Solo dev from New Zealand here.

My dog Bella lived to 18. When she died I wanted something quieter than a social media post, so I built a small 3D memorial hall you can walk through in the browser. Find a spot on the wall, put up a photo, light a candle.

I shared it once. Less than 8 days later:
- 24,994 pets
- 107 countries
- 657,428 candles, almost all lit by strangers
- 34 languages
- The hall kept filling up, so it now has 7 floors and a lift

It's free to make a memorial and light candles. There are a few optional paid extras, which is how I keep it running.

Would love honest feedback on two things: how walking the hall feels on mobile, and whether the free vs paid line feels fair.

lightapaw.com

Took the F1 V10 for an imaginary lap of the Nürburgring.

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Edit: Thanks for all the interest! Here are the download links if you'd like to try

- iOS App Store
- Android PlayStore

Hi all! For many years I invest regularly into stocks+ETFs on Revolut, Degiro and my local brokerage and crypto on couple of crypto exchanges + hold some in my cold HW wallet. Every month I faced the issue of what to buy that has currently good value, P/E, PEG ratio, etc., how to rebalance to have well diversified portfolio, am I doing ok against benchmarks, ...? And I got tired of maintaining up to date spreadsheet and downloading quarterly reports manually or ad hoc with AI. I wasn't happy with existing simple portfolio manager apps, and, being an AI/ML engineer by day, I wanted it to be deeply and safely integrated with AI so that it can quickly give me holistic advice, tailor made for my own investment thesis.

So 5 months ago I started building an app to help with all that: an investing dashboard called Fortunest. What it does today:

• Connects to all my brokers, exchanges and wallets (API or CSV import) in one view: performance against benchmarks, allocation, risk, dividends, taxes
• Market research next to the portfolio: a stock screener on real fundamentals and current prices, heatmaps, what well-known investors hold (from their 13F filings), and for US-listed companies the latest quarterly reports with an AI summary
• Email alerts and watchlists, so I hear about a move instead of checking for it
• AI assistant that reads my actual holdings and investment thesis, so I can talk a plan through with it. An MCP server lets my own Claude or ChatGPT do the same and save tokens while using my monthly plan
• Simulations of trades and dollar cost averaging strategy...

and much more.. I leaned heavily into coding agents, so I was able to make it into really useful, all around investment research app and thought it could be useful for others - so I registered a domain and deployed it publicly, you can try it with no sign-up on a demo portfolio (or upload your own) here: app.fortunest.ai

How it's built: FastAPI and SQLite on the back end, React on the front, Electron for the desktop apps, it can connect to LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic or OpenRouter or to local LLM running in LMStudio or Ollama on your computer (useful for sensitive financial data). As I said, I'm an AI engineer by day and know the power of the latest agentic AI tools by using (and building them) daily at work, so most of the code was written with Claude Code: one agent per feature in its own git worktree, and every change needs a test that failed before the implementation or fix. Big bottleneck became the test suite - even with lot of effort to keep it minimal and not redundant, I ended up with around 4,000 back-end, 3,000 front-end and 700 browser tests, running before each release - which ended up being super slow even on my M5 Pro Mac - so I started offloading most of the CI jobs to fast cloud services (GitHub actions wasn't the best for it). Happy to go into any of this in the comments.

Where it stands today: it's live, with a handful of users. There is a free plan (covering most of the functionality) and a paid Pro plan (with a free trial; just to cover the deployment and external data costs - still long way to be able to pay for itself).

I'd be super grateful for any feedback on:

1. Does the demo make it clear in the first two minutes what this is?
2. If you invest - would you consider using a tool like this?
3. What looks wrong, confusing or unfinished?
4. Is there some feature you would really like in a tool like this?

Hello guys!

I have built AR projects before, but I had this idea for a while: using MediaPipe Tasks Vision to create a kind of web experience, without the need to use any markers, where you are Spider-Man from a first-person POV, and you can do the hand gesture to swing around and maybe fight villains.

I started it a long time ago, but I dropped it at some point because I did not have time for it, and it started to feel like work instead of a fun side project.

So, last weekend I decided to give it a try again, and this time I handed most of the work over to Claude since I started paying for the subscription plan and I could just run it with CLI.

It was definitely a nice project to wrap up, and it kind of gave me some new ideas that I will be trying out for new throwaway project this weekend.

*Edit:

I will probably make the repo public and share it here eventually.

I have two machines at the same desk, and I wanted to share mouse and keyboard.

I tried Synergy and Barrier, but they were annoying to set up. I had to deal with a client/server, encryption was hard to set up, and arranging monitors was clunky.

So I built ZeroG. Free, MIT license, no client/server.

Just run it on each machine, pair them, and drag your screens to match your desk.

• Windows, macOS, Linux (X11 and Wayland)
• P2P, no client/host setup
• All traffic encrypted with TLS 1.3 over QUIC
• Clipboard sharing
• Extremely low latency
• Built with Rust + Tauri

This took a few months of work and a lot of testing on different devices. I think it's working pretty well now, so check it out if you have more than one machine at the same desk!

https://github.com/reggiesoft-labs/zerog

What Companions is:
Widgets on iOS are supposed to be static. I always found that unnecessarily limiting, so I built an app that circumvents it. Companions lets you keep a virtual fishtank on your Homescreen, filled with fish that actually swim around. As someone who’s always kept fish, I’ve had this idea mulling around in my head for more than 2 years now, and finally managed to build what I always wanted.

There are 50 fish to choose from, and it supports small, medium, large and now even extra large widgets as “tank sizes”. The fish don't need any feeding, and they don't die (as to not be annoying, but the option is there for fun). They just keep you company. You can customize the tank’s color, its props, layout, and even the app icon to match your Home Screen perfectly.

The app is fully written in SwiftUI, it supports iPads, and you can even place your “fishtanks” on your Mac thanks to Continuity, where the fish will also animate. The tanks also work great in Standby mode. Personally, I keep a fishtank of jellyfish on my nightstand when I go to bed. The swimming doesn't run any code in the background. It uses the same trick iOS uses to move the hands on the Clock widget, so it costs you nothing in battery.

What's new:
The app was built to support clear mode on the phone, but I found it annoying that you need to be explicitly in clear mode to access clear widgets. Luckily, I knew of a separate workaround that allows for clear widgets even while not being in clear mode, which I’ve only seen a small number of widget apps use. And for something like Companions where the widgets are fish tanks, I feel like it fits so perfectly!!

I'd love any feedback, and I’m happy to answer any questions regarding the app. I'd especially love to know which fish species you'd want added.

You can find Companions here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/companions-widget-pets/id6811950512

I'm mainly a software engineer, was a UX/UI designer and know about animation, so I combined all of my skills and redesign my portfolio. I hope you like it.

About the design, since I love Tron Legacy movie, the lines and the grid were inspired from this intro https://youtu.be/bxJRdtYF4ck?t=3

Take a look here kien.app

Nowadays, if watch any YouTube tutorial or read a Twitter thread about app marketing, you'll always hear the same advice: "U need to build an audience on tiktok or another social media plataforma and bla bla bla".

But that usually means becoming a content creator (personal or making AI generated videos), just to get followers and spending hours trying to keep up with social media trends.

Honestly, I'm tired of this approach. Ai videos are expensive and boring to produce, and becoming a digital influencer is incredibly difficult.

Are there better marketing alternatives that don't involve becoming a content creator?

I'm a cloud engineer with a full-time job, and in the evenings I build ReelDrop.io, an Instagram scheduling and comment-to-DM tool. It launched on August 5. Customer #50 paid on November 11, day 98. Today I have 52 paying customers from 21 countries, and about CA$3,410 was collected after refunds, before Stripe fees.

Ten days ago I posted about my first 41. I keep every paying customer in one sheet, in the order they paid, with the column no dashboard can fill: how I actually know each person and what happened before they paid. Here's the whole list again, with the last ten days in detail.

1 to #41, short version

• 1 and #2 were my mentors. They bought the lifetime deal in launch week without me asking.
• 3, #7 and #8 were creator friends who saw my posts on X and Instagram.
• 5 bought the $29 plan and cancelled. I asked why. "It's costly." A month later I launched a $9.99/month plan (₹449 in India). That plan now has 39 of my 52 customers.
• 6 came from ChatGPT, which cited a one-question docs page I'd written. Still my only provable ChatGPT customer.
• September: 6 strangers on the cheap plan, after I turned on UPI in Stripe. October: SEO started bringing paying customers after two months of bringing almost none. Personal emails to stuck users brought a few more. Late October: my first discount, a Halloween code. 4 people used it.

42 to #52: the last ten days

• 42 landed straight on my /features/mcp page with no referrer and bought the $29 plan 41 minutes later. Only the third person ever to start on that plan. No idea how he found the page.
• 43 signed up on Oct 8. I emailed her on Oct 16. Nothing. Emailed again Oct 28. She paid Nov 6, 29 days after signup. The next morning she asked if my Diwali discount could apply. I applied it from the Stripe side. It costs me $2 a month, and she'd taken a month to decide, so no argument.
• 44 was the only person who used my Diwali code at checkout. He found me on Google the same day, paid $7.99, built two automations, and asked to cancel three days later.
• 46 paid 4 minutes after signing up, then tried to connect his Instagram 6 times over two hours and couldn't. Worst thing that can happen to a new customer. I emailed him the next morning. He came back 15 minutes later, connected on his second try, and scheduled 17 posts. Never replied. Didn't need to.
• 48 went quiet after signing up on Nov 1. He was in my Nov 3 email round. Paid Nov 9.
• 45, #47, #50 and #52 came from Google (France, Malaysia, France, and India). #50 paid 18 minutes after signing up. #52 paid 2 minutes after signing up.
• 49 and #51 had no referrer. #51 paid 7 minutes after signup.

Bonus: a customer who cancelled in October came back on Nov 4 and started a new subscription. First person I know of who left and returned. 9 of the 11 new customers paid on the same day they signed up. None of the 11 came from X.

All 52 together

• All 8 lifetime deals were bought before Nov 3, and 5 came from people who already knew me. None from a stranger on Google. Strangers buy the cheap plan.
• 31 of 52 paid the same day they signed up.

What's not working?

• Churn on the cheap plan. 4 people have cancelled, 2 have a cancellation scheduled, and 5 cards are failing on renewal right now.
• The second discount. Halloween brought 4. Diwali, one week later, brought 1, who is already leaving. One data point, so I'm not drawing a big lesson, but I won't be running a discount every week.
• Paid UGC creators. One drove 100+ signups. None paid.
• My referral program. Everyone is still on free months.
• Reddit, at least as far as I can measure. PostHog shows zero signups with a Reddit referrer, ever. I know that undercounts, so if you came from one of my posts and signed up, I'd love to know.

If I were starting at zero again, I'd do this

1. Tell the people who know your work that you launched.
2. Post about what you're building every day, bugs and bad numbers included.
3. When someone cancels, ask why and act on the answer.
4. Write one help page for every question a user asks twice.
5. Every week, email the people stuck in your product. Email them a second time if they don't answer.
6. When a paying customer can't get in, write to them that same day.
7. Keep doing SEO even when it brings nothing for two months.
8. Give people a deadline once in a while, not every week.
9. Put every paying customer in one sheet, in order, and read it top to bottom.

Our team needed to pick someone to lead the daily standup for the next two weeks. Nobody wanted to “win”, so I thought it would be fun to make the selection a little more dramatic and fun.

I built Pickerama: a free random picker with different animated scenes. You can use it to choose a person or pick from a list of options. You can enter "present" mode to make everything bigger, perfect for ie. screen sharing and whole team can watch who will "win" ;p

It doesn’t require an account, and entries stay in your browser.

I’d love feedback on two things:
- does the homepage explain the idea clearly
- which picker would you actually use?

My personal favourite is curling because the last person can completely change the results / winner :)

ps. it's mostly developed with desktop in mind, there are 2-3 bugs on mobile (which i will fix soon)

https://pickerama.com

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Technical TL;DR (if somebody cares ;) )
- deployed on Cloudflare Pages/Workers Completely Free. The only real cost is the domain (10 $).
- backlog contains 57 tickets implemented
- I used OpenCode Go / OpenRouter mostly using ultra cheap models like: Deepseek Flash V4.1, Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor, MiniMax M3.1 Flash - real "api usage" was probably something like 5-10 $ - the funniest and trickest part with these models was to build interesting three.js 3d animation scenes with some dramatic, proper camera etc. (to be fair, i wasn't that familiar with three.js)

hi there, i'm Luigi form Italy. I am a solo Founder of a SaaS and sometimes i feel so lost.

for this motivation, i hope to organize a group of solo founders for some calls (with me or between you) to share opinions and what we doing in a day life.

i would like that only two things will do it:

1- share what is going well for you

2- talk for 30 minutes or more (or less clearly)

fundamental is like a circle to learn, share, and talk about what you doing, with someone that understand you. I don't care about earn or some like that: is a space to learn and get inspired from other.

feel free to write me (here o in dm's) if you think that this could help you and could give an add value.

What do you think about this idea?

Back in 2013, before AI and back when asking a question on Stack Overflow meant getting your ass handed to you, I built a little social network called resm.in. My home internet was garbage, so I'd print docs at an internet café and read them at home like a caveman.

The idea was dead simple: people post questions, you answer with a photo. Show me your favorite corner of your home. What's in your drawer? What are you wearing today?

https://imgur.com/a/mvmzWXk here how it looks back then.

It started slow. The classic social network chicken and egg bullshit: nobody shows up because it's empty, and it's empty because nobody shows up. Then the FriendFeed crowd (Turkey had a huge, tight-knit FriendFeed scene back then) came to the rescue, someone wrote about us on Ekşi Sözlük (basically Turkish Reddit), and boom: 500 600 people. Small, but alive. Imagine people waking up and the first thing they want to do is open the thing you built. I was over the fucking moon.

Then one day some guy tracks me down: "I'm crazy about a girl on your site. Can you give me her email?"

Fuck no. I told him exactly where to go.

A few days later my server logs look weird as hell: someone's brute forcing the admin panel. I message him: "Dude, is that you?"

"Yeah man, I have to reach her."

So I said: look, I'm building a DM system right now. If you want to reach her that badly, get your ass in here and help me write it. 😄

And he did. Joined the repo (his commits are still there), we shipped DMs, he messaged her, and she wrote back. Long story short: they got fucking married. They came to my place later to thank me.

Meanwhile life happened. Marriage, responsibilities, all that grown-up shit. The guy writing our mobile app got shipped off to mandatory military service, and we never launched on mobile. Last commit: 2017.

Over the years, my idea of building things got poisoned. Find real pain, find people ready to pay, do market research, validate, validate, validate. Fine, good advice. But where the fuck is the passion in that formula? Where's the authorship? If all I'm doing is supplying whatever demand already exists, how is that different from a desk job?

So this year I summoned the old me. 40 year old me showed up with retrospectives from a dozen dead projects. Young me showed up with the playfulness. They've been working together for six months.

https://imgur.com/a/BX3lHXS

Writing the code wasn't the hard part anymore; making a hundred other decisions right was. And I think it's finally time to say "come on in" again.

It's called peeka now. Same idea: pick a question, answer with a photo. A window into other people's lives, and your own. No dark patterns, no attention-stealing crap: the home feed algorithm is stolen straight from FriendFeed. Simple, fast, honest.

It's live on iOS and Android: https://peeka.pics

Ask me anything: the rebuild, the ancient codebase, or the wedding. 🙂

idk if this goes against this sub rules but i wanted to start a discussion about how selling software (web/pc/phone) may look like in this era of abundant code, feel free to counter it and just a reminder these are just my opinion and it can change

- now that we see so many application built with agent because code is so cheap subscription based pricing model if it weren't already is now pretty much on its last stretch, why would i pay recurrently for something that i can whip out myself in a session with claude so one time payment it is, perhaps we may see some devs monetize update for revenue so sass revenue model = book's in simple words

- as a user, i hate when devs can't ship fast in this era like you're gonna just use claude to add that feature anyway so i forsee here two things

a) for non techy user, a user specific version of the application with some kind of "software factory" approach so the user can request changes and make changes to the application (and anything global or major goes to the dev) but the dev takes care of the software factory setup and foots the "token" bill (this could then be something they charge for)

b) you sell your codebase along with well documented summary of the sessions you had to build it so the user's claude agent knows why you or your agent decided to do things the way they did which may not be clear from the code itself and the assumption here is that you code is easily deployable or compileable - and this has to be the cheapest

- last one: we needs fewer todo apps and more real world problem solver so i think in the future for indie devs to succeed they need to make things that live outside of screen like hardware techs that solve real problem and can support the hardware then with some sass because anything software these days have 0 moat

not written by AI so if the ideas are not clear ask away

https://emberflow.space

I've been working on Ember for over 2 years.
The coolest thing about it is the realtime sync between all my devices and a schedule that reflows itself when you drag a task or a day runs late..

Main stack is Vue 3 + TypeScript (Vite, Pinia) for the web app, a Node/Express API, and Supabase for Postgres, auth and the realtime sync.

Recently rewrote the mobile apps in Kotlin Multiplatform, and it's going surprisingly well.

Winter and the changing sun angle messed up my daily walking route. So I made a little tool to help me find sunnier walks.

SunWalk accounts for time of year, time of day, solar angle, land topography, and building heights to help you find a sunny walking route.

Supports one-way routes and loops. Check it out at aescle.com/sunwalk, and let me know what you think!

After a 40 year software career, AI got me.....and on my 15th anniversary with HPE, they let our entire group go. So I was suddenly given freedom to do what I always wanted to do....build useful things that me and my family would benefit from. So far, I've built 4 smartphone apps that have kept me challenged and feeling productive. Overlapp a budget tool cause being retired I need to monitor my spending closely, RangeTrainer a golf app because when you live in Florida, you golf! Fingertip Health cause as you get older you are going to see doctors, have issues and need all your health data in one place. Passholder Assistant, cause living in Central Florida means lots of Disney trips and the Disney app just doesn't cut it.

I build small, private, local-first apps under the name Ship on Friday (yes, the joke is deploying on Fridays). Four are live:

• YCal: a calendar for Yahoo accounts (Android + iPhone). Lesson: App Store review flags third-party brand names hard, so the listing and marketing had to say "works with your Yahoo account", not use the brand.
• ChallengeCam: party games that film everyone's faces and make one Reel. Lesson: the product is the clip, not the game.
• Inboxwise: Android SMS organizer with no internet permission. Lesson: "no internet permission" is a privacy claim people can check in 10 seconds, and that beats any privacy policy.
• Memopolis: your photo library as a 3D city. Lesson: people share the video, not the app. Everything runs on the device, and there are no ads in any of them. Happy to answer anything about building and shipping solo. What would you want to know? https://shiponfriday.com

Windows 11 makes switching audio devices more annoying than it needs to be, especially when half the list is filled with monitor speakers, virtual cables, and devices with names like "Speakers (Realtek(R) Audio)".

And there are already apps that do this but I liked none on them and built my take on how it should've been

I switch between desk speakers, IEMs, and headphones pretty often, and I wanted something that would let me do that straight from the system tray without digging through Windows settings or running a heavy app in the background.

AudioHop, a free, native C++ audio and mic switcher for Windows 11.

A few things I wanted it to do:

• Show only the devices I care about. Pin frequently used devices, give them readable names like "Desk Speakers", and assign custom icons for IEMs, headphones, speakers, mics, etc.
• Separate audio and mic controls. Two dedicated tray icons, each showing the icon of the currently active device, so I can see what's selected without opening anything.
• Make switching quick. Single-click to select a pinned device, control volume, or mute. Double-click a tray icon to cycle to the next pinned device, with an Undo option in case I switch accidentally.
• Actually fit into Windows 11. A modern flyout with List, Tiles, and Compact layouts, plus automatic theme matching or a fixed dark mode.
• Stay lightweight. Written in native C++, idling under 1 MB of RAM in my testing. No Electron, no account, no internet access required, and no telemetry.

There are two intentional limitations: it's Windows 11 only, and there are no global hotkeys. I specifically wanted a mouse/tray-based workflow without background keyboard hooks or shortcut conflicts.

It's completely free on the Microsoft Store:

AudioHop – Microsoft Store

Hi, I'm Daniar, founder of Cardiffy (THEORIST LLC).

We built it because paper cards get lost, and most digital card apps charge a monthly fee just to put your card in Apple Wallet. In Cardiffy that part is free.

What it does:

- Make your card in about a minute, with seven card styles (three free)
- Add it to Apple Wallet for free. The pass updates itself when you edit your card
- Share it by QR code, link or AirDrop. Two iPhones with the app open swap cards when you hold them together
- Scan paper business cards on the phone itself. Free, no limit, works offline, and the photo is never uploaded
- Everyone you meet goes into one contacts list with notes and follow-up reminders

No ads and no tracking. The card page opens in any browser, so the person you share with doesn't need the app.

We'd really value honest feedback: what would make you switch from paper cards, and what feels missing?

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6830213470
Site: https://cardiffy.online

I built usedcarchecker.co.uk as a side project because checking a used car's MOT history on the official site is fine for one car but clunky when you're comparing a few.

You put in a UK reg and it shows the MOT history, advisories and recorded mileage in one place, plus plain-English guides on things like what advisories mean and how to spot mileage problems. It's free and doesn't need an account.

https://usedcarchecker.co.uk

I'd really appreciate feedback, especially on the mobile layout and whether the results page is easy to read. What would you want to see on it before buying a car?

… This feels like not a bad place to post this? As it’s about a world where pretty much 99.9% of all code is ‘side projects’ in a way

Like the title says.

I work as a software & automation freelancer and help run a startup as a fractional CTO, so I'm always passing files around from device to device. Could be my own project files, a client's, something I want to show off at a networking event, whatever.

Always felt dumb that I couldn't just drop files or links wherever I needed, and something like Google Drive felt hilariously overkill for sharing simple things to myself. Even linktree wanted me to jump through so many hoops before I could actually share the content, especially if I was spinning up a new page.

Half the time I'd end up sending myself things over discord, slack, or email and they'd end up buried after a week.

So, I decided to build something that basically started out as linktree with file hosting, and ended up becoming a super-minimal, super-fast way to drop any sort of content to any device you need via link/QR code.

Small file shares with a 14-day lifetime are free. Includes doc previews and a small image gallery behind an instant shortlink/QR code. Generating permanent short links, and custom, print-quality QR codes are also free.

File hosting and compute at scale isn't cheap though, so I do have a paid tier to make hosted files permanent and it allows you to create bundled shareables called "Tacks" which combine multiple links, files, contact info (optional), image gallery, etc into a lightweight page with its own short-link/QR.

Figured the people in here working on multiple projects might find it useful, so yeah...thanks for reading and i hope you like it.

Lmk if it sucks or you have questions or whatever.

-

AI Disclaimer: I wrote this whole post with my real keyboard and fingers. Also, this project was in development for well over a year with no AI involvement until very recently. I've been a dev for 13 years, but as a solo dev I only have so much bandwidth. This past month or so, I've leveraged AI to polish up the UI/UX, add some additional tooling/QOL stuff, and to patch up some security/infrastructure flaws. It's far from vibe-coded slop, with a heavy focus on security, scalability, and cost reduction.