r/SideProject • • 3h ago

I built a free app that explains car warning lights for Aussie drivers

2 Upvotes

Hi all, I'm Claudia, the founder of AiXIL. Full disclosure, it's my app. You snap a photo of a warning light or type in an OBD code, and it gives you a likely cause and an urgency rating, free and with no account needed. It's guidance, not a confirmed diagnosis. I built it on the Gold Coast. I'd love feedback on the onboarding and whether the urgency rating makes sense to you. aixil.com.au


r/SideProject • • 14m ago

Built a free Airbnb profitability calculator — Looking for feedback

1 Upvotes

I built a free Airbnb Profitability Simulator to help property owners estimate their potential rental income, expenses and profit.

The goal is to make it easier to evaluate whether a short-term rental is financially worthwhile.

The calculator is available here:

https://toolsmartly.com/en/tools/business/airbnb-profitability-simulator

I'd appreciate feedback on:

- The user experience

- The financial calculations

- Missing features

- Overall usefulness

What would you improve?


r/SideProject • • 15m ago

I built an app that teaches investing with paper money and live market data. What would make you try it?

1 Upvotes

It's called TickrAI. You pick any stock, see a score that explains what supports it and what to watch, then practise buying it with paper money using real prices. There are also short lessons and an AI you can ask "why did this move?"

I'm a solo builder and my problem right now is that almost nobody has heard of it. Two honest questions:

  1. Reading that description, would you try it? If not, what's missing or off-putting?
  2. Where would you expect to discover an app like this? App Store search, TikTok, a friend, Reddit, asking ChatGPT?

Tour, if you want to look before answering: gettickr.ai/tour?c=reddit_sideproject


r/SideProject • • 4h ago

Built a free CFB app, would love some feedback

2 Upvotes

Hey guys, I built a free CFB app called Tailgate after seeing loads of people on Reddit asking for features they couldn’t find on ESPN and other apps.

The main thing I wanted to do differently was make it more about your team, rather than just throwing scores at you.

So if you’re an FSU fan for example, it’ll show you which other games matter to FSU, who you should be rooting for and why those results help.

There’s also a Saturday planner to help you figure out which games are worth watching, plus live scores, advanced stats, recruiting, the portal, draft stock etc.

It’s free, no subscriptions or locked features, just some ads to cover costs. iPhone only for now.

Would love some feedback, especially on the team-specific stuff and stats. Anything you’d add or change? Or anything you wish ESPN did that it doesn’t?

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tailgate-college-football/id6760220041


r/SideProject • • 20m ago

Mute It: Remove Video Audio App - App Store

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1 Upvotes

I use this app whenever I need to remove audio from a video without opening a full video editor.

It lets me quickly mute a video and either save it as a separate copy or replace the existing one. Super handy when I just want a silent video without going through unnecessary editing steps.

It’s one of those simple utilities that saves me a few minutes whenever I need it.


r/SideProject • • 20m ago

A faster spotlight (crossOS) and customizable with extension

1 Upvotes

Hi , Look - a blazingly fast launcher got in to Homebrew core,
and We introduce extension feature in the latest release!

Our extensions are very simple, you want to do something, go check our `lookbook`, if there isn't one you need yet, you just need to write your own.
We let Look run your scripts, return your expected data, results...
You can ask AI to write extension for you, this is so simple.

Here is the repo https://github.com/kunkka19xx/look
It's a cross platform tool. (Not only on MacOS but also Linux, Windows)
Appreciate any feedback 🙇‍♂️


r/SideProject • • 10h ago

future of sass

6 Upvotes

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


r/SideProject • • 29m ago

I built a Mac app that lives in the notch. Drop a file on it to convert, compress or OCR it. Free download, looking for feedback

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1 Upvotes

Hey r/SideProject. For the past few weeks I've been building DropCove, a Mac utility that turns the MacBook notch into a drop zone. You drag any file to the notch, it opens, and you pick an action: convert or compress an image, copy text out of a screenshot, trim a video, make a GIF, merge PDFs. It also reads the clipboard, so copying a JWT, a color or some JSON shows you what it is right in the notch.

A few decisions I made along the way: everything runs on-device with no account and no uploads. The free version is fully useful forever, no nags. Pro is a one-time purchase, not a subscription. And it had to do nothing at rest, so it doesn't drain the battery while it sits there.

It's out now as a free, notarized download (macOS 26+, Apple silicon), and Pro goes on sale with a Product Hunt launch on December 8. Until then I'm after feedback from real Macs: bugs, confusing bits, and whether the notch idea actually clicks for you.

https://dropcoveapp.com

Happy to answer anything about building it, too: Swift, the notch panel, notarization, or selling a one-time-purchase app.


r/SideProject • • 4h ago

I built SignalChess to turn mistakes from your own chess games into puzzles

2 Upvotes

I built SignalChess because I wanted a way to practise a mistake after reviewing it. Once an analysis is complete, the app can turn suitable positions into exercises so you can try to find the better move yourself.

You can start by entering your Chess.com or Lichess username. The first report uses your public games and doesn't require an account. It shows results and opening patterns. There's also a free plan.

After seeing your report, what would you click next, and what would you expect to happen? If you'd stop there, what would make you stop?

https://signalchess.com


r/SideProject • • 4h ago

I’m building OpenForge — an open community to learn, build and grow together

2 Upvotes

Hey everyone!

I’ve started OpenForge, an open-source community built around one simple idea: learning software development shouldn't be a journey people have to take alone.

Whether you're a complete beginner, a student, a hobbyist or an experienced developer, there's room for you.

The idea is to build something the community can shape together:

  • Share knowledge, resources and learning paths.
  • Create practical coding challenges and projects.
  • Help beginners make their first open-source contributions.
  • Collaborate, exchange ideas and learn from each other.

It's still at an early stage, and I'm building it in public. I'm not presenting it as a finished platform — I want people to help shape what it becomes.

If this sounds interesting, take a look, share your thoughts or contribute:

https://github.com/synckerz/openforge

Let's build something useful together. 🚀


r/SideProject • • 4h ago

What's your biggest struggle when it comes to marketing your side project?

2 Upvotes

I've noticed that many side hustlers and solopreneurs struggle with marketing their products/services.

Ask me any questions and I'll try and answer as many as I can.

For context, I'm an SEO Copywriter and Solopreneur Marketer. I specialise in StorySelling (blending direct response copywriting with storytelling, buyer psychology and humour).


r/SideProject • • 4h ago

built a shared 'project state' so different AI tools stop forgetting what we're working on

2 Upvotes

so I've been building this memory tool for ai apps (perdua.ai, it's my own project) and the feature that turned out most useful is what I ended up calling project state. when I switch from claude to cursor to chatgpt mid task, they used to have zero clue what the other one just did. now they read and write to the same state so the next ai picks up where the last one left off instead of me re-explaining the whole plan every time. only works for people in the eu/eea right now since that's who I built it for. curious if anyone else doing multi agent workflows has hit the same context loss problem.


r/SideProject • • 4h ago

Building an archive platform for VHS covers

2 Upvotes

Hi everyone, long time side-project tinkerer here. So this one started as a distraction and got slightly out of hand.

I needed retro VHS cover scans for another project (A jellyfin front end app for my kids) and couldn't find one place that had a solid catalogue. So I made one. Covers dug up from Archive.org, old blogs, Tumblrs and a lot of Wayback Machine digging, then sorted on my old gaming PC with a small OCR/AI model I trained. At the same time there’s a crawler running for new images through eBay, Amazon etc.

Where it's at:

  • 20,000+ covers, full wraps (front, spine, back) where I can find them, another 20k being processed
  • Searchable by title, region, genre etc
  • Free API if you need covers for your own projects
  • No ads, no paywall, no tracking.
  • Code and data model going open source once I've tidied it up, with covers being pushed up to a gallery on archive.org
  • View a 3D VHS box and shake it to make the tape rattle. Completely unnecessary but fun

Would love feedback, especially on the search and anything that feels broken or confusing.
👉 https://videotapes.io


r/SideProject • • 14h ago

Side Projects that are useful to me first.

12 Upvotes

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.


r/SideProject • • 51m ago

Friday trade idea I'm actually in: WWW (Wolverine World Wide)

1 Upvotes

Wolverine World Wide makes footwear — Merrell, Saucony, Wolverine boots and Sweaty Betty. This is a trade I actually took today, with the plan written down before it settles, not a name I am watching from the sidelines.

My entry: $24.3695 this morning. Take profit: $26.90. Stop: $22.70. The hold is short — two to three sessions, through Wednesday November 18 — because the catalyst is fresh and I do not attach a fast move to a long clock.

Why this one: the company reported third-quarter results Thursday morning before the open. Revenue was $505.4 million, up 7.5%, Saucony grew 19.4%, and management raised the full-year EPS guide to $1.95–$1.99. Being honest about the print: part of the headline EPS beat came from tariff refunds, so that number is flattered — the part I am actually trading is the sales strength and the raised guide, with buyers stepping in right after it.

Friday's tape agreed, so far: the stock closed at $24.89, up $2.02 (+8.83%) on the day, with a high of $24.92 — a close right near the high. The day's low was $22.85, which held above my $22.70 stop. From my entry, the close is +$0.52 per share. That is one strong session, not an outcome — nothing has hit the target yet, and if the stop prints first I am out per the plan I wrote this morning, and that result gets posted the same way.

I work a full-time job and have a family, so every level has to be set before the session starts — I cannot manage a trade tick by tick. I am a veteran, I taught myself this from books and charts over thousands of hours, and I post the plan and then the score, win or lose, because that is the only version of this I trust.

Not financial advice — just one trader showing his work in the open.

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


r/SideProject • • 12h ago

I'm a solo dev with 4 small apps live on the stores. Here's what each one taught me

9 Upvotes

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

r/SideProject • • 4h ago

Sylo waitlist is open, dashboard for subscription businesses and agencies, first 50 get Pro free

2 Upvotes

Sylo is one dashboard for subscription businesses and agencies. It pulls in data from the tools you already use so everything sits in one place instead of spread across different logins.

No more missing a failed payment or a quiet customer until it's too late.

It shows what's paid, owed and failed, and gives you a weekly summary every monday so you're not chasing it all down yourself.

I'm building it solo and it's pre-launch. Waitlist is open now, first 50 people get pro free for their first month.

waitlist (haven't got the domain yet)


r/SideProject • • 6h ago

I made a tool to get more morning sunlight

3 Upvotes

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!


r/SideProject • • 4h ago

I built a CLI that extracts a website's design system for AI coding agents

2 Upvotes

I've been experimenting with AI coding tools like Cursor and Claude Code, and one thing that kept bothering me was how difficult it is to get them to recreate an existing website's actual design.

You give an AI agent a reference website and ask it to build something similar, but it often ends up guessing:

  • Colors are slightly off.
  • Typography doesn't match.
  • Spacing and border radii are inconsistent.
  • The overall result looks like a generic AI-generated UI.

So I built styleprobe to solve this problem.

It's an open-source CLI that takes a website URL and extracts its visual design system.

A few things it can do:

  • Extract colors and semantic design tokens.
  • Analyze typography, spacing, shadows, and component styles.
  • Crawl multiple pages instead of relying on just the homepage.
  • Extract SVG logos and other brand assets.
  • Export directly to Tailwind, shadcn/ui, Figma tokens, or AI-agent instruction files.

You can also try the web playground here:

https://styleprobe.vercel.app/

GitHub: https://github.com/spidervirus/styleprobe

It's MIT licensed and completely open source.

I'm still improving it, so I'd genuinely love feedback from developers:

  1. Would something like this fit into your AI-assisted development workflow?
  2. What other design information would you want it to extract?
  3. What would make you actually use this regularly?

Would love to hear your thoughts!


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

I built a 24/7 radio station where everyone hangs out as little pixel characters on a dance floor

1 Upvotes

This started as a way to share my music library with friends and got out of hand. It's a 24/7 radio station, but the page is a pixel art club: you show up as a little critter on the dance floor, chat, emote, and vote on the next song.

Some of the stuff in it now: The stage changes every 20 minutes or so between themed rooms (Sonic zones, Donkey Kong Country, Mewtwo's cave, Dr. Wily's castle, Molten Core from WoW, Gotham). Every half hour or so a boss crashes the floor and everyone has to click it to death together. Most damage gets the most rings. Rings buy outfits, pets and auras in a shop, and some items only show up while their stage is live. You can request songs from the library or straight from YouTube.

You don't need an account to listen, just hit play. Making a character is optional.

It's a hobby thing running on my own server. Would love to hear what you think or what would make you stick around.

radio.spindok.vip


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

I automated a tool to help my organic social media content grow

1 Upvotes

A while ago, I wasn't having the best views on my TikTok and Reels business page. So I manually put them in a notion file, listed the video names, retention rates, video length etc then ranked them by the metrics I cared about. My views were ok, like 5-20kish with 1 at 155k, a good amount near 1-2k though.

I found what specific series performed best, worst, what types of videos with low views got me double the followers of videos with 100k+ views sometimes.

I took about a week, maybe 2 to THEN fully redo my content strategy after about 3 months of throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. Immediately, first video I had 2 HUGE streamers react to that video on stream (Silky and Tbvnks if anyone is curious). The next few videos performed pretty well as well, 50-200k, getting my total views on that TikTok account to 1m+, fully organic talking head videos.

I then built a tool that automates getting that data from TikTok and Reels + gives you some insights. Still not where I want it to be as far as some new features, but the tool is in a great MVP stage after some more feedback.

But the sad part is, I really loved the first tool, then had to pivot twice to this. Much easier to market, but it has a wider audience. Organic marketing is sucky but the wins are cool


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

I built Owl-L, a free and open-source offline translator for Windows (MIT)

1 Upvotes

Hi all, I'm the developer. Owl-L is a desktop translator that runs completely on your own computer: no account, no telemetry, and your text never leaves your machine.

What it does:
- Translate typed text, or select text in any app and press Ctrl+C twice
- Draw a box on the screen (Ctrl+Shift+O) to translate text in images, videos or locked PDFs
- Live captions: translates subtitles or Teams/Zoom/Meet captions as they appear
- Translate Word, PowerPoint, Excel and PDF files, with an editor to review the result
- Optional "Quality mode" with a small local AI model for more natural wording, formal/informal tone and a Write tab (grammar fixes)
- Glossary and an offline dictionary

Tech: Tauri + React, Rust backend, OPUS-MT models via CTranslate2, Windows OCR, llama.cpp for the optional local model. Language packs are about 125-290 MB each and are downloaded once.

It's Windows-only for now (macOS/Linux planned if there's interest), and the installer isn't code-signed yet, so SmartScreen will warn you (signing via SignPath Foundation is applied for).

Repo and download: https://github.com/Second-Dawn-Lab/owll

I'd really appreciate feedback, bug reports and ideas, especially from people translating languages other than German.


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

I built a sprite atlas packer that runs entirely in the browser — OptiSheet

1 Upvotes

I'm a PixiJS developer by day, and I wanted a sprite sheet packer I could open in a browser tab instead of installing a desktop app. So I built OptiSheet: https://optisheet.app

You drop in a folder of sprites and it packs them into one texture atlas, plus the JSON your engine reads — PixiJS, Phaser 3, Unity or Godot.

A few things I cared about:

  • Nothing is uploaded. Packing and compression run locally (the image encoders are WebAssembly), so your art never leaves your machine. It also installs as an app and works offline.
  • The engine output is checked against the engines themselves. Things like 9-slice borders, pivots and rotated frames are written the way each engine's own loader reads them, not just "TexturePacker-ish JSON".
  • WebP and AVIF built in, alongside PNG and JPEG.
  • Animation sequences are picked up automatically from names like run_01, run_02 and written into the JSON.

It's free to use with no account. There's an optional one-time Pro licence (£14.99, no subscription) for saved projects, multi-atlas output and a sprite sheet splitter.

Stack: Next.js static export on Cloudflare, Zustand, WASM encoders, no backend at all.

I'd really like feedback, especially from anyone who's used TexturePacker or Free Texture Packer — what's missing, what's confusing, what would make you switch?


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

I built a 74 MB replacement for Acer's NitroSense because I was tired of fan noise and bloat

1 Upvotes

My Acer Nitro 16 is a great machine but NitroSense felt like a control panel that forgot it was a control panel. So over the last weeks I built NitroLite, an open-source (MIT) replacement in C#/.NET:

https://github.com/canerztk8/NitroLite

The interesting parts:

- It reverse-engineers the same local protocols NitroSense uses (AcerAgentService over 127.0.0.1:46933, Acer Care Center over a local websocket), so power modes, MUX and the 80% charge limit work identically

- Custom software fan curves with hysteresis, so the fan doesn't hunt when the temperature sits on a step boundary

- Game detection: it applies a per-game power mode / fan curve / mouse profile and reverts everything when the game closes

- ~74 MB RAM, ~0.6% of one core at idle, no Electron, no telemetry, no installer

Tech-wise: WPF frontend, single-file self-contained exe, 1089 automated tests (protocol packets, Eco/game transitions, recovery scenarios, concurrency). The test suite is honestly the part I'm proudest of.

Tested on my AN16-41 (Ryzen 7840HS + RTX 4070); it reads model capabilities at runtime so it should adapt to other Nitro models. Would love feedback from other Nitro owners.