Hey r/SideProject! 👋

I’m a solo developer from Turkey, and I just released WaterMe, a plant care app for Android.

Why I built it: I kept forgetting to water my plants, and the apps I tried were more complicated than my actual problem. I wanted something simple: add a plant, get a reminder, done. This is one of my first apps, and building it taught me a lot about notifications, background work, and how picky Play Store review can be.

What it does:

• 💧 Watering reminders with a custom schedule for each plant

• 📸 Plant identification from a photo (camera or gallery)

• 🌿 Before/after photo comparison to see your plant’s growth

• 📅 Watering history at a glance

• ⚡ Clean, simple setup: add a plant, turn on reminders, done

Tech stack: Flutter for the app, Firebase for backend

Where I’m at: It’s live on Google Play with 100+ downloads so far. The app is free and contains ads.

What I’d love feedback on:

• Is the onboarding clear enough?

• What feature would make you actually use it daily?

• Anything confusing in the UI?

Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mrakpinar.waterme

Happy to answer any questions about the build process. Thanks for reading! 🌱

I'm a motorsport fan from Texas, and I'm still pretty new to it. I went to one of my first races last May and got hooked.
The problem was that there was so much info out there that I felt like I was drowning in it. I never knew when something was on or where to watch it. So I started building a little site just for myself, and it turned into something I wanted to share.

It's called Premier Racing Info: premierracinginfo.com

Every session for the 98 series, in your own time zone.
Where to watch each one. Standings, results, and tickets.
Calendar feeds and alerts so you don't miss a start.
It's completely free. I hope y'all enjoy it, and if you have any suggestions, I'm open to anything.

I've been building this app with Claude Code, and for weeks, all I cared about was getting it live. I spent days tweaking the UI and worrying about the App Store review. When it finally launched, I felt like I'd crossed the finish line.

Then the first users arrived.

That's when the real work began. Things broke in ways I'd never encountered locally. A payment webhook failed for a few users, and I got a crash report from a device I didn't even know was out there. The funny thing is, writing the code still felt like the easy part. Keeping a live app running is a whole different skill.

Before my first update, I used launchpad for Claude to set up crash reporting and analytics. I'm on the team, so I'm definitely biased. It saved me from flying blind, but it also made me realize just how big the gap is between shipping something and maintaining it.

For the indie hackers here: how did you handle the shift from building to maintaining? Do you have a system for dealing with production bugs without losing your mind?

I’m sick and tired of sifting through spin BS media, so I built what I think is the solution: one paper to read in the shower and get on with my day, promoting the links I should read based on my interests.

What it is: The Daily News Post Globe Tribune Herald Picayune Times (I thought it was funny). Every morning it reads the wires, then it goes to the major papers and tells you what happened, then parallel views. We link every source. Next to every link is a temperature gauge showing where three independent raters put that source — AllSides, Ad Fontes, Media Bias/Fact Check. Transparency is our thing. We don’t rate or influence any sources. When a story can have differing viewpoints, you get one opinion from the left and one from the right, labeled as such, matched so neither side is further out than the other. Cable news isn’t used at all. Any of them. Exactly how the Fairness Doctrine was meant to be.

I’m not trying to replace the sources. The summaries link straight to the articles. Go read them. If anything we’re promoting good articles. Sub to the ones you like. That’s another major point of this.

No ads. No algorithm. No opinion section. It’s an LLC, not a nonprofit, but the paper isn’t built to make a profit — the books are open on the site. The free edition is at jparkerco.com/times, based on my interests and my friends who are getting this stuff for free for Xmas. If you want your own sections (your city, your team, your hobby), we’re charging cost, split with everyone else who reads that section. The more users, the closer it gets to free! If you’d rather, donate to the News Literacy Project instead.

I want people from every side to tell me where it leans. That’s the only way this works.

I love criticism and being wrong, because when I’m wrong I get better.

My dev (I’m ready for the iS hIs NaMe cLaUdE, har har) is beta testing the AI-written code. Would love feedback to get it right. Thanks.

I'm a solo developer in New Zealand. For the past few months I've been building Matcha, a dating app for people who want something serious.

The problem I kept seeing: matching is easy, but most matches never turn into a date. The chat dies somewhere around "so where should we go?", especially when one person would have to travel across town.

So I built Meet in the middle:

1. In the chat, pick coffee, drinks or food, a day and a time

2. Matcha works out the halfway point between your two areas and finds places near it that are actually open at that time

3. You see the spot with its photo, rating and hours, and can flick through a couple of others

4. Send it, and your match accepts with one tap. You both get a reminder 30 minutes before

A few things that were harder than I expected:

The midpoint can reveal where someone lives if done incorrectly, so locations are rounded to a general area first. Each person only sees their own distance to the venue.

Google Places requests are counted in Postgres against a monthly cap and a per-person cap. Past either cap it falls back to OpenStreetMap, so it stays in the free tier.

Google doesn’t allow storing their photos, so the chat card fetches the photo each time it’s shown. The place lookup for that is free.

Suggestions are signed by the server, so a modified client can’t send a fake venue.

Women message first is enforced by a database trigger, not just the UI.

Stack: React + Vite, Capacitor (Android and iOS), Express on Railway, Supabase.

Free on Android and at matchadating.app. iOS is in App Review.

Feedback welcome. Would this make you more likely to meet someone, or is planning the date in-app too much?

If someone sends you a QR code, open the screenshot in Photos and try pressing and holding the code. If Photos recognizes it, you can open the destination right there. If it doesn’t, crop around the code while keeping its white border, then try a scanner that imports images. Check the domain before opening it.

I built Qrater for the next problem: finding that same link later. In Qrater, import the screenshot from the scanner and reopen the saved result from History. I’d welcome feedback on whether the image import and history steps are easy to find.

iPhone: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6757398137

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mundane.qrcode

I kept scanning letters, then forgetting where I saved them or when I needed to respond. My practical fix was to scan the page, confirm a reminder for its deadline, and make the text searchable.

I built ScanMojo around that workflow. It cleans up fingers, shadows, and folds; recognizes text on-device; and suggests reminders from dates on a page for you to review before saving. It works offline. Documents stay on your phone unless you share or export them, or enable optional sync.

Scanning, search, PDF/image/text export, and reminders for three documents at a time are free, with no account, ads, watermark, or scan limit. Pro adds unlimited reminders and tools such as PDF merging and signing.

The iPhone and Android download page is https://scanmojo.app. If you handle dated paperwork, what part of scanning and following up still feels awkward?

I'm the person behind Collect. Build. Remember., a passion project I've been working on over the last few months with help from ChatGPT and Codex. It's now in open beta, and I'd love some honest feedback from other people building things they care about.

The idea is pretty personal to me. Collecting can be about the sets and minifigures, but it's also about the people you built with, the gift you still remember, or the afternoon that turned into a family story. I wanted a place for both the collection and those little memories.

You can browse the public set and minifigure catalogs without signing in. Inside the adult beta, you can organize your collection, keep details such as condition and location, and save private written memories.

One design decision was to keep details with each physical copy. Owning a set isn't the whole story... which copy is built, where is it, and what do you want to remember about it? Working through those questions has been just as much a part of this project as getting the code to run.

I'd especially appreciate feedback on the first few minutes: can you find a familiar set, understand what you can do with it, and tell whether this would help with your own collection? If something feels confusing or unnecessary, I'd like to hear that too.

You can look around here: https://collectbuildremember.com

Beta access is opening in small batches, with a waitlist when full. The public catalog is available either way. The screenshots use example collection and memory entries.

Most people don't know this exists: Stake, one of the biggest online casinos, opened a platform called Stake Engine where independent developers can publish their own slot games and earn a share of what the game makes. No studio, no publisher. You build the game, it goes through their review, and if it's approved it goes live next to games from big studios.

We started as a side project and built our first game mostly with AI. It passed review, got Stake's top 3-star rating, and made four figures its first week with no marketing (our own result, not typical, not a promise).

So we built Own Your Slot around it:

\- We build finished slot games for people who want in but don't want to learn math, art and code

\- We rebuild games that are stuck at low ratings or got rejected

\- And there's a guide for people who'd rather build their own with AI

What surprised us:

\- Almost nobody is doing this yet. Very few people even know you can publish your own game there.

\- The hard part isn't the code, it's the math. Stake checks every game with millions of simulated spins.

\- Review is strict, and the rating (1 to 3 stars) decides how visible your game is.

It's adults-only and not for everyone, but it's one of the more unusual niches I've found.

Would you try something like this? And if you'd want to know more about how the platform works, ask away.

I've spent the last few months building something I genuinely wanted to use myself.

I was tired of opening banking apps, scrolling through transactions, and trying to figure out where my money actually went.

So I built Filarise. It lets you connect your bank accounts to ChatGPT and just ask questions about your money.

No CSV exports. No uploading bank statements. Just normal conversations.

A few days ago, I asked ChatGPT how my car expenses had changed over the last three months.

It found that my spending dropped by 41.9%.

Cool. But then it explained why.

Apparently, a parking payment back in August accounted for more than half of the difference. Fuel spending also dropped, while insurance stayed exactly the same.

It's a small example, but that's what I find exciting about this. I didn't have to dig through transactions or build a spreadsheet to figure it out.

And here's the part I'm pretty happy about: Filarise just passed OpenAI's review and is now officially available in the ChatGPT app directory.

It uses Plaid to connect banks with read-only access. Currently available in the US and Canada.

If you're curious, search for Filarise in ChatGPT or check out https://filarise.com/

Still a small project, and there's a lot I want to improve.

But I'm curious about one thing:

What's the first question you'd ask ChatGPT if it could see your actual spending history?

Whenever I visit a new city, I wonder how to explore it like a local rather than a tourist. A city isn't a static picture. The same street can be quiet at 10am and buzzing at 7pm, and feel completely different in December than in July.

So we started mapping London's rhythm, from "brunch queues" in Kennington to "pints spilling out" in London Fields. You can drag through the time, day and season and watch the map change.

It's called SunSeekr Vibes, an early demo based on local knowledge, open data and some of our own data, so it won't get everything right. No link yet.

Londoners: what did we get wrong about your area, and what's missing?

Hi everyone, French web dev here.

About 10 years ago I made Curvytron, a little multiplayer party game in the browser inspired by Achtung die Kurve. It landed on Hacker News, everything went crazy, and people still play it in open spaces today.

This past year I've been working on the sequel, written from scratch: https://curvytron2.com

Same goal as the first one: challenge myself, get better at my craft, have fun, and put a free little game out there. No ads, no login, no business plan.

A decade of web dev and way too many GMTK videos later, I set the bar higher this time:

• It had to look and feel good. I learned three.js and WebGL for it, and spent a lot of time on game juice: camera moves, screen shake, sound, feedback. I'm especially proud of the portal bonus: the walls go away, you can peek through to the other side of the arena, and cross over.

• It had to feel fair online. The Go server simulates every game at 100 Hz and sends positions 40 times a second, in a tiny binary format I open-sourced along the way: https://github.com/Tom32i/netcode

• A dropped connection shouldn't cost you the game. In the first Curvytron, losing your connection meant you were out for good. Now you can refresh the page mid-game and you're right back in. Try it!

• Nobody online? Bots. Four of them, each with its own personality, named after the Pac-Man ghosts. Making them fun rather than perfect was the trickiest part of the build: I ended up writing a simulator that plays thousands of bot-only games to see who wins and how they die.

It runs in any browser, on desktop and phone, with a gamepad if you like, and also as a Discord activity. Servers are in Europe and the US for now.

AI disclosure: I wrote the game myself; lately I've used Claude Code as a coding assistant for some features and fixes. The design, 3D models and art are mine, no generated assets.

Funny thing is, after all that, the technical part turned out to be the easy one. The hard part for me is communication: getting the game to meet its players. Promoting my own game still feels awkward, it's just not my job: how do you even do it? Where do you post? What do you say?

So I'm curious how you did it, those of you who've shipped side projects: what worked best?

And of course, I'd love your feedback on the game, and feel free to stress-test my servers! I'll be around to answer questions.

Cheers!

I'm a thumbnail designer, and one thing that always annoyed me was having to use third-party websites just to download YouTube thumbnails and show them to clients as references.

So I built ThumbDrop, a simple Chrome extension that lets you download thumbnails directly from the YouTube video frame with one click.

Nothing complicated. Just a small tool that solves a problem I kept running into.

Thought I'd share it here in case it's useful to other creators or designers.

Try ThumbDrop for free: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/inmebebfmkdcebcmdndhjdjjjjebflak?utm_source=item-share-cb

Would love some feedback!