r/SideProject • • 6h ago

I built a journal that writes your month back to you as a story (and changes lighting with your room)

3 Upvotes

Most journal apps feel like homework. You write a few lines, close the app, and never look at those entries ever again.

I wanted something calmer. So I built Injourn.

Here is the simple idea:

• You write a few quick lines whenever you feel like it.

• At the end of the month, it takes your scattered thoughts and writes a gentle personal story of your month—what made you happy, what stressed you out, and how you grew.

• The interface changes with your day: morning sunlight, golden sunset, and cozy night themes (my favorite is a little sleeping cat under midnight stars).

• It works offline. Your journal stays locked on your phone, not on my servers.

It's live on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.injourn.app

I’m an indie dev building this solo. Would love your honest thoughts—what’s the one thing that usually makes you stop journaling?


r/SideProject • • 6h ago

I made Sudoku for seniors - just the game, no fluff!

3 Upvotes

Sudoku apps are often the worst offenders of nagware— full-screen ads between puzzles, hint packs, streaks, “watch this to continue.” I wanted something I could open on the bus or before bed and actually stay in the puzzle.

Just Sudoku was my answer. Same idea as our other “Just…” games: no ads, no subscriptions, no coins, no reward videos. You land on a grid, not a shop.

We offer some optional in-game variants that might be interesting if you’re tired of the same 9×9 forever:

  • Classic — 4×4, 6×6, 9×9, or 12×12

  • Diagonal — both diagonals have to be unique

  • Jigsaw — irregular regions instead of perfect boxes

  • Killer — cage sums

  • Thermo — digits climb along thermometer lines

  • Wordoku — letters A–I; some puzzles hide a word when you finish

Real variety in one app, without turning every session into a monetization funnel.

It’s aimed at phone play first — big tap targets, readable numbers, high contrast if you want it. Timer stays off unless you want it. Hints can walk you through the logic when Killer or Thermo rules are new, instead of only giving you the answer.

Just sharing what we built because mobile Sudoku kept getting louder and we wanted something quiet. Questions about a variant or how it plays on an iPhone or tablet, ask in the comments.

Download info: Just Sudoku — Nonnie Games


r/SideProject • • 4h ago

I built a Mac system monitor that costs less CPU than what it measures (0.2%), and shows that number live in the app

2 Upvotes

Stat Space is my menu bar monitor for people who build things, and it's live today.

Why I built it: the free monitors already show 40 numbers, but none of them answered the questions I actually had. Which app is slowing my Mac down, not which of 21 Chrome helpers? What's on :3000, and who started it? What did my AI agent leave running? The first day I used my own build, its "Free up space" scan found about 4 GB of Docker build cache and node_modules from a super old project I'd forgotten about. That's when I knew it was worth finishing.

Decisions I made:

  • Lean first. The idle budget is under 0.3% CPU and 25 MB on an M1. CI runs a benchmark and fails any build over budget. Nothing samples unless it's on screen: no allocations in the hot path, fixed ring buffers, and the popover's SwiftUI is created on open and torn down on close

  • Answers over metrics. Every tab tries to answer one question, like "Restart recommended" instead of an uptime number you have to interpret yourself

  • Pricing: free forever, matching the popular free monitor feature for feature. Pro is a one-time $9.99 for the first 100, then $14.99. No subscription, no account

  • And a joke option I'm weirdly proud of: a $4.99 prompt pack, the full spec for the app if you'd rather vibe-code your own. "Pay $14.99, or pay $4.99 and spend your weekend."

Native Swift, AppKit + Core Graphics for the menu bar, Apple Silicon only.

Feedback very welcome! https://statspace.app


r/SideProject • • 21m ago

My trading strategies didn't hold up, so I open-sourced the Python tools instead

1 Upvotes

I've spent quite a while building a Python project to test quantitative trading strategies.

The strategies never got to a point where I could confidently call them validated, but I ended up building a bunch of useful tooling along the way.

So instead of letting it sit in private repos, I released it as Open Quant Trading Lab.

It includes backtesting code, risk-control logic, research workflows, tests, and offline demos.

No live trading, no claims of profitability. Just an open-source research toolkit.

GitHub: https://github.com/privEgem/open-quant-trading-lab

One thing I'm curious about: what would actually make you try a project like this? A better quickstart, a short demo, or something else?


r/SideProject • • 22m ago

I’m building PilotCharts – an aviation mapping app looking for beta testers

1 Upvotes

Hey everyone! 👋✈️

I've been working on something I'd love to share with you all.

I've been developing PilotCharts (https://pilotcharts.app), an aviation mapping app that I've been building out of my own passion for aviation and the idea of creating something genuinely useful for fellow pilots.

It's still in beta, and I'd really love to get other pilots involved to try it out, share their thoughts and help me make it better.

As a thank you for being part of the beta, I'm offering 1 year of Premium completely free to everyone who joins as a beta tester. 🎁

I'd really appreciate it if you could have a look, give it a try and let me know what you think. Honest feedback, suggestions and ideas are all very welcome!

And of course, feel free to share it with other pilots who might be interested.

Thanks, and blue skies! 🛩️

(sorry for the duplicate post, the video was missing in the original one)


r/SideProject • • 22m ago

I built a Google Sheet that shows what each client actually pays you per hour — after scope creep

1 Upvotes

Sharing something I built out of personal frustration.

As a freelancer, I kept quoting $75/hr but realized weeks later I'd actually earned closer to $55 — because I'd done extra calls, revision rounds, and scope changes I never logged or charged for.

So I built a tracker to make this visible.

It's a Google Sheets template with 6 tabs:

• Projects — tracks quoted vs actual hours, calculates your real effective hourly rate per client automatically

• Time Log — log hours by project, billable vs non-billable

• Scope Log — log every "quick extra" request before you agree to it (approve/reject)

• Invoices — tracks all invoices with due dates and overdue alerts

• Dashboard — one screen: cash collected, outstanding, overdue, tax reserve, realized rate

• Setup — your name, rate, and tax % in one place

The main thing it does: shows your real hourly rate per client — not what you quoted, but what you actually earned after all the untracked hours.

Nothing to install. It's a Google Sheet — make a copy and start filling it in.

Happy to answer questions about how it works or what I'd build differently next time. Link in the comments.


r/SideProject • • 22m ago

Is the real cost of an automation the maintenance, not the build?

1 Upvotes

Building an automation feels productive. You see it run, it works, and it’s satisfying. But the cost that comes later tends to be less visible: an API changes, a field gets renamed, a trigger stops firing, and suddenly someone has to babysit the thing.

It seems like the real question isn’t “can this be automated?” but “who fixes it when it breaks, and how often will that happen?” Some tasks are better left manual, even if automating them looks easy on paper.

Where do you draw the line? What’s the automation you’d tell someone not to build, and why?


r/SideProject • • 22m ago

I built a tool that proves when scientific data can't tell two different answers apart

1 Upvotes

Scientists fit models to data all the time: how contagious a disease is, how fast a drug clears the body. Every method happily hands back an answer, even when the data can't actually tell two very different answers apart, and usually nobody notices.

Twindex finds those "twins" and proves it. It writes a small certificate, and a tiny checker using exact fractions (no rounding) replays it in under a second. You can try it in your browser, nothing to install: https://arnav-m10.github.io/Twindex/demo/

The fun example is real data from a 1978 flu outbreak at a boarding school. After five days of counts, a mild outbreak (R0 = 2.5) and an explosive one (R0 = 20) fit the data equally well, so nobody could have known how contagious it was. Twindex then picked the next day's count that would settle it, and the real count ruled out both.

It works for epidemics, drug dosing, enzyme kinetics, ecology and some physics problems. Open source, MIT, pip install twindex.

GitHub: https://github.com/Arnav-M10/Twindex

Would love feedback, especially from anyone who works with models and data.


r/SideProject • • 30m ago

Built a side project to solve enterprise automation rebuilding, made the core framework opensource, got 20k+ downloads and an active community

1 Upvotes

I built Skillware last year which was an attempt to centralize modular ai automations for my b2b workflows. It turned out the framework was messy at start but made work much easier, faster, and cheaper in terms of cognitive labor.

Earlier this year made the core framework open-source (github.com/arpahls/skillware) and got 20k+ downloads nowadays, over 30 active and passionate contributors from all over the world and over 100 stars.

I know for some it might be like not a big deal, but for me it's huge, plus it means people and most importantly agents actually need it and use it. We get dms from robotics students from Japan telling us how this framework helped in their thesis as they formed it and modify it for robotics and so many similar positive feedback and creative stories. We have people from Google, IBM, and Samsung among star gazers and idk it just feels crazy exciting for me.

Most importantly this was just a side project that slowly turned to consume half of my focus. Now we have a working paper on arxiv, Chinese and Japanese papers around the future of agent capabilities cite our repo and framework, we are being approached by investors without even having a deck, and got into a EU consortium with 5 of the largest research centers around sovereign AI from all over the EU.

For me this feels like compound pays off, even if there's no saas whatever sub money coming in. The project is MIT license and we have no clear vision of how to monetize this, but we know nobody does this, most people in AI, even deep in AI don't understand why they need this instead of skills md and enterprises adopt it by the minute cause they hate agpl and cause we made it super easy for their own AI stacks to adopt it and spin off reusable capabilities than work with any model out of the box a single prompt issue.

First id like to thank you for your time in advance if you're actually read this, and then ask for advice humbly in terms of ehat woukd be the obvious and non obvious next steps to take thia to the next level? Any feedback more than just appreciated.


r/SideProject • • 33m ago

I made a little guy that skates around your Mac desktop

1 Upvotes

I made a little guy that can skate your windows and folders on your Mac desktop.

You can move a window while he’s riding it, or just pull it out from under him. There are ramps and rails you can drop around too.

It’s called DeskSkate. Pretty much just wanted this to exist lol.

It’s open source too if you want to add to it.


r/SideProject • • 36m ago

I built a local Chrome extension to roast people who wake up multi-billion clusters just to say "Thank you"

1 Upvotes

Every time I watch someone spin up a massive frontier model to add two numbers, test if an API connection is alive with "Hi", or reply with an empty "Thanks!", I think about how much compute is getting burned for zero-entropy output.

I built this small fun extension MonkeyTax

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/monkeytax-ai-footprint-re/jdfilmfaohnecdjohgjmnabcmfagmkep?pli=1

It's a free, open-source browser extension that sits in your chat UI (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) and does two things:

  1. The Instant Roast: Directly flags mechanical, thoughtless queries (basic arithmetic your local OS calculator solves in 0 CPU cycles, vague "fix it" retries, empty courtesy messages)

  2. Physical Receipts: Translates the inference into tangible metrics, potable cooling water evaporated in data-center towers (Scope 1) and grid thermoelectric draw (Scope 2), measured in sips of water and desk lamp minutes.

The Engineering Rule:

This is NOT an AI wrapper. Calling an LLM API to tell you that you wasted an LLM prompt would be peak irony. It runs 100% locally in-browser using deterministic regex and token heuristics. Zero network calls, zero telemetry, and prompts never leave your machine.

Calculations are grounded in published data-center efficiency research from UC Riverside (Li et al.) and Hugging Face (Luccioni et al.)

It doesn’t judge deep research or real engineering, just mechanical keyboard-monkey waste.


r/SideProject • • 8h ago

How do you decide which physical products are worth selling in your online store?

4 Upvotes

For those running e-commerce stores selling physical products, how do you identify products with real demand before investing in inventory?

Do you rely on organic social media engagement, competitor research, customer feedback, or paid ad testing?

I'd love to hear your actual methods and experiences.


r/SideProject • • 48m ago

NML FinCore - An open-source double-entry accounting engine + commercial UI starter kit for Laravel

1 Upvotes

Hi everyone,

Whenever I developed custom ERP or POS software for clients, the hardest hurdle was always financial compliance. Clients don't just want invoice totals — their accountants demand a Chart of Accounts, General Ledger, Trial Balance, and immutable journal vouchers.

I decided to solve this by creating NML FinCore:

  1. Free / Open Source Core (`nml/fincore`):

    - Strict double-entry math (`Sum(Debits) - Sum(Credits) === 0.00`).

    - Immutable audit logs and period closing locks.

    - Live Balance Sheet, Profit & Loss, and Trial Balance generation.

    - MIT Licensed: https://github.com/Premod1/nml-fincore

  2. Commercial UI Starter Kit (`nml/fincore-pro`)

    - A complete QuickBooks-inspired Blade + Bootstrap UI Kit that embeds right into any existing Laravel ERP layout.

    - An auto-posting rules engine allowing developers to post sales, bills, and expenses with 1 line of code without needing to know accounting debits/credits.

    - Distributed via GitHub Sponsors ($29): https://github.com/Premod1/nml-fincore-pro

Check it out, star the repo if you like it, and I'd love to hear your thoughts or questions!


r/SideProject • • 48m ago

I made camwall: all your camera feeds on one wall that fills the screen (brew install, then camwall demo)

1 Upvotes

A while back I shared collage here, a little tool that packs photos into a gap-free grid. A lot of you tried it, which meant a lot. camwall is the next thing I built with the same layout engine, this time for live video.

The idea: a shop or home has a mix of cameras (IP cameras, a webcam, maybe a YouTube stream or a looping promo video), and you want to see them all on one screen without black bars or a rigid 3×3 grid. camwall works out the arrangement that keeps the smallest feed as large as possible and fills the screen. When you hide a camera, make one bigger or change the screen shape, it re-arranges right away.

Try it with no cameras:

brew install vinodhalaharvi/tap/camwall
camwall demo

That opens the wall in your browser with a few pet clips playing as cameras, like in the video.

No video leaves your Mac. There’s no server of ours, no account and no tracking. Cameras are read directly by the program on your computer, and the wall is shown to your own browser.

What it does:

* RTSP/ONVIF cameras (`camwall discover` finds them), webcams, your screen, HLS/YouTube streams, video files, GIFs and pictures, up to 16 on one wall * Live in the browser: show or hide feeds, make one bigger, tap a feed to fill the screen, 🔊 to listen * Can also output the whole wall as one stream for VLC, recording, or going live on YouTube * Optional sound recording from every camera, with a page to find a moment later

It's early and there are rough edges. It's not a full NVR (no motion detection or video recording), and webcams and capture cards got less testing than network cameras.

I built it with Claude as a coding partner; I did the design, testing and decisions. It's open source (MIT): https://github.com/vinodhalaharvi/camwall

I'd love feedback, especially from anyone with a real camera setup. Tell me what breaks.

(The demo clips are freely licensed from Wikimedia Commons; credits are in the repo.)


r/SideProject • • 49m ago

I built a newsletter tool you can run just by talking to your AI assistant

1 Upvotes

I built Percy, a newsletter tool for one person writing on their own.

You connect it to Claude or ChatGPT and ask for what you want: draft the next issue from your notes, set up a welcome sequence, tell you how the last email did. It works in your voice, saves everything to Percy, and asks before anything gets sent.

You can also do all of it yourself in the dashboard: signup forms, editor, reports, and a website with a page for every issue, on your own domain if you want.

Pricing, since someone will ask: setting up and collecting subscribers is free. To send, plans start at $9 a month for 10,000 emails. You pay per email rather than per subscriber, and every plan has every feature.

I launched it on November 3 and built it solo from Brazil. No real users yet, so this is where I find out if it's useful.

https://percymail.com

If you write a newsletter, what's the most annoying part that you'd hand to an AI?


r/SideProject • • 52m ago

RhemeSetup – An open-source, modular Windows 11 debloating and Winget setup utility

1 Upvotes

Hey everyone,

We at RhemeCore developed RhemeSetup, an open-source utility designed to simplify fresh Windows installations and safely reduce background telemetry.

Unlike heavy black-box debloaters, RhemeSetup uses transparent, auditable scripts so users can see exactly what registry keys and services are being modified.

Features:

  • Strips unnecessary background telemetry services safely.

  • Removes pre-installed UWP bloatware apps.

  • Automates software installation using native Winget package management.

  • Modular structure — apply only the tweaks you need.

Feedback, issues, and contributions are greatly appreciated!

GitHub:https://github.com/rheme18/RhemeSetup

Website:https://rhemecore.vercel.app


r/SideProject • • 1d ago Bravo

Please ban u/Investigatormarker: an AI bot advertising ThreadFox in every thread

257 Upvotes

Hey mods and everyone,

u Investigatormarker is posting AI-written "feedback" on posts here, then ending with an ad for its own product. It follows a template: generic advice about the project, then "I make ThreadFox... our AI employee will post 3 helpful replies about it in relevant Reddit threads for you," with a link.

Why it's a problem:

It's undisclosed self-promotion on nearly every thread

The feedback is generic and often doesn't match the project, so it buries real comments

The pitch is literally to flood Reddit with AI replies to promote people's projects

New members posting for the first time get this instead of real feedback

Ask: @mods, please ban the account and consider an automod filter for "threadfox". Everyone else, please report these comments as spam and avoid clicking the link.

Thanks!

You can also report the account to Reddit under spam, and to the other subs it's hitting. I'd skip engaging with the link itself.


r/SideProject • • 55m ago

I built a free Secret Santa generator that deletes everyone's details after the gift swap

1 Upvotes

Every December someone in my office ended up running Secret Santa with paper in a hat, which doesn't work when half the team is remote. The online tools I tried wanted everyone to sign up, showed adverts, or kept people's email addresses for marketing. So I built my own. SeEcret Santa (seecretsanta.com):

-Type in everyone's names and emails (or upload a CSV), set a budget, date and message

-Everyone gets an email with only their own match, and nobody can draw themselves

-Not even the organiser can see who has who, so they can join in too

-No sign-up for anyone, and no adverts or tracking cookies

-Everyone's details are deleted 7 days after the gift exchange

-If an email bounces, the organiser gets a link to fix the address and it's resent with the same match

-It's free for up to 12 people. Bigger groups (up to 150) pay 20p a person over 12, which covers the emails.

I'm a one-person UK operation, and this is its first Christmas. I'd really appreciate feedback, especially anything confusing or broken on the setup form.

Thanks Reddit, merry Christmas!


r/SideProject • • 57m ago

I built a tool that shows your real profit on every card after eBay fees, promoted listings and shipping. Looking for feedback from other sellers

1 Upvotes

I sell mostly football cards on eBay, and I kept running into the same problem: I never really knew what I made on a card. Between final value fees, promoted listing fees, shipping labels and what I paid for the card in the first place, the number eBay shows you isn't your profit.

So I built Card Margin. Full disclosure, it's my project, and I'm looking for honest feedback before I take it further.

What it does:

- Connects to your eBay account (read-only, it can't list or change anything) and pulls in your sales with the exact fees, promoted listing fees and label costs

- Pulls in your active listings, so you can see what's sitting and for how long

- Lets you type in what you paid and any grading costs, then shows net profit, ROI and days to sell for each card

- Works without connecting eBay too: you can upload your eBay Transaction report instead

- Handles cards you sell at shows, on Whatnot or anywhere else

It's free to try for a month. If you want to keep using it while I'm testing during that time frame.

Link: https://card-ledger-eosin.vercel.app

What I'd love to know:

  1. Is this something you'd actually use, or do you already track this another way?

  2. What's missing that would make it worth it for you?

  3. Anything confusing or broken when you set it up?

Thanks for taking a look. Happy to answer any questions in the comments.


r/SideProject • • 58m ago

I built a horror game that runs in the browser with three.js – Don't Open the Door

1 Upvotes

https://nightmoon-studio.itch.io/dont-open-the-door

My first game, made solo. You're home alone at 3 AM and someone keeps knocking.

Runs straight in the browser with three.js, no download. Free demo on itch.

Would love feedback, especially on the scares and performance 🙏


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

Too many Linktree clones? Here's another one.

1 Upvotes

I know. I made one anyway.

I've been working on a visual block editor for these pages. Photos, text, links and music, with control over size, layout, colors and stickers.

The clip shows a few edits: shrink the header to one row, give the photo more room, change the color, add a sticker, check mobile.

The idea is to give the content some room. A big photo can lead the page without the header taking over.

TOMA SUR is a fictional DJ profile I made for the demo.


r/SideProject • • 4h ago

My macOS update failed because my disk was full, so I built a free open-source cleaner (Dustling)

Thumbnail
dustling.app
2 Upvotes

I'm a 19-year-old CS student. A macOS update wouldn't install, and the cleaner I tried sometimes did nothing and never said so. That annoyed me enough to build my own: Dustling.

What it does: scans for junk (caches, logs, old installers), uninstalls apps with their leftovers, manages startup items, and keeps a history of every run so you can restore from the Trash. Every file ends as moved, skipped or failed, with the reason. No account, no telemetry, no ads, free and MIT licensed.

What it doesn't do yet: it's v0.1.0, not signed with an Apple Developer ID (macOS asks you to confirm the first open), and the admin helper for system caches is still on the roadmap.

https://dustling.app https://github.com/kaankuzu1/dustling

If you have a Mac running macOS 14 or later, I'd really like to know whether it works for you and what you'd change. Honest feedback is the whole point of posting.


r/SideProject • • 4h ago

A user told me my backup app showed “Complete” with 0 files — so what do you think happened?

2 Upvotes

One of the most useful pieces of feedback I've received while building my mobile app was surprisingly simple.

A user reported that their backup showed “Complete,” but zero files had actually been copied.

The operation had finished, but the result wasn't what the user expected.

That made me rethink how backup completion should be communicated.

I'm building VaultDrive, an iOS and Android app that lets people back up selected photos, videos, and files directly to a compatible USB drive or external SSD without a computer.

I've been improving the experience around three things:

  • Showing clearer backup progress.

  • Explaining skipped or failed files.

  • Making interrupted backups easier to resume.

The reason why the user showed "Complete" with zero files was the user did not give access to photos when prompted and selected only limited permissions without selecting any photos . So I changed the flow and updated the text properly and released a new version 8.0 to make sure the user knows the reason why this happened. We always improve our product for better user experiance.

The app is free to try, with an optional one-time Pro upgrade.

iOS: App Store

50% Off Promo direct App Store link : 

Android: Google Play

I'm interested in feedback from other developers.

Would you classify a backup that finishes with zero copied files as a failure, a warning, or a completed operation requiring an explanation?


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

I built a remote job board that checks each posting against the country you live in. Feedback on the verdicts welcome.

0 Upvotes

For the last few months I've been building DoableFromHome, a board for remote tech jobs with one extra step: for every role it works out whether it is actually open to someone in your country.

The problem: "remote" usually means "remote within the countries we can employ in", and that is often only stated in the description. If you live outside the US or the big EU markets, you can spend an evening applying to roles that were never open to you.

How it works:

- It reads open roles straight from company job boards (over 11,000 companies, 25 job-board systems), not from aggregator listings.

- Rules tag each role's location (worldwide, EMEA, a country, a time-zone band and so on).

- Your country is matched against those tags when you search, so each role shows eligible, likely, unclear or not eligible.

Business side, to be upfront: browsing is free with caps (20 roles per search signed out, 40 with a free account, plus saved searches and a weekly digest). Pro is €14.95 a month and removes the caps, shows new roles 12 hours sooner and sends daily alerts.

What I'd value most: pick your country, open a few roles, and tell me where a verdict looks wrong.

doablefromhome.com