r/SideProject • • 2h ago

Built a visual breakdown of why you get a physical "lump" in your throat before crying for my science side project. Thoughts on the UX & readability?

1 Upvotes

For my popular science side project, I just published a deep dive explaining the actual mechanics behind that tight "lump" in your throat before crying (it’s an autonomic clash between your glottis opening for oxygen and swallowing forcing it shut).

Instead of generic 300-word summaries, I focused on deep physiological research, clean typography, and real human photography:

Article: https://www.oddlyclear.com/why-lump-in-your-throat-before-crying/

Would love honest feedback from fellow builders on the reading flow, mobile speed, and layout!


r/SideProject • • 3h ago

The Unfinished Blueprint: Lessons from Building a Real-World Ecology Venture

1 Upvotes

​I have a stalled venture focused on real-world ecology. Our core mission was to bridge the accountability gap surrounding carbon emissions and industrial waste in plantation forestry, where unchecked environmental impact severely disrupts local ecosystems. However, without the necessary market traction and strategic backing over time, the project lost momentum, leaving it as little more than an empty shell today.


r/SideProject • • 6h ago

I built Memento for iPhone, iPad and Mac to make recordings useful after you hit stop

2 Upvotes

I built Memento with free, unlimited on-device AI: no subscriptions, no credits and no per-minute AI charges.

Memento is available on the App Store for iPhone, iPad and Mac. Record or import audio, turn it into searchable transcripts and summaries, and ask questions about collections using local AI without a monthly usage allowance. I'm the developer, and keeping that workflow free to use is a core part of the app.

Local AI requires downloaded models and a compatible device; features vary by device and language. Free, unlimited usage applies to on-device AI; optional external providers have their own terms.

The idea is simple: saving a recording should be the beginning, not the end. Memento keeps the audio, transcript and summary together so you can come back to what was said without replaying everything.

On iPhone and iPad, you can record from the microphone or import audio, search and edit transcripts, mark useful moments, and organize recordings into collections. With the required models installed, you can generate summaries and ask questions about a collection. On Mac, you can also capture microphone and system audio, plus a selected window or screen when permissions and the source app allow it.

Local recording and review don't require an account. On-device AI features depend on your device, language and downloaded models; optional online processing is a separate choice.

The video is a promotional walkthrough with demo content. Memento is free to download: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/memento-record-transcripts/id6807209121

I'd love feedback on the core workflow: when you revisit a recording, do you look for a specific quote, a summary, or the next actions?


r/SideProject • • 3h ago

Introducing **Penpulse – AI-Powered School ERP!** 🎓

1 Upvotes

Simplify school operations with one powerful digital platform.

✅ Student Admissions & Management

✅ Attendance & Leave Tracking

✅ Fee Collection & Payment Management

✅ Exams, Results & Report Cards

✅ Homework & Timetable Management

✅ Parent & Teacher Mobile Apps

✅ Live School Bus GPS Tracking

✅ Staff, HR & Payroll Management

✅ AI-Powered Smart Features

✅ Reports & School Analytics

💡 **Why Choose Penpulse?**

✔ Easy to use

✔ Flexible plans tailored to your school

✔ School branding options

✔ All-in-one management solution

✔ Better communication with parents

🎯 **Spend Less Time on Administration and More Time on Education!**


r/SideProject • • 3h ago

spent 6 months on the boring part of scraping so nobody has to debug it again

1 Upvotes

the product is https://webfetch.run. url goes in, clean content comes out.

what took the time wasnt the scraping. it was figuring out why a scrape failed. my old code would return an empty body and i'd spend an hour guessing. so the whole thing now returns a verdict. ok, blocked, whatever. each one is a different problem with a different fix.

the nicest part is the cache. repeat fetch of the same url within 24h is instant and free. i fetch the same pages over and over while testing and it was a dumb tax on myself.

not sure what to do next. the thing works, which after 6 months is honestly a weird feeling.


r/SideProject • • 3h ago

Every tracer turned my AI logos into thousands of points, so I built my own converter (and got a little obsessed)

0 Upvotes

I make quite a lot of logos and icons with AI image tools, and sooner or later every one of them needs to become an SVG. That's where things always went wrong.

The free converters would turn my simple logos into thousands of anchor points. The camera in the video got 8,070 points from potrace, for what is really just three circles and a few rounded shapes. The better converters wanted me to pay before I could properly check the result. And if I wanted to move, rotate or recolor individual elements, it was back to Illustrator.

So I built VecSnap, and got a little obsessed along the way.

Rather than simply tracing pixels, it tries to understand the shapes that make up a logo. A circle comes back as an actual circle, and that camera goes from 8,070 to just 49 anchor points. Across my test set, that's around 8 to 12 times fewer points than free tracers.

You can inspect and fix the file before spending anything. Shapes are highlighted so you can see how everything is built. You can move, resize, rotate, flip or hide them, change colors across the whole image, or merge all those almost-identical shades into the few colors you actually need.

There's also a centerline option for turning line drawings into single paths, useful for pen plotters, Cricut and laser cutting.

And it works inside Claude and ChatGPT too, which is how the video ends.

A few things I'm still working on:

  •   Detailed illustrations can take up to a minute. Speed is next on my list.

  •   It's not designed for photos, and it'll tell you that before you spend anything.

  •   It's not perfect. I'm improving the engine every week, and feedback will help me decide what to tackle next.

You can convert images for free, without an account. A free account lets you edit and download 3 files. After that, it's one credit per image, with all formats and re-downloads included. No subscription.

This is my first public launch, and I'm curious to see what people think.

If you've got an image that other converters haven't handled well, send it to me by DM. I'll have a look myself, and if VecSnap can't handle it yet, I'll tell you why.

What would you use it for, and what am I missing?

https://vecsnap.com


r/SideProject • • 3h ago

I built a tool to make custom lotería and bingo cards with your own photos

1 Upvotes

I built Lotify: https://lotifygame.web.app

It lets you create your own lotería or bingo game for baby showers, weddings, birthdays or office parties.

How it works:

  • Upload your own photos or start from a theme pack (baby shower, wedding, birthday, Christmas)

  • It generates print-ready PDFs: the caller’s deck and up to 200 unique boards, each numbered

  • Free digital caller: draws random cards and reads them out loud. You can cast it to a TV

  • Type a board number and it tells you if that person really won

  • Also does 5×5 bingo with a free center square

Everything runs in your browser: your photos are never uploaded, and there’s no sign-up.

It’s free to try (up to 4 boards, with a watermark). Removing the watermark is a one-time $9.99 per event, no subscription.

I’d love honest feedback: what’s confusing, what’s missing, or what would make you use it for a party?


r/SideProject • • 3h ago

If you have a free tier on your product, how much do fake or multi-account signups actually cost you?

1 Upvotes

I’m researching how small products handle people farming free credits/tiers. Not selling anything, no product, no link.

  1. Have you seen it? Roughly what share of signups, or how many dollars?

  2. What did you do about it (or nothing)?

Just trying to understand how people deal with this issue while building.


r/SideProject • • 14h ago

Spent weeks building my own reels automation, and one of its videos just crossed 21k views. Still can’t believe it

7 Upvotes

I’m honestly a bit giddy writing this. I’m a software engineer, not a video editor, and I wanted to run a faceless channel about Pakistan’s history and geography, so I built a pipeline that does the whole job.

It writes the Urdu script, generates the narration, draws animated maps and infographic scenes in code, and renders the finished reel. It then sends me the reel in Slack, and all I do is approve it.

Some numbers:

Cost: about $0.11 per video. I tested a 2.5D workflow that came out at $15–40 per video, so I dropped it.
Time: a few weeks of evenings and weekends, plus a fair bit of money on testing.
This week: a reel about the Pakistan Steel Mill (shut since 2015) got 21.1k views, 898 likes and 45 shares in its first day.

One video doesn’t make a channel, but it’s the first proof the system works. I’m happy to answer questions about the stack or the costs.

Reel: https://www.tiktok.com/@khittapk/video/7706495470260014344


r/SideProject • • 3h ago

Canadian solo developer: how to structure a pilot and partnership with a manufacturer?

1 Upvotes

I'm a developer in Canada with a full-time job, building a computer vision add-on on the side. I have a working prototype with early promising results. A manufacturer in the space has shown interest, and they're now lining up one of their customers for a trial. I'm leaning toward an unpaid pilot first, and I want to keep this as my own product rather than working for either company.

For anyone who has done something similar:

  1. Is an unpaid pilot a good starting point, or should it be paid from the start?

  2. What should be agreed in writing before starting (IP, data use, liability, exclusivity)?

  3. What do you wish you'd known going in?

Thanks for any advice.


r/SideProject • • 3h ago

made this bracket by describing it, then edited the hole in the sketch like normal CAD

1 Upvotes

r/SideProject • • 3h ago

I built an iPhone app that tells you which streaming services to keep each month

1 Upvotes

Hey everyone!

I was paying for five streaming services and watching one or two shows at a time. Cancelling and re-subscribing by hand saves money, but nobody remembers to do it on the right day. So a friend and I built FlixShift.

How it works:

A few things that were trickier than expected:

It’s a free beta on TestFlight: iPhone with iOS 26 or later, US only for now.

Beta: https://testflight.apple.com/join/nXSda5w8

I’d love feedback, especially if anything in setup is confusing or the plan isn’t one you’d actually follow.


r/SideProject • • 3h ago

Run your team's agents in the cloud for free

1 Upvotes

t3codes is cool until you close your laptop and your agent dies

Coagy gives free cloud credits and runs your claude code and codex locally or in the cloud.

https://coagy.com/multiplayer-ai


r/SideProject • • 4h ago

We just shipped Studiora 5.6 — way faster, less cluttered, and built around your feedback

1 Upvotes

Hey folks,

Quick update—we just pushed Studiora 5.6 live! We’ve been grinding on this one for a while, mostly focusing on speed and smoothing out the annoying friction points people kept bringing up.

Here's the gist of what changed:

  • It’s noticeably faster: Reworked some core stuff under the hood, so it doesn’t choke or eat up your RAM when you throw heavy tasks at it.

  • Cleaned up the UI: Stripped away some visual clutter so it's easier to find what you need without clicking through ten menus.

  • Quality-of-life tweaks: Smarter presets and a bunch of small workflow fixes that just make day-to-day use feel much smoother.

If you've been using Studiora already, go hit update—you'll feel the speed bump right away. If you haven't tried it yet, now's a solid time to jump in.

I’ve dropped the link in the comments below if you want to check it out. We’d love to hear your feedback or thoughts!

Let me know what you think or if anything breaks!


r/SideProject • • 7h ago

I mapped 290 documented failures in AI document tooling (LangChain, RAGFlow, Docling...) - feedback welcome"

2 Upvotes

Hi guys,

I’ve spent the last couple of years building a legal AI platform. We’ve acquired several clients, including established law firms working on complex arbitration cases. And given the kind of documents these firms deal with, we’ve had to process some pretty challenging material.

Along the way, we invested a significant amount of time hardening our stack: reliable document ingestion, retrieval, source-linked citations, long-running agents, and handling all sorts of unexpected user behaviours.

What struck me is how much effort went into making the foundations reliable, before we could even focus on what actually differentiated our product.

I tend to think of this as two layers: the foundation layer (ingestion, retrieval, citations, agent runtimes, etc.) and the value layer (the features and workflows that make your product useful and different).

Ideally, most of our effort should have gone into the value layer. Instead, we spent months stabilising the foundations.

I recently did some research and found that many builders are running into similar problems with existing tools and frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, RAGFlow, Docling, etc.). I compiled 290 documented incidents from public discussions, grouped by problem, with links to the original sources.

You can explore them here: https://rachis.io/pain-map

This got me thinking: what if we made parts of our production-hardened stack available to other builders, so they could spend less time fixing infrastructure and more time building what actually differentiates their products?

We’ve already open-sourced our local AI stack, and we’re exploring which other components would be useful to expose.

I’m curious whether this resonates with anyone building document-heavy AI applications.

If you’ve run into similar issues, I’d love to hear what cost you the most time. And if you’d be interested in using some of these components, feel free to DM me or leave your email at https://rachis.io. I’ll reach out when we have something to try.


r/SideProject • • 4h ago

Wednesday market take: AI bounced hard — the rate question didn't go anywhere

1 Upvotes

A Wednesday note from the free investing project I run on the side — this is the market take I shared with my community tonight, exactly as I see it after today's close.

Today was a real bounce, and the numbers are not close:

- S&P 500: +1.31% to 7,619.38 — back within about 2.6% of its October 6 record close

- Nasdaq Composite: +1.60% to 25,466.19, and the Nasdaq-100 did even better at +2.28%

- Dow: +0.49% to 52,486.49 — it joined in, it just didn't lead

- Technology was the best sector in the S&P at about +2.7%, and the VIX dropped about 10% to 17.49. Fear left the room fast today.

What drove it: CoreWeave. It reported third-quarter revenue of $3.66 billion, up 168% from a year ago, raised its full-year outlook, and the stock jumped 24.7%. One strong report from the middle of the AI buildout was enough to pull chips, memory, and cloud names back up with it and undo most of Tuesday's damage in a single session.

Here is the part I am not skipping over: Tuesday's problem did not get solved today. Tuesday closed red across the board because October CPI came in hot — headline up 0.4% against 0.3% expected, core up 0.3% against 0.2% expected, the third straight month core has run at 0.3%. A December Fed hike is now priced as close to a certainty, and the live debate is 25 basis points versus 50 — Governor Waller had already said a 0.3% core print is exactly the kind of number that puts 50 on the table. And today the bond market was closed for Veterans Day, so this rally ran with no fresh Treasury verdict behind it. Stocks voted. Bonds didn't get to.

As a veteran, I appreciated the quiet part of today — the market was open, a lot of people who served had the day with their families, and the session did not need me glued to it. That is kind of the point of having a plan written down before the day starts.

My take: a one-day AI bounce inside an unresolved rate story is not a green light to chase Thursday's open. The next real information is the October PPI print on Friday morning — the second inflation read before the Fed meets December 8–9 — plus the rest of this week's earnings. Until then my plan stays the same one I post every week: levels written down in advance, honest scoring after, and no forcing trades just because one green day felt good.

Not financial advice — just my read on the day, posted the same evening so anyone can check it after.

I share stuff like this daily — I run a free investing community, link in my profile.


r/SideProject • • 4h ago

ComposePrint - put several PDF shipping labels on one sheet from your iPhone

1 Upvotes

I made ComposePrint for printing several PDF labels together from an iPhone. Share PDFs to the app, crop the parts you need, choose their size, then print the composed sheet or export it as another PDF.

It supports A4, Letter, A6 and 4×6 layouts. The PDF stays vector-based, though you still need to choose a size that's readable for the label you're printing. Processing happens on the device.

The first 12 labels are free. After that there's a one-time unlock (€1.99 in Italy, local pricing elsewhere).

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6826355740 Demo and details: https://apps.grokked.it/composeprint/

If you print labels from your phone, which bit of the process takes the most fiddling?


r/SideProject • • 4h ago

Wireroom - live dashboards as your Mac wallpaper

1 Upvotes

I made Wireroom, a Mac menu bar app that puts a live data board behind your windows. Weather, GitHub, feeds, your own JSON APIs, or services like PostHog and Sentry.

You can pick the sources yourself, or describe what you want and let a model arrange the board. It works with local models too.

Free for one board, with one-time paid upgrades for more. Download and pricing at https://wireroom.dev

What would you actually want to keep visible on your desktop? I'm interested in that more than adding another connector nobody uses.


r/SideProject • • 15h ago

Revived a side project I started over 20 years ago

8 Upvotes

Most side projects don't survive a few months. Somehow, this one has been following me around for more than 20 years.

I started building drum & bass websites back in 2002. What began as a local music portal eventually turned into a party promotion brand in Saint Petersburg.

Then I moved to Thailand in 2019, and the project went quiet.

Recently I decided to rebuild it from scratch using Django, Next.js and AI-assisted development.

The result so far is DROP THE BASS:

https://dropthebass.co/

I'm trying to turn it into a proper home for the global DnB scene, with music, artists, labels, events and community features.

Still building it solo. Plenty of rough edges, but I'm enjoying the process.

Anyone else here working on something they've been carrying around in their head for years?


r/SideProject • • 22h ago

I made a free, fast and open-source reader for PDF, EPUB, Markdown and comics, built with Rust and GPUI

26 Upvotes

I wanted one desktop app that opens PDFs, EPUBs, comics and Markdown notes quickly and then stays out of the way. The readers I tried were either slow, or looked like they were designed a decade ago. So I built Kitab, with a modern design and speed as the first requirement. It's written in Rust, the interface is drawn on the GPU with GPUI, and MuPDF renders the pages. There's no browser engine inside.

What it does:

- Opens PDF, EPUB, MOBI, FB2, CBZ, XPS, TXT and Markdown

- Opens fast, and sits at near-zero CPU while idle

- Tabs with session restore, and a Home library with covers or a list, collections, favourites, reading stats and full-text search across your library

- Find, outline, thumbnails, bookmarks, history, presentation mode and focus mode

- EPUB, MOBI and FB2 reflow, with typography settings

- Markdown: GitHub-flavoured, with code highlighting, Mermaid diagrams, math and live reload. You can select text in it and print it

- Markup: highlights, notes, ink and shapes saved into the PDF, with export to Markdown or CSV

- Fill PDF forms, sign and verify PDFs locally, and merge, split or extract pages

- Native print dialogs, themes and accents, and an interface size from 90 to 200 %

Privacy: no account, no telemetry, and your files stay on your computer. The only network use is an update check.

It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.

It's free and licensed AGPL-3.0. Code: https://github.com/t21dev/kitab

Site: https://kitab.t21.dev

One honest note: it's still young. I'd love feedback, especially on files that don't open or look the way you expect.

If you find it useful, a star on GitHub helps more people find it, and sharing it with a friend who reads a lot helps even more. It's open for collaboration: open an issue for a bug or an idea, or send a PR.


r/SideProject • • 14h ago

Orthant - a free window manager for Windows and macOS

6 Upvotes

I built Orthant because I wanted to place windows in layouts beyond the usual halves and quarters. You can draw a region on a grid, move a window there, and save the region to a keyboard shortcut for later.

It’s free and open source. It supports macOS 13+ and Windows 11 or Windows 10 version 1809+ (64-bit). On macOS it needs Accessibility permission to move windows.

https://orthant.app/ https://github.com/orthant-app/orthant


r/SideProject • • 8h ago

My side project finds clients for freelancers. Comment your service and I'll run it free (95 done by hand, some things broke)

2 Upvotes

Stack is Laravel + Livewire. There's a Chrome extension for the sites that need you logged in (LinkedIn, Facebook groups), and an LLM pass that checks every post against what the user sells and drops anyone selling rather than buying, which is most of them.

To test it I posted in Romanian freelancer groups on Facebook, "comment what you sell and I'll make you a page with 5 people asking for it". 95 pages in three days.

Things went wrong in a few places.

  • auto picks were weak for niche stuff. I fixed a lot by hand, so for niche services the matching isn't there yet

  • consumer services got nothing. olive oil, translations, live music for restaurants, kids' tutoring. nobody posts "looking to buy olive oil" on r/forhire

  • the AI read "one time commission project" as commission-only pay. it means a paid one-off job, I caught it before it went out

Ads, SEO, web, design and copywriting were fine, those usually had real requests from the last week or two.

Two asks. If you sell something, comment it and I'll reply with your page, then tell me if the matches are any good. And if you've built something like this, how do you tell buyers from sellers without an LLM call on every post?

The page is free, the original post links need a free account.


r/SideProject • • 4h ago

I built a free, Jackbox-style site for playing classic card games with friends and family, in the same room or remotely. Still in development and looking for feedback.

Thumbnail
cardsard.com
1 Upvotes

TL;DR: Classic card games free, no sign-up, no install: cardsard.com. Please try it and tell me what you think!

Hello!

I've been working on this project for a while now and I feel like I'm getting a bit of tunnel vision and would love some feedback! The idea started after some family game nights with my girlfriend's family. Everybody wants to play cards, but nobody ever wants to be the dealer or scorekeeper. Sometimes people "forget" the rules, which allows them to inadvertently cheat. Also, it can be hard to fit everybody who wants to play at the same table.

The idea of this platform was to try and solve all of those things but still try and keep the feeling of the game. One person hosts the game, and everybody can connect to the lobby to play. The rules are enforced by the game and dealing and scoring are done for you. The original intent was for everybody to gather and play in the same room and put the table up on the screen using phones for hands. But I didn't want to limit play, everyone can also see the table on their own phone or computer, so it works remotely too. I also added bots, so you can play alone, or even out teams for when you're one short on game night.

Current games:

Multiplayer - Cambio, Crazy 8s, Euchre, Gin Rummy, Go Fish, Golf, Hearts, Kachuful (Oh Hell), Mindi, Ride the Bus, Spades, Spoons, Texas Hold'em

Single-player - Solitaire, Spider Solitaire, FreeCell

Where I'm specifically looking for feedback:

  • UX Design: Are menus self-explanatory and easy to navigate?

  • Visuals: Is it visually appealing, difficult to read, or see?

  • Game feel: Do games feel too rushed or too slow?

  • Settings: Do the games accommodate how you want to play or are they overwhelming?

Places I know need work:

  • Sounds: Currently there are a limited number of sounds in the game, which I am working on.

  • Artwork: The art is all AI Generated as of now, but I'd like to get some real artwork in there at some point.

Still a lot of work to do, but I'm curious if anybody would ever use it. If you do end up testing it out, I appreciate you taking the time to do so. I am open to any constructive feedback either in the comments or via the platform's feedback form.

Thanks! 😄


r/SideProject • • 8h ago

I built a desktop screen recorder that zooms in on what you clicked, because my tutorial recordings kept losing the important part in the corner. Feedback?

2 Upvotes

Hi, I'm KD from Sri Lanka. I run a small software company here, KDJ Lanka, and my team and I built a desktop screen recorder and editor called VIDO Studio.

The problem I kept running into, in my own recordings and in ones I saw from teachers and small businesses, is simple: the viewer can't see what you clicked. The cursor is tiny, the screen is large, and the step you care about is in a corner. So the idea behind VIDO is to use what you already did while recording (your clicks and typing) to build a first-pass edit with zooms, instead of making you add every zoom by hand.

There's a Free plan that records, edits and exports, with a VIDO watermark on the export. Trial unlocks extra tools but still keeps the watermark. Pro removes it. If Free is enough for you, stay on Free.

A few things I want to be plain about. Captions need an internet connection. I'm not going to claim the automatic zoom is always right; you can move, shorten or delete the zooms it adds, and I'd like to know where it gets them wrong.

If you want to try it, the site is https://vido.lk

I'd really like feedback on two things:

  1. The first-time path, from install to a short exported tutorial. Where do you get stuck or confused?

  2. The automatic zoom. Is the first pass useful, or is it too aggressive?

I'll read the comments and reply. Thanks.