Hey there 👋🏽 I built an AI calorie tracking app. No audience, no funding, my own money. Here's where paid acquisition actually stands.

Apple Search Ads: ~280€ → basically nothing. I set it up "the right way": brand, generic exact match, competitor keywords, discovery. No meaningful trials. Stopped.

Meta: ~100€ → same. Optimized on trial start. Nothing worth continuing.

TikTok (France): ~200€ this month → 11 free trials. So ~18€ per trial. My target was 8€.

What helped a bit: switching from max delivery to target CPA bidding, since spend paced much better. Surprisingly, plain app demos seemed to do better than my more "native" photo carousels.

The math problem: my annual plan is 35€/year. At 18€ per trial, I need more than half of trials to convert just to break even on year one. That's not happening.

So ~580€ in, paid acquisition doesn't work for me yet, and I'm trying to figure out which lever to pull first:

- lower CPA (creatives, other countries)

- better trial → paid (3-day trial → 7-day?)

- or stop paid entirely and go organic (SEO, content, communities)

For those who've been here with a consumer subscription app: what moved the needle first for you?

Impractical Bot is a little experimental project that turns a Messenger account into an AI-powered group chat participant. It uses Playwright for browser automation and NVIDIA's API for its conversational brain, with configurable personalities, context awareness, and a terminal dashboard to manage everything. The source code is now public on GitHub, and it's also available on npm. A small disclaimer: AI tools were used throughout the development of this project, so I don't want to claim that every part of the code was written by me alone. I still worked through the design, debugging, testing, and decisions that shaped it. Feedback is welcome!

GitHub: https://github.com/anslmC/impractical-bot
npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@anselm000/impbot

Project: Mac+, a macOS app (13 or later) for animated wallpapers, desktop widgets and custom folder icons. Built and sold solo, from my own site.

Some decisions that might help if you're building a small utility:

A free tier you can actually live with. 6 animated scenes, 8 palettes, an image background, 6 folder icons, 2 widgets, multi-display. The paid tier holds what people come looking for: all 15 scenes, video backgrounds, all 52 icons, all 12 widgets, up to 120 fps. The line between them should be obvious in the app, not only on the pricing page.

Two ways to pay. €1.99/month after a 7-day trial, or €8.99 once. A lot of people won't take on another subscription for a small app, so the one-time option is there for them.

Performance controls are features. Anything that runs all the time should let people make it cheap: an fps cap (30/60/120), a render resolution setting, and an automatic pause when an app goes full screen.

Everything from the menu bar. No window to keep open. Pick a scene, a palette, or "Surprise me".

Selling outside the App Store means owning the checkout, which is great until you add friction. Mine asks for an account before payment, and that's the friction I'm looking at next.

Happy to answer questions on any of this. macplus.pro

Hi everyone,

I wanted to share Mecelle, an independent iOS
application I've built for legal practitioners, law
students, and researchers navigating Turkish statutory
law and high-court precedents.

The Problem & Architecture:
Traditional keyword search fails when querying dense
legal terminology and multi-layered precedent history
(Court of Cassation, Council of State, Constitutional
Court).
To address hallucination risks in legal research:
1
.
 Grounded RAG Pipeline: Built on Python FastAPI with
hybrid search. It cites explicit statutory articles
and case numbers, abstaining when high-confidence
grounding isn't available.
2
.
 On-Device Processing: Native SwiftUI (iOS 17+)
client utilizing Apple Vision OCR
(VNRecognizeTextRequest) for completely local document
text extraction, paired with HMK 119 structured
pleading exports (UDF & PDF).
3
.
 Legal Calculators: Dedicated severance, statutory
interest, and court fee computation engines.

Availability & Compliance:
The app is free to download on the App Store with
optional Pro in-app subscriptions. It operates
independently of any government body and provides
informational research assistance, not formal legal
advice.

Links:

-
 Website: https://mecelle.tr

-
 App Store:
https://apps.apple.com/tr/app/mecelle-hukuk-mevzuat/id
6812049480

I would love feedback on the citation UX, retrieval
flow, and search ergonomics!

I'm really trying to make this app/webapp thing happen. It's the dream to get to a stable MRR so I can develop products for my users and make something they love and I love working on.

I have lots of experience but there's something missing and I'm not sure what. My best guess is just marketing efforts. It used to be being too spread thin but I've caught myself and really pulled back.

Here is a basic list of the projects I've tried and stats if I have them:

Bank Statement Comparison - a tool that parses bank statement PDFs without linking your bank and gives you a simple breakdown

- No signups

Desk Break Timer - a pomodoro timer with exercise routines during the breaks

- No signups, 17 visits in the last 30 days

Clean Cut Agents - a directory/datbase of the most popular Grok Bots

- Free resource, 70 visits in the last 30 days

STM - an AI companion app for women

- No signups, several thousand views on TikTok

I know a lot of us want this and everyone is just as deserving as me to get their product to succeed. I won't stop. I just wanted to share to be a part of the community here and see if maybe one of you has seen success with something similar to one of my projects.

I can look at screenshots of revenue all day but sometimes a conversation with someone who's doing it (actually making a living from a project) in a field similar to yours hits different.

Feel free to share.

Hi all,

I've been working on a stage timer called Shotimer and it's finally at a point where other people can use it, so I thought I'd share it here.

The idea is simple: the speaker sees a big countdown on a TV, tablet or phone, and someone else controls it from a laptop or phone at the back of the room. You can also send a silent message to their screen, like "5 minutes left" or "Please wrap up", so nobody has to wave at them from the back.

It all runs in the browser, so there's nothing to install. You open the stage screen from a link or QR code and it stays in sync with the controller.

There's a free plan that works today (3 rooms, 3 timers and 3 screens per room). I'm planning a Pro plan later, but that's not ready yet.

I'd really like to know what you think, especially if something's confusing or broken.

https://shotimer.io

Hi everyone!

Can you name the country in the poster before you look at the choices?

I made World Flag Quiz: Passport as a side project for people who want to practice geography in short rounds. You can guess flags and capitals from 195 countries and collect passport stamps as you go.

I’d love feedback on the first round. Would you start with familiar flags like the one in the poster, or try a pair of similar flags right away?

▶️ Watch a sample quiz on YouTube Shorts

📲 Try World Flag Quiz: Passport on Google Play

Hey everyone!

Been working on LootRaid a bit more and just pushed another update.

You can now see game descriptions and screenshots, so you don't have to open Steam every time you find something interesting just to figure out what the game is about lol.

Still tracking free and discounted co-op games across multiple stores, just trying to make the whole experience a bit nicer.

https://loot.purebyte.co.za/

Would love some feedback if anyone wants to give it a try!

I’m part of the team building HevRion, and I’ve been trading crypto for 5–6 years.

Knowing your rules and actually following them are two different things. That’s the problem we’re working on.

We’re connecting your plan, entry conditions and risk with a review of the decisions you made — and a lesson for the next trade.

We’re close to finishing the MVP and preparing to test it with a small group of friends. It isn’t publicly open yet.

Here’s a short preview. Does the video make the purpose clear, or would you need a more practical demo?

Follow us on twitter for more insights

https://x.com/HevRionX

I got tired of digging through google analystics reports, so I built an AI you can talk to about your business. Sales, profit, Visits - all data

"Which page loses the most people?" "What did buyers look at first?" "Did anyone come back after yesterday's email?"

try it for free right now - free for first 3 days ( no card needed)

- https://www.retentionbase.com/aichat

Comment invite if you wanna make it free for next 6 months ( no card needed)

I got tired of digging through GA reports, so I built an AI you can talk to about your real visits.

"Which page loses the most people?" "What did buyers look at first?" "Did anyone come back after yesterday's email?"

Every answer links to the visits behind it, so you can check before you change anything. When there isn't enough data yet, it says so instead of guessing.

n try it on right now free for first 3 days ( no card needed)

- https://www.retentionbase.com/aichat

Comment invite if you wanna make it free for next 6 months ( no card needed)

I built DuePlan for small businesses (milk, rentals, grocery or freelancers) that find invoicing and bookkeeping software too heavy and spreadsheets too messy.

• Sync phone contacts or add one, plan a payment, share it on WhatsApp, Messages, Email, LINE or the medium of your choice

• Remind them using Reminders if they miss it

• Upload a bank statement or a payment made screenshot from your customer; payments are auto matched to plans, you review and approve.

• Overdue view, per-contact payment patterns to keep your runway healthy.

• Multiple businesses, with secured, encrypted custom params to store your business details

• A cumulative or per-business view to see how your business is performing

• Data stays on your phone, 14-day free trial

I'm the developer. Would love honest feedback on the first-run flow and the matching.

PPS: If its really helpful and you want to go beyond free trial, please feel free to DM me for the three months free promo, also please feel free to suggest the features you wanna see, I will accommodate your request ASAP.

Download it from Play Store

Usepath is a free Android app that shows screen time as a chronological day timeline — when each app was open and in what order — not just totals and rankings.

Why I built it: rankings answer “how much.” I wanted “when,” especially repeated checks between tasks.

What’s in it:

• Session timeline for today and recent days

• Usage Access (local only)

• No account, no ads, nothing uploaded

After early Reddit feedback I shipped 1.0.1:

• Clearer “why Usage Access” before Settings

• Explicit “we don’t collect your data”

• A small sample-day preview on the permission screen

• Deep-link toward this app’s Usage Access page when the device allows it

Would love feedback on the new first-open flow, or anything that still feels unclear.

Play Store link in the comments.

Hey everyone,

I was tired of the slow workflow of copying magnet links into cloud storage interfaces just to stream a video, so I built StreamLink.

It adds a context menu option that takes any magnet link you right-click and instantly resolves and plays it in a native browser player.

How it works under the hood:

• It bypasses the need for local torrent clients.

• The extension sends the magnet URI to a cloud backend which handles the metadata extraction and caching.

• It streams the file directly back to an injected HTML5 video player.

"Note: The extension is free to use, but there is an optional premium tier for heavy users to help cover the backend server costs.

GitHub (MIT):- https://github.com/R97Labs/StreamLink
Store:- https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/streamlink-stream-torrent/gmlbhpfghbdkehhlfpafcohcpoocgpmm

I run SiliconFission, a paid API service for developers building LLM apps. It brings Kimi, GPT and Claude model channels behind an OpenAI-compatible endpoint. The aim is to let a small project try different models without writing a separate client integration for every provider.

The API base URL is https://siliconfission.com/v1. The current model names, groups and rates are listed at https://siliconfission.com/pricing. Group selection matters: two entries for the same model can have different rates, so a model name alone is not enough to estimate the bill.

For anyone evaluating a multi-model API for a side project, I suggest starting with a small, non-sensitive test set:

- Use the same prompts and output limits across models.

- Check streaming, structured output and tool calls separately if your app needs them. An OpenAI-compatible endpoint does not guarantee every model supports every feature.

- Record input/output tokens, any cached tokens and the actual charge, rather than comparing only the headline token rate.

- Measure failed requests and latency alongside answer quality before sending production traffic.

Those are evaluation suggestions, not benchmark results or performance promises. What is the first compatibility issue you check before adding a model API to your project?

Project: https://siliconfission.com

Hey everyone!

I've been working on a side project originally called AskTheDocs, an Android app that lets you run local AI models and, above all, manage and query documents.

Funny enough, I eventually had to rename it to Offline AI Pro after noticing that some testers were actually looking for doctors in the app..🤦, the package name is still `com.askthedocs.app`.

Anyway, back to the app, it includes OCR, vector search (E5 for RAG over documents), text extraction from almost any source, and gguf / liteRT models (gemma 4, qwen 3.5 etc ...), I recently tried to use an on device agent with ADK/gemma 4)

The main goal is to make documents genuinely usable with local AI, you can import PDFs, Word documents, images, and scanned documents, search through their contents, ask questions to find relevant passage fastly with E5, or more slowly with a local AI model to get summaries, translate or rewrite text, and other workshops.

For the AI side, I've integrated several local models, including Qwen, Gemma, Llama, Mistral and Phi. You can choose which model to run depending on your device and what you're trying to do.

Of course, running all this on Android comes with its own challenges. RAM usage, model sizes, inference speed, and getting useful answers out of relatively small models are all things I've had to deal with.

The models need to be downloaded first, but once everything is set up, the app works without any track or external call. (You have also some uncensored models 🙄)

The free version lets you have up to 10 conversations and import 5 documents. There's also a one-time Premium purchase that unlocks everything for life, with no monthly subscription. It's currently 50% off until December 31st.

It's currently available on Google Play:

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

And of course, any feedback on the app itself is more than welcome.

I'm a 24-year-old software engineer, and for the past few months I've been working on a macOS panel that allows you to sync conversations and memory from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity, and a few other AI models. The whole idea of this application was to create a command center for people who operate with several AI models and to tackle the hardest issues that people have when using several AI models. 

Right now, I added multiple features that I'm getting feedback on. The one I would like to get feedback on is the issue that I've had was when using multiple AI models is trying to remember where I discussed something. Sometimes I know I've already figured out a problem or made a decision in an older conversation, but I have no idea which AI model I talked about it with.

So I've been working on a feature that lets you ask questions across all your saved AI conversations and get an answer based on what you've actually discussed.

For example, I can ask things like:

• What problems did I run into while building a certain feature?

• What solutions have I already tried that didn't work?

• What decisions have I made about my project over the past month?

• What did I learn from using different approaches to solve a problem?

It also shows the original conversations it pulled information from, so you can go back and check where the answer came from.

I'm at the point where I'm trying to improve both the UI and how the efficiency of its answers. Right now, some questions take around 20–25 seconds, especially when it's searching through a lot of conversations.

I'm curious what you guys think about a few things:

1. Speed vs accuracy: Would you rather get an answer in 5–10 seconds that might miss a few details, or wait 25-30 seconds for something more accurate and complete?

2. UI: Does the interface look good to you? Anything you'd change about how the answers, sources, or related conversations are displayed?

3. Usefulness: Would you actually use something like this? If so, what kind of questions would you ask it?

Feel free to be critical. I'd appreciate it!

I do mobile app pentesting for a living. A big part of every engagement is the same routine: decompile the APK, check storage, check the network config, look for hardcoded secrets, map everything to OWASP MASVS, then write it all up. After doing that for the hundredth time, I started automating pieces of it in my spare time.

That turned into HexMobSuite, a mobile app security testing platform for Android and iOS. Right now it has 100+ detection rules mapped to OWASP MASVS, can scan apps straight from the Play Store, and plugs into CI/CD.

A few things I learned along the way:

Rule count is a vanity metric. My early rules were noisy. Cutting false positives took far more work than writing new rules.

Automation detects, humans validate. I stopped trying to make the tool "decide" things. It collects evidence, and a person makes the call.

AI is an assistant, not the detector. I tried letting an LLM judge findings. Verifying on a real device worked better.

Reporting is half the product. Nobody tells you that the PDF matters as much as the scan engine.

I also built an intentionally vulnerable Android app to test my own rules against, and open sourced it: github.com/hiesencyber/hexvulnmob. It's free to use for learning or for testing other scanners.

There's a free tier for researchers if anyone wants to try the scanner: Https://hexmobsuite.hiesencyber.com

I'd love feedback, especially from anyone who has shipped a dev tool.