, testing it, and the hardest part isn't building, it's getting people to find the app at all. We applied for Apple featuring many times and never got picked.

Things we tried this year, honestly:
- ASO. Putting "Water Tracker" first in the store title helped a bit. A bit.
- Writing to "best water tracker apps" lists and blogs. Most never replied, and a lot of those lists feature apps we think are worse than ours. Which is kind of why we started building ours in the first place.
- TikTok. Views, yes. Paying users, almost none.
- The one thing that does work: friends. About a third of our paying US users came in small groups who invited each other, so this year we built challenges you do together.

That said, we're honestly having a great time. Every new subscriber still makes our day. We built a feedback chat into the app, so people write to us directly and we answer them ourselves, and a lot of those messages are just people saying they love the app. That's probably the best part of the whole thing.

It's also the project where we finally get to build stuff client apps never have budget for: home screen widgets, Rive animations for the mascot (you'll soon be able to dress him up), custom app icons, background work that actually behaves.

So we're still figuring out the growth part. If you got your app past this stage without ads, I'd really like to know what did it for you.

That's not window-manager snapping. It's Claude driving the real cursor through a CLI I built called desk, at 20x speed. Each window is one drag.

Free / MIT: github.com/zacfink/screen-intelligence

BasketBoss is a progressive web app designed to eliminate mealtime stress and reduce food waste for busy families. It scans your ingredients with AI, auto-generates smart weekly meal plans around what you already have in your kitchen, and builds aisle-by-aisle shopping lists—all without requiring a bulky app store download.

I run a small real-time quiz game: live 1v1 math battles over WebSockets. A player reported that mid-match his screen froze. He could see both scores, and his opponent kept scoring, but his own answers did nothing.

What the logs said: nothing. No errors, no refused answers; the server simply never got his answers. In one match his socket dropped 30 s in and came back 15 s later, and still no answers arrived.

Reproducing it: I put a tiny TCP proxy between the app and the server that breaks the live connection three ways, and drove a phone-sized headless Chrome through a real match:

Root cause: on mobile networks a WebSocket can die quietly, or in one direction only. The browser keeps readyState === OPEN, so the client kept re-sending into nothing. The server only drops a socket after 60 s without a pong, and a match lasts 90 s.

Fix (client side):

1. App-level heartbeat: nothing received for 15 s → send ping; no reply within 6 s → drop the socket without waiting for it to close, and open a new one.
2. Answer watchdog: an answer unconfirmed for 5 s → force a reconnect and re-send. This catches the one-way case, where messages still arrive, so the heartbeat never fires.
3. Resync after every reconnect: fetch the match state over HTTP, because anything pushed while disconnected is lost.

The server counts each answer once, so re-sending is always safe. Same tests after the fix: every case recovers in about 5–6 s.

Takeaway: readyState === OPEN is a claim, not a fact. Test on broken networks, not just slow ones.

Full write-up with every debugging step: https://mindrace.in/app/community/posts/5dd00ef5-5c34-4e0a-af30-f45e6958ccbc

How do you detect half-open WebSockets, especially on mobile?

I’m the solo dev behind Dark Roll 2, a marble platformer heavily inspired by soulslike genre. Apparently, that wasn’t enough scope creep, because something in my brain went: "Backrooms". So I added a Backrooms-inspired bonus level. No objective. No exit. Just a place to wander around.

There are weird photos scattered throughout, sourced from years of random crap on my phone and contributions from friends. Finally,a use for all those pictures I refused to delete.

There’s also a ball pit, a creepy mannequin room, and more. You can’t finish the level, but you can roll over a cushion with remarkable fidelity.

Was this a gut feeling? A creative impulse? The tiny unpaid level designer living in my skull? Hard to say. He doesn’t attend meetings. If this sounds like your sort of nonsense, the level is avalable for free in the demo.

Would you explore something like this, or should someone revoke my access to Unity?

MojoTick launched on Product Hunt today, so I'm sharing it here too.

It's a free market scanner for US stocks and crypto: 15-min delayed data · Real-time numbers with a subscription.

What it does: scans a lot of charts and ranks setups by which technical checks they pass, with a badge for each check so the ranking isn't a black box. Windows: 15m, 1h, 4h, 12h, 2d, 7d. Four scan modes: Steady · Calm Trend, Moderate · Balanced Scan, Aggressive · Momentum Hunt, Hyper · Fast Movers. No sign-up to try it.

What I'd love feedback on: is the first screen clear? What would you change?

Try it: https://mojotick.com

Launch page, if you'd rather comment there: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/mojotick

Scanner, not a broker. Not financial advice.

i made a little tracker app for myself about 7 years ago and it's been logging ever since. looking back at it, it's not really health data, it's a life story - you can see house moves, new jobs, kids being born, just from where the nights are.

so i've been turning it into a real app, mymo. it builds a timeline of your life from what your phone already knows - places, trips, photos, workouts, sleep, day summaries. then there's a chat where you can ask about it ("what did i do exactly a year ago", "how's my sleep been"), and it slowly learns about you so the answers get better.

everything runs on the phone, the data and the AI. no account, no server, nothing uploaded. phones know so much about us that it felt like the only way to do it. the downside is a big download, around 3gb, because the model lives in the app.

it's been on iphone for a few weeks and android just got approved for open testing this week, so i'm looking for testers on both:

https://mymo.app/invited/2MemMY/

iphone needs ios 26. android needs android 12+ and at least 6gb ram.

(the video is demo mode with made-up data, not quite ready to share 7 years of where i've been)

what i'd love to know:

• does the timeline look right for your own days?
• what was the first thing you asked it, and was the answer any good?
• what would make you open it again tomorrow?

reply here, dm me, or shake your phone in the app for a feedback form. testers get it free forever.

Hey everyone!

Finding interesting communities online can be surprisingly frustrating. Telegram groups, Discord servers, WhatsApp communities, and Signal groups are all scattered across different platforms, and finding the right one isn't always easy.

So I built GroupHub — a searchable directory that brings public communities from these platforms into one place.

Here's what it does:
* Discover groups across Telegram, Discord, WhatsApp, and Signal.
* Browse communities by topic, language, and platform.
* Explore around 2,900 group listings across 23 categories.
* Submit your own public group or community for review and listing.

The idea is simple: make it easier for people to discover communities that match their interests, while helping community owners get discovered.

I'm an independent developer, and I'd really appreciate some honest feedback.

Would you find a cross-platform community directory useful? And what would make you trust a group listing enough to join it?

You can check it out here: https://grouphub.win

If you run a public community, you're also welcome to submit it!

Thanks for checking it out. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

For the past few months I've been building investorexplorer.com as a side project.

The main tool is the AI Explorer: pick any US stock and it runs five classic value frameworks on real data (earnings yield, return on capital, the Acquirer's Multiple, an FS-Score, and a 10-year DCF). It explains each one in plain English with a green/yellow/red signal, then ties them together into one overall verdict. The site also contains lessons as to how and why this metrics are used.

Try it here, your first analysis needs no account: https://www.investorexplorer.com/app/ai-explorer

Where it stands honestly: I got some traffic with a "guess the mystery stock" game I posted on Reddit, but hardly anyone made it to the actual tool (until today it was behind a login wall). So I genuinely don't know yet whether it's useful to anyone but me, and I'm deciding whether to keep going.

What I'd love to know:

1. After one analysis, would you come back? What would make you?
2. What did you expect it to do that it didn't?
3. Does it give you anything ChatGPT or a normal stock screener doesn't?

Brutal honesty welcome. I'd rather hear it now.

Sweet Listeners connects people who want to talk (about their day, a vent, a weird thought) with real listeners. It isn't therapy or crisis support, just everyday conversation. This short clip shows the experience. I'd love honest feedback on whether it's clear what it is in 15 seconds. https://sweetlisteners.com/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=home_free_video

I've been working in outreach for the past 4 years, and the most annoying part of the process for me has always been doing the research to write good cold emails.

I was spending so much time researching companies and trying to figure out what to say to people that I felt like I was spending more time doing research than actually reaching out.

So I decided to make a website that focuses on that part of the process so I could save myself a lot of time.

It's called SimpleSend, and it pretty much uses AI to research companies, find relevant information, and help write personalized cold emails.

I was hoping to get some tips or suggestions from other people who do outreach because I'm still trying to make it better.

There's a 14-day free trial, and I'd honestly be really happy if anyone wanted to try it out and give me some feedback.

Even if you don't like it, I'd love to hear what you think I could improve.

Here's the website: https://simplesend.tech/

Hey y'all

Wanted to share a project I'm working on for feedback.

A little about me. I'm a product designer for over 20 years, and took this on as a personal project. I know there are 1 million apps out there that do something similar. I want to say Proof is unique, because of all the time I've spend on the insights engine. Also, I pay particular attention to the interaction design, pushing paradigms and design I wouldn't normally get to push in my day job. I'm not looking to earn any $ from this project, I just want people to use it. It's 100% free, no strings attached. This one is completely designed "by hand".

About the project...

Proof is a workout tracker and analysis tool (yes another one). On the iPhone, its main job is to track your workouts, strength training (or other goal), steps, sleep, etc... . It guides you through your progression (IE: suggests to go up, or down), and gives you a pre and post workout analysis.

While I would like people to use the app for its logging, you can import CVS, or feeds from other workout apps, if you want to just use it for analysis.

This newest piece is an iPad version I’m calling Proof Studio. In the app you can see your routine on a body map, how many sets each muscle gets, how each lift is trending, and you can pick a goal (like bigger arms or a V-taper) and it suggests the lifts your routine is missing. You can also log a workout from a bar along the bottom. The iPhone and iPad stay in sync through your own iCloud.

The video is my own training log. If you want to poke at it yourself, there’s a browser demo with sample data (nothing to install, nothing saved):

https://getproof.now/redesign/index.html?demo=1&try=1&studio=1

I’m a designer, not a full-time developer, so I’d really appreciate any feedback: what’s confusing, what’s missing, what you’d want from a tool like this. Thanks for looking.

I've been testing three tools and I'm curious if there's a better alternative.

VidRush(.)ai has the best quality so far, but it's expensive when you're testing new niches.

Framitor(.)site is much cheaper at around $0.15 per minute with similar quality in my experience. The downside is that a 10 minute video takes around 70 minutes to generate.

Pictory is fast and affordable, but it relies heavily on stock footage, which doesn't work for every niche.

I'm looking for a tool that offers a good balance between video quality, generation speed and price.

Have you tried any of these? Or is there another platform you'd recommend based on your own experience?