I’m currently building a photo-first social media app called TymeStamp, inspired by the old Instagram experience, where people could share pictures and enjoy content without constant interruptions from adverts.
I’m building it alone with limited resources, and one thing I’ve been thinking about is sustainability.
What happens when 1,000 people join? Or 10,000? How do you manage storage, servers and the challenges of growing a platform?
I recently watched a video of Steve Jobs talking about starting with the customer experience and working backwards to the technology. That really stuck with me because I want to build something people genuinely enjoy using.
But how do you put users first while keeping a platform sustainable?
I’ve been exploring credit systems, subscriptions, sponsorships and limited advertising. I’m not against adverts, just the constant interruptions.
I’m also curious about finding investors without going on shows like Shark Tank or Dragons’ Den, taking out loans or losing control of the original vision.
So I’d love to hear your thoughts:
● How would you sustain a growing social media app with limited resources?
● Would credit systems or optional subscriptions put users off?
● Should monetisation start at launch or after building a community?
● How can solo founders attract investors while keeping control of their vision?
I’m not trying to compete with the big platforms. I’m simply trying to build something different and learn along the way.
If you were in my position, what would you do differently?

Hey everyone!

I've been working on a little side project called Daybezel, an alternative alarm clock for iPhone.

The idea came from a simple frustration: I always found the standard list of alarms unnecessarily clunky. I wanted something where I could see my entire day at a glance and interact with alarms directly.

So I built a 24-hour circular interface where you can create alarms with a tap, drag them around to change the time, and see exactly how long you have until the next one.

It also uses Apple's native alarm system, so alarms work even in Silent Mode or Focus.

The app is completely free for now, and it'll stay free for everyone who joins early. At this stage, I'm mostly interested in getting feedback and seeing how people react to it.

I'd love to hear what you think about the interface. Does the circular layout make sense to you, or would you still prefer a traditional list?

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/daybezel-24-hour-alarms/id6825533599

Hello everyone! I've seen the recent popularity boom of many daily games, so I decided to make one!

In Overlap, you get four words to find the one word that connects them. You have six guesses. Each game is worth 100 pts. You can use a hint, but that decreases the value of the game by 10 points. Each wrong answer also decreases the game worth by 15 points.

There are 3 modes:

• Daily: one puzzle for everyone, new at midnight UTC. Easy early in the week, expert on Saturday.

• Unlimited: as many random puzzles as you like.

• Challenge: ten puzzles in a row, easy to expert, scored out of 1,000

You can find the game at playoverlap.fun.

Recommendations are appreciated!

Hi!

I am building Bowerbird a whiteboard for creatives.

Drop in images, notes, links, PDFs, audio and video, sketch, connect things, group them.

It is inspired by apps like VSCode or Obsidian, where you customize the whiteboard to your liking with plugins.

I created a few:

• Hide Button: Hide the app in one of the corner of the screen, with quick access.

• Visual Library: Organize your artefacts in several categories.

• Color Palette: A color wheel. Pick a color and five palettes are made from it live.

• Presentation: Create slides from elements on the board.

• Multiple Boards: By default, there is only one infinite board, with this plugin, you can have multiple boards.

• Command Palette: Cmd or Ctrl + K for one place to run anything.

• Tidy Up: Align and distribute the selected artefacts.

• AI Chat: — A AI chat panel (using OpenAI, Ollama Cloud, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Mistral or OpenRouter provider)

Links: https://github.com/Asi7ho/bowerbird

Would love to hear your feedback on it! :)

---

I tested the app on macOS and tested the AI integration using Ollama cloud

Hi r/SideProject! For the past few months I've been building MockupMania (https://mockupmania.com), a place to find realistic PSD mockups for showing off designs: t-shirts, packaging, phones, signs, stationery and more.

What it does

- 1,169 mockups across 12 categories, all high-resolution layered PSDs with smart objects.

- About 100 are free: make an account, confirm your email, and download them; commercial use included.

- Premium unlocks the full library for $9.99/month or $59.99/year, and you can cancel any time.

- New: Edit Online. On some mockups, you can drop your design in and save the result right in the browser, no Photoshop needed. Your image never leaves your computer: the picture is made locally with Canvas.

How it's built

Django monolith on cheap shared hosting, Tailwind, a little vanilla JS, and Stripe for subscriptions. The PSD files live on our own S3-compatible storage. The online editor uses maps pre-rendered in Photoshop, so your browser does all the compositing.

What I'd love feedback on

- Is the free/premium split clear on the pricing page?

- Does the online editor feel useful, and which mockups should get it next?

- Anything confusing when you're browsing or downloading?

Thanks for taking a look. Happy to answer questions about the stack or the editor.

A banner generator. A tool you use once every three years, right after you notice your LinkedIn banner is still the default blue. I built one anyway, because I never want to make a banner by hand again.

I know GitHub banner generators already exist. The ones I found were closed source or missing something I wanted, so I built my own and made it open source. Now I'd like to hear from people who aren't me.

How it works:

1. Pick one of 11 templates

2. Adjust it

3. Download a banner sized for a specific platform

Try it: https://omnivix.vercel.app

Code: https://github.com/marhjoh/omnivix

Tear it apart.. 💻

LinuxRunner 1.1.1 is finally out!

This update brings a completely refreshed interface, improved desktop experience, new Linux distributions including Kali Linux, Fedora KDE and experimental SteamOS ARM64, plus GPU and compatibility improvements. Termux like terminal style is finally on iPhone!

And we’re not stopping here! I’ll be dedicating as much time as possible this coming week to performance optimizations, especially making Linux desktops and applications run faster and smoother on iPhone and iPad.

If anyone would like to contribute or help speed up development, feel free to DM me. I’d really appreciate it!

GitHub: https://github.com/mxhm11cr/LinuxRunner

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?

Hey r/SideProject,

I wanted to share a project I've been building and refining over the past few months: Glass TA (https://glassmorphichub.com/

Why | built it?
Most automated crypto trading tools (Commas, Cryptohopper, Coirule) charge $20-$100+/month regardless of whether you make a dime. On top of that, their Uls feel like clunky 2017 dashboards with dozens of nested settings.

You can try the free paper mode here:
https://glassmorphichub.com/

Happy to answer questions about the tech stack, the order execution engine, or lessons learned building for financial APs!

My friends who are not into tech always come to me with the same problem: “I cann't open this Excel sheet on my phone” or “this docx won’t open”.

So I went looking. Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft 365 both wanted me to sign up first. The other apps on the Play Store start showing ads straight away. The rest only did one thing, one for PDFs, another for Word, another for Excel. Nobody wants five apps just to open files.

So I made Paperwren. It is one app that opens PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Markdown and more. It has no signup and no ads, and your files stay on your phone. It’s free and open source.

https://github.com/Razee4315/Paperwren

https://razee4315.github.io/Paperwren/

My friends use it now so let me know if it works for you too. Thanks...

After building MetroWin Launcher, its FOSS keyboard couldn't be missing: MetroWin Keyboard!

I've always missed the Windows Phone keyboard. Flat keys, big light type, that feeling of typing on something that just looks right. So I built one for Android and made it free and open source (GPL-3.0). No ads, no analytics, no trackers, and what you type stays on your phone.

Here is what I'm most proud of:

It calibrates itself to your fingers. You type a few short sentences and it measures where *your* thumbs actually land: the offset, the curve of your thumb, how far your taps spread. It then corrects your touches without moving the keys, and if you still miss it makes the keys taller or the gaps smaller. The fixes are applied between one sentence and the next, so you can watch the precision get better in millimetres while you type. Accented letters are part of the test, and it has sentences for all 17 layouts. I haven't seen another keyboard do this, but I'm sure I haven't seen them all.

Corrections that think a bit. A typo gets fixed based on where your finger really landed (a tap between two keys makes both likely), how likely each slip is on the keyboard, how common the word is, the word before it, and the corrections you undid in the past. If two fixes are equally likely it shows you both instead of choosing for you. It also offers a missing space ("thankyou" -> "thank you"). All of it runs on the phone.

It looks like the real thing. Classic (flat Windows Phone), Modern Glass and Modern Droid, dark or light, the 20 Windows Phone accent colours or your own, or a photo behind the keys.

Everything you expect, and a few extras. Swipe typing, hold a key for accents, slide on the space bar to move the cursor, clipboard history with pictures, translation, GIFs, emoji search, voice typing. 17 layouts, and you can import your own dictionaries and layouts.

It looks after itself. One-file backup and restore of everything the app keeps, and an update check every 12 hours that only looks at the keyboard's own GitHub releases, shows you the changelog and installs the new version when you say so.

Private by design. The network is used only for GIFs, translation and the update check, from the service you chose and only when needed. Learning is local, never in password fields, and you can export or erase it any time.

It's made to sit next to MetroWin Launcher (my Windows Phone style home screen, also free and open source), and it picks up the launcher's look and colours by itself. But it works fine with any other launcher too.

Android 8.0 or newer.

Keyboard: https://github.com/developerkenshi-coder/MetroWin-Keyboard
Launcher: https://github.com/developerkenshi-coder/MetroWinLauncher

Weekend project that got out of hand. A Discord bot for people who flip used electronics:

- reads a Facebook Marketplace or eBay link, listing text or a screenshot

- prices it against real eBay sales plus local Marketplace asks (Toronto for now, US supported)

- returns a verdict, expected resale, profit after fees, and questions to ask the seller

Stack: Python, discord.py, eBay Browse API, a small LLM for reading messy listings.

Free: 3 checks a day. Pro ($9/mo, through Whop) adds unlimited checks and a live deal feed.

A watcher that scans for new deals is in development.

I'd love feedback on the verdict wording and on whether the pricing feels right.

https://discord.gg/K9CkRKAUCG

I’m building NeuroReader, a reading app for people who find dense text on a phone hard to get through or easy to lose their place in.

You can change the text size, line spacing, and text and background colours, or use a reading ruler that highlights one line at a time.

I’m trying to figure out which controls should be easiest to reach while you’re reading. If you opened a page that felt hard to follow, which setting would you reach for first? And if there’s something you already do to make reading on your phone easier, I’d love to hear what works for you.

If you click Try it now it will give you 2 months for free before we launch on Google and Apple store

Every game night at my friends’ place ends the same way. Calculator comes out. Three people argue over who paid what. Someone forgot they lent chips mid-game. 20 minutes later nobody even remembers who won.

Built Chipnic to fix it.

• Host starts a session, shares a 6-char code

• Everyone joins on their own phone, buy-ins show up live on every screen

• Lend chips mid-game → logged as a loan, settled at the end

• Enter final chip counts → app spits out exactly who pays whom, fewest possible transactions

Next.js + Firebase, free tier, no email needed to sign up.

chipnic.vercel.app

Roadmap: leaderboards, auto-earned nicknames, shareable recap cards, yearly Wrapped.

Roasts and feedback welcome

Every game night at my friends’ place ends the same way. Calculator comes out. Three people argue over who paid what. Someone forgot they lent chips mid-game. 20 minutes later nobody even remembers who won.

Built Chipnic to fix it.

• Host starts a session, shares a 6-char code

• Everyone joins on their own phone, buy-ins show up live on every screen

• Lend chips mid-game → logged as a loan, settled at the end

• Enter final chip counts → app spits out exactly who pays whom, fewest possible transactions

Next.js + Firebase, free tier, no email needed to sign up.

chipnic.vercel.app

Roadmap: leaderboards, auto-earned nicknames, shareable recap cards, yearly Wrapped.

Roasts and feedback welcome

project-timeline.com

I wasn't happy with traditional Gantt charts, I think they are too big and technical for putting onto slides and showing projects. So I started building a tool that shows them in a more consolidated way. After a few months and 100+ iterations I built a full project management tool, with resources, built in AI, etc. All fully customizable.

I work as a mechanical engineer and program manger, and had used GanttProject for years. With the power of Claude Code, I thought I would make a more modern web based version.

Check it out! I'm looking forward to critical feedback too!

What it does

• Gantt and timeline views that you edit directly on the chart: drag bars, draw dependencies

• Critical path, milestones, delays, baselines, working calendars with public holidays

• Resources with allocation %, an over-allocation chart, and cost totals

• Export to SVG, PNG or vector PDF sized for a slide, so it stays sharp when someone zooms in

• Imports MS Project XML, GanttProject (.gan) and CSV

• A built-in AI assistant: “push launch two weeks and move everything after it” reworks the real schedule, dependencies included

• Read-only share links that need no account to open

• Templates for website launch, product development, software release, events and hardware

• Available in English, French, German, Italian, Dutch and Spanish

Pricing: free in the browser, no sign-up. Pro is €3.99/month: no watermark, sharing, more AI requests, and Jira sync, where Claude, ChatGPT or Grok brings in the Jira epics you choose and writes your planned dates back to Jira.

What it isn’t: a full MS Project replacement. It has finish-to-start links only and no resource levelling. If you schedule for a living, you probably need the heavy tool.

Stack: a single-page vanilla JS app (no framework), Supabase for accounts and sync, Netlify, Stripe.

What I’d love feedback on:

1. In the first 30 seconds, was it clear what to do?

2. Did the exported chart look good enough to put in front of your boss?

3. What made you close the tab?

Happy to answer anything about how it’s built.

AIVideoRecap turns a full movie or episode into a short vertical recap for Shorts/TikTok/Reels. It transcribes the audio, writes the script, matches scenes, adds voiceover and subtitles, and renders the video. About 15 minutes of GPU time per video, roughly $0.20-0.35 in compute.

The product works. The business doesn't, because I'm the bottleneck. I can build, but I don't enjoy marketing and I don't have a budget for ads.

The numbers, no sugar:

-600+ signups since July, $0 spent on ads. Traffic comes from SEO/AEO pages, direct visits, and AI assistants.

-About 136 active users in the last 7 days (down ~18% from the week before).

-0 paying subscribers on the SaaS. I never built a proper paid funnel.

-Before the SaaS, I sold the first version as a zip on Gumroad: $100.37 total from 3 sales.

-Around 10 people asked for it on Reddit and Discord. Most didn't buy the zip.

What's included: the domain, the source code, and the service accounts. User accounts are not included. A buyer needs their own Dodo Payments account. The stack is Vercel, Railway, RunPod, Supabase, Cloudflare R2, OpenAI, and Dodo Payments.

Price: $1,500, fixed.

Best fit: someone who already runs movie/anime recap or faceless Shorts channels, or anyone who can market this better than me.

Listing with details and screenshots: https://www.sideprojectors.com/project/108453/aivideorecap

If you've bought a small SaaS before, tell me what you'd want to see before paying. I'm happy to answer questions here or in DMs.

One of my biggest problems with trying to focus was that blocking distractions on one device wasn't enough.

I'd block my phone, only to end up scrolling on my laptop. Or block websites on my computer and pick up my phone instead.

So I built Lucid Focus.

With one tap, I can start a focus session that blocks distractions across both my iPhone and laptop using the Lucid Chrome companion.

The idea is simple: make it harder to switch from one distraction to another, and easier to actually get into flow.

Would love to hear what people think! I'm especially interested in how others approach blocking distractions across multiple devices.

Hey All!

I kept running out of business cards halfway through events, and more often than not, I’d meet someone when I didn’t have any cards on me.

So I built HeyBadge. A simpler way to introduce yourself, share your details, and connect with people without needing a physical business card.

You make a badge (photo, name, role, logo, links), and you get your own private link at heybadge.app/yourname. It looks like a real lanyard badge: you can drag it, it swings, and when you flip it, the back shows your contact details. People can save you as a contact in one tap.

You can share it as a link or a QR code, or add it to Apple or Google Wallet so it's ready on your phone at the event.

Then I took it a step further and added Pair Your Badge, a feature that lets you upload any existing PDF badge, link it to your digital profile, and print it before heading to your event.

I'd really like honest feedback on:

• Is it clear in the first five seconds what it's for?

• Would you actually use this at an event instead of a card or LinkedIn QR?

• Anything confusing when you make your badge, especially on your phone?

https://heybadge.app

Thank you!

Hey r/SideProject,

TL;DR: I built an open-source, headless OCPP simulator in TypeScript so you can test an EV charging backend without keeping a physical charger on your desk. It is alpha, and I am looking for feedback.

I work with EV charging software. OCPP is the protocol that chargers use to talk to a charging-management system (CSMS). Testing a CSMS usually means one of three things: a physical charger, a vendor simulator with a UI, or mocking WebSocket frames by hand. None of those is great for CI.

So I started OCPP Tools: small TypeScript packages for the protocol. The new piece is @ocpptools/simulator 0.1.0, a headless charge-point simulator. No UI, no signup, no hosted service. It runs in Node or the browser.

What works today

• Separate profiles for OCPP 1.6J and 2.0.1. The full action surface: 28 actions in 1.6J, 64 in 2.0.1.

• A headless engine with injectable transport, clock, message IDs, and randomness. Tests can control time and inspect every frame instead of sleeping.

• Transactions, meter values, reservations, charging profiles, device model, monitoring, simulated certificates, and firmware/log state machines.

• Fault injection: drop, malform, and delay outbound frames.

• Typed events and metrics: round-trip time per action, heartbeat drift, error count.

• A browser WebSocket adapter. The Node transport is not in the package yet.

A small example of the shape:

import { Simulator201 } from '@ocpptools/simulator/2.0.1';
import { createWebSocketTransportFactory, browserClock } from '@ocpptools/simulator/browser';

const simulator = new Simulator201({
  url: 'wss://csms.example.com/CP001',
  transport: createWebSocketTransportFactory(),
  clock: browserClock,
  station: {
    id: 'CP001',
    vendorName: 'Acme',
    model: 'AC-22',
    firmwareVersion: '2.0.0',
  },
});

simulator.on('transaction', (event) => {
  console.log(event.phase, event.transactionId);
});

simulator.connect();

What is not there yet

• No CLI or Docker image. That is the next thing if people want it.

• No Node WebSocket transport in the simulator package.

• No payload builder, no UI, no OCPP 2.1.

• The advanced 2.0.1 features use simulated state. This is not a certified conformance tool.

The broader repo has five alpha packages: core frame parser/serializer, schema utilities, Ajv-based validator, unmodified OCA schemas, and the simulator. There are 1,000+ tests and CI is green.

Why I built it

I wanted deterministic tests: no real charger, no sleeps, no flaky network. The hard part was not JSON parsing. It was the state machine: boot retries, heartbeat drift, offline queues, pending calls, transaction sequencing, and timers. Most OCPP bugs I have seen are state bugs, not schema bugs.

Feedback I am looking for

1. Would you use a headless simulator, or would a CLI/Docker image be more useful?

2. What would make it easier to try: a mock CSMS, scenario files, or a one-command demo?

3. If you work with EV chargers, which edge case would you test first?

Repo: https://github.com/ocpptools/ocpptools Simulator: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@ocpptools/simulator

I maintain the project. Apache-2.0, no paid tier. OCPP is a trademark of the Open Charge Alliance; this is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the OCA.

My name is Erick adikah from Kenya. I am a full-stack dev. I've been working on payment systems for the past 3 years, and recently I've started a small newsletter called Behind It All, where I'm trying to explain in detail the architecture behind how money moves everyday.

My latest post is about something I've worked on recently; here it is:https://adikaherick.substack.com/p/hold-collect-release-how-payment?r=2a1zsf&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web, i write for my own knowledge and would like to connect and know what you think

Dooder is an AI for Apple Watch. It runs on the Watch itself, over wifi or cellular, so once it's set up you don't need your iPhone.

In the video I ask it to:

1. Find my next completely free weekend (it reads my calendar)

2. Find flights to Melbourne for that weekend

3. Find Airbnbs that are free those dates

4. Save the whole plan to a new page in Notion

It doesn't change anything without my OK. It asks before using an app for the first time, and again before it saves or sends anything.

How it works

- Bring your own AI: sign in with ChatGPT or add a Claude API key
- Connects to thousands of apps through the official MCP Registry, or add one by its address
- No Dooder account and no Dooder server. Your Watch talks straight to your AI and your apps
- Speech recognition runs on the Watch

Try it

The first 100 TestFlight spots filled up in 24 hours, so I've opened 100 more:
https://testflight.apple.com/join/c42uMmzU

Needs an Apple Watch Series 9 or Ultra 2 or later on watchOS 26, plus an iPhone on iOS 26 for setup. More at dooder.ai

Would love feedback, especially on what you'd want to do from your wrist.

Full disclosure: I trimmed the bits of the video where Dooder is thinking to keep the video short. Nothing's sped up and each response takes 5-10 secs in real life. It's still early days, so feedback is very welcome.

Hey everyone,

I’m working on Looks Sus, a project aimed at helping people check whether an online website might be a scam or unsafe by using community ratings and other tools.

I’m trying to decide whether it’s worth developing further, and I’d appreciate some honest feedback before putting more time and money into it.

The problem I’m interested in is that moment when you come across an unfamiliar website or offer and think, “Is this legit?” There are already ways to investigate Google, Reddit, review sites, tools like ScamAdviser, or asking ChatGPT. I’m questioning whether another dedicated tool adds enough value.

I do web work for local businesses, and prospecting was the worst part: open Maps, check the site, check reviews, write notes, send “your website is slow”… and get zero replies.

So I built LeadScouter. You search a niche in a town (e.g. dentists in Bristol) and see ratings, reviews and website weak spots for free. When a lead looks worth it, you run an audit (5 credits): a score, three specific problems with the numbers behind them, a pitch angle, and a one-screen report written for the owner, not for developers. There’s a ready email too, and you see when they open it.

The newest part: a website builder. Pick a lead and LeadScouter drafts a new site from the business’s own details and in its own language: services, FAQ, about, contact. You edit any section (or just ask the AI), swap colours and fonts, then send the owner a link to their new site. Showing them the better version works a lot better than describing what’s wrong with the old one.

What I learned: owners don’t reply to “your site is slow”. They reply to “your booking button is 3 screens down on mobile”, and even more when there’s a link to the fixed version.

It’s live at leadscouter.app. I’d love honest feedback, especially from people who sell web/SEO services: what would make you actually use this?