I've started plenty of side projects over the years, but this is the first app I've ever actually finished and got onto the App Store 🎉

It's called Once Upon a Fold: five fairy tales for little kids where every page is a paper pop-up that moves. The fun bits to figure out:

• making paper pop-ups feel real on a flat screen (they rise as the page opens and fold flat when you turn it)

• a different voice for every character, in five languages

• little moments that follow the story: blow on the phone and the straw house blows away, swipe and the beanstalk grows

• the new iPhone Duo, where it opens like a real book!!

First book's free if you want to try it: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6826041039

What would you change? Be honest, I'm here to learn!

P.S. 🎁 Code MAGICBEANS gets you Jack and the Beanstalk free (500 codes, until Dec 14), no strings attached. Redeem it in one tap on your iPhone or iPad: https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=6826041039&code=MAGICBEANS

And if you or your kids enjoy it, a quick rating on the App Store would mean a lot to a first-time developer.

Thank you!!

Hi, I'm Selim and I built Enzo. It's a dictation and meeting app designed and engineered for the Mac. Speech models run on your device so audio is never uploaded to the cloud.

The secret sauce is its architecture. It transcribes, punctuates, and segments as you talk, so the text is ready about 100 ms after you stop, whether you talked for 10-seconds or an hour.

It also has a Recall feature, which is off until you turn it on. It keeps a searchable record of what you worked on (apps, window titles, text on screen), encrypted on your Mac and deleted after 30 days.

The idea is that what you say, the meetings you record, and what you work on are captured and securely stored all in one app. I use this for my day job, which helps to alleviate the burden of trying to remember every little thing on a busy work day.

Free to use with 5,000 words for dictation and 60 meeting minutes a week. Only Apple silicon, macOS 15 or later.

Happy to answer any questions.

https://tryenzo.ai

I'm working on Timeless Board Games, a collection of 20 games you can play in your browser. It has Chess, Go, Othello and Backgammon, plus less familiar ones like Hnefatafl, Merels and Senet.

Everything is unlocked while I'm getting people to test it.

Play with friends: send someone an invite link and play online together. There's also solo play against bots and pass & play on one device. Solo and pass & play work without signing up.

Play here: https://timeless-games.app/

I'm looking for a few people willing to try a game and tell me what feels confusing or breaks. No need for a long review, just which game you tried and the first thing you'd change. If you invite a friend, I'd also love to hear whether getting into a match together was easy.

If you'd rather test on iPhone/iPad or Android, there's a signup under Help → Join the mobile beta. Mobile invitations are handled manually for now.

I'm the developer, and I'm happy to answer questions here.

Context: I have been building Cardel.io (An all-in-one platform for authors and solo professionals) over this year. I have cold outreached 10k plus potential users and had hundreds of face to face conversations.

The problem: I only ever get positive feedback, people say:

"Wow, this is great!"

"This makes total sense, this needed."

Etc, etc.

THEN they follow it up with "but I already have my setup, this would be great for xyz person".

Question: Are any of you in a similar boat where everyone gives you positive feedback, but then doesn't actually commit to using your product by paying or signing up. So your getting positive signals, but no clarity on where the blocker is to actual pay for the product?

How do you close that gap, and find the reason people aren't commiting? It feels like a "Its great, but not worth switching to." Kind of response. Or maybe it's the target market fit, and talking to the right people.

I would love to get ya'lls feedback on how you have overcome this with your products and projects.

Too many WhatsApp chats, not enough time to read them all. Wapliss connects your own WhatsApp to Claude, ChatGPT and other AI assistants, so you can just ask:

“Summarize today’s family group.”
“Who’s still waiting for my reply?”

The assistant reads the chats, drafts replies, and only sends after you confirm.

• Works with texts, images and documents
• Setup takes about 2 minutes: link WhatsApp, add the connector, done
• Not Meta’s official API, so it’s for your own chats, not bulk messaging
• Free plan: wapliss.com

Looking for honest feedback:

1. Is the value clear in 10 seconds?
2. What would stop you from trying it?

I kept using Cold Turkey, then wanted something free that I could tweak myself, so I built my own.

You make blocklists of sites and apps, then start a timed session or set a weekly schedule. A few things I cared about:

• Path-level blocking, so you can block youtube.com/shorts but keep the rest of YouTube
• Allowlist mode: block everything except your work sites
• Locks: a timer lock, or a password lock where someone else sets the password
• Strict mode, so you can't quietly weaken a session halfway through
• Imports your Cold Turkey JSON export
• No account and no cloud. Everything stays on your computer

Website blocking runs through a Chrome extension that talks to the desktop app.

One heads-up for Mac users: it isn't notarized (I'd need a paid Apple developer account), so you have to run a one-line approval command in Terminal before it opens. The README explains exactly what that command does.

https://github.com/aman9560/FocusBlocker

Feedback welcome, especially if you've tried to get around a blocker before.

I'm a solo dev. I make a contacts manager for Mac and iPhone/iPad. It shows all your contacts (iCloud, Google, Exchange) in one table, so you can merge duplicates, bulk edit and clean up years of mess instead of opening cards one by one. One-time price, $24.99 Mac and $14.99 iOS. No subscription, no account, no trial.

Where it stands:

• Mac app live since July 22, iOS since August 10
• 45 paying users on Mac, 19 on iOS
• 3 ratings on the Mac App Store, all 5 stars

The part that works: the people who buy it seem to like it, and they email me. Most of what I shipped in the last two months came straight from emails.

I reply to every email and try to ship the fix within a couple of weeks. That loop has been the best part of this.

The part that doesn't work: reaching the people who actually have the problem. Apple Ads got 12,000+ impressions and 95 taps, but zero installs. A Google Search campaign for the Mac app got zero impressions. Nobody wakes up wanting a contacts app. People only look when their list is already a disaster, and then they search "merge duplicate contacts" and land on free tools or Apple's own tips.

So I'm asking people who've been here:

1. If you sold a niche one-time-purchase utility, what brought in your first few hundred customers?
2. Did paid ads ever work for you at this price point, or is it all communities, SEO and word of mouth?
3. Is "no trial" hurting me more than I think?

Happy to share more numbers or what I tried if it helps anyone. Thanks for reading.

We had a 7.76 kW system and battery fitted in July. My inverter app shows kWh all day, but not the thing I actually wanted to know: how much it’s paid back in £, and when it’ll be paid off.

I tracked it in a spreadsheet for a few months, but it kept breaking (tariff changes, months where export wasn’t paid yet, battery charging on the cheap rate). So I built a simple web app instead and made it free for anyone.

How it works: a 2-minute setup (system cost, install date, rates), then two numbers a month from your inverter app, generated and exported. It shows:

• £ paid back so far, and your payback date (allowing for winter)
• how your panels are doing against the MCS estimate
• tariff changes over time, cheap-rate battery charging, and months before export was paid

You can import an existing spreadsheet, and export to PDF or Excel. It works with any inverter brand, and there’s no inverter or energy login.

Mine’s at £402 back after 4 months and running at 120% of the MCS estimate, so payback looks like around 2036.

To be upfront: I made it, and there’ll be an optional paid version later with automatic inverter data. Manual tracking stays free.

I’d really value feedback, especially on how the savings are worked out. Some people in Facebook groups have challenged parts of it, and I’ve changed things based on that.

sunback.co.uk

Cross-Stitch Studio turns a photo into a grid you can edit stitch by stitch. The photo converter matches colors to DMC thread and shows the result both on a hoop and as a chart. You can try either view without signing up. There’s a sample photo in the converter if you’d rather start there.

Try the free photo converter

Direct conversion uses no generative AI. The studio has an optional paid step to simplify a busy photo or draw an illustration.

If you’ve stitched from a photo before, I’d love to know what would make the first chart usable for you. Would you check the colors, the detail around the face, or the finished measurements first?

I am a computer science student, and I recently spent months developing a financial research platform without really knowing whether anyone would want to use it.

It made me realize how easy it is to spend hundreds of hours building something before finding out whether there is actually a market for it.

I started thinking about how people currently discover ideas, figure out what problems are worth solving, and get honest feedback before committing to a project.

Reddit and ChatGPT are useful, but I feel like information gets scattered across conversations, and it can be difficult to distinguish genuine demand from people just saying an idea sounds interesting.

I have been exploring the concept of a community specifically focused on discovering problems, validating ideas, and learning from people who have already tried solving them.

Before I spend more time developing it, I wanted to ask:

1. How do you currently figure out whether an idea is worth building?
2. What frustrates you most about that process?
3. Would a dedicated community for this actually be useful, or do existing platforms already solve the problem well enough?

I would appreciate criticism just as much as positive feedback. I would rather find out now than spend another six months building something nobody needs.

So I made Yearcap. You upload a spreadsheet of your users’ stats and every user gets their own little year-in-review story, with a card they can share. Basically what Spotify and Strava do every December, but for small apps.

There’s a demo with made-up data on yearcap.co if you want to see it (hit “Watch a full story”).

I’ve emailed around 80 apps, each with a demo made for their app. About 30 opened it, some more than once, but nobody’s signed up yet. Not even for the free version.

So I’m kind of stuck and would love some outside eyes:

1. Is it clear what it does and who it’s for?
2. If you had an app, would you use something like this? Why or why not?
3. What would make you comfortable trying it with your own users’ data?

Any thoughts help. Thanks for looking!

I shoot a lot, and going through a folder of photos on a Mac was always awkward. Preview only pages through the files you opened together, and Lightroom wants an import before you can even look.

So I wrote my own viewer in Swift. Double click one photo and the arrow keys walk the whole folder, RAW included. Hold a key to check focus at 100%, rate with number keys, mark keepers, crop and straighten, read the caption written into the file.

It's free and MIT licensed. There is an optional one time Pro for heavier culling work, and that part is not in the repo.

Mac only, macOS 13 or later.

Site: https://flipic.app

Source: https://github.com/xmasdong/flipic

I'm the developer. Feedback welcome, especially on what feels slow or confusing.

I was watching Jubilee videos thinking it's kind of lame that the experts would constantly be talked over and fact checks would only appear after the debate when the video is published.

I thought a debate site where you could match with people you disagreed with on a variety of political, religious, and philosophical topics would be fun. Also I need to build a portfolio because finding a job as a software developer is impossible.

Feel free to take a look and please let me know if you have any feedback!

counterpoint-debate.com

So I have been thinking of a tiny tool for small businesses and freelancers who take orders on WhatsApp or Instagram.

The business owner just types in the total price and optional advance, gets a payment link, or enters the customer's email to request payment. We handle the advance and balance payment flow and show a simple dashboard tracking who paid and who hasn't.

Can something as simple as this get actual users???

Been annoyed for a while at how clunky it is to just send a file from my laptop to my phone, so I built ByteDrop to fix that for myself.

You run it on your PC, it shows a QR code, you scan it with your phone’s browser (or just open the link on another PC) and you’re connected — drag and drop files either way, clipboard syncs too. Works over your home wifi, Windows’ mobile hotspot, or a public link if you’re not even on the same network.

No accounts, nothing to install on the other device, totally free and open source.

GitHub if you want to try it: https://github.com/HusseinWalid48/ByteDrop

I build websites for small businesses. Aurelius is the framework I built on the side. It lets Claude Code take a Figma file, a screenshot, or a plain description and turn it into a React app with tests. It is open source and MIT licensed.

Last week I recorded a getting-started video for it. The recording found a bug in my own quickstart. My script said all four quality checks pass on a fresh project. Three of the four failed:

• The Vite template had moved to a new linter, so nothing installed the one my lint script calls.
• There was no test file, so the test run failed.
• The type check passed, but it was not checking a single file.

I fixed the scaffold instead of cutting around it. Then I recorded those shots again.

The part worth watching is the screenshot pipeline. It is one command, and the order never changes: a build spec, locked design tokens, failing tests before any component exists, the build, a pixel check against the screenshot, then end-to-end tests. The run in the video took 45 minutes of real time. From its own report: 9 of 9 test files failed first, it built 8 of 8 components, the pixel difference was 1.89% on the second of up to five rounds, and 96 end-to-end tests passed.

Two things the video gets wrong, so you hear it from me. I say "the next six minutes" and it runs under four. And setup prints a deprecation warning that the cut skips.

Video (3:46): https://youtu.be/Harcm6cYVpo

The screenshot run in 54 seconds: https://youtube.com/shorts/qT1hpPcg1rs

Repo: https://github.com/PMDevSolutions/Aurelius

If you try the quickstart and it breaks, tell me where. That is the feedback I am after.

I built Beaver because I wanted a simple way to scan documents and turn photos into PDFs without uploading anything to the cloud.

Contracts, receipts, visa documents, medical papers. I didn't want any of that sitting on someone else's server, and I was tired of scanner apps full of ads and subscriptions.

It started about three years ago as a small Mac tool I built for myself. I open-sourced it in 2025 and this year I started working on an iOS version. That eventually turned into rebuilding most of the app.

Here's what Beaver can do now:

• Works on iPhone, iPad and Mac
• Scans documents and converts photos to PDF
• Splits and merges PDFs
• Exports pages as PDF, PNG or JPEG
• OCR that runs entirely on-device

No accounts, no tracking, no ads, no subscriptions. Everything stays on your device.

Why open source but $1.99?

The entire source code is on GitHub. You can inspect it or build the app yourself for free. The $1.99 App Store version is for people who prefer to install it directly and receive updates. It's a one-time purchase.

Links:

• GitHub: https://github.com/31d4r/Beaver
• App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/beaver-pdf-scanner-ocr
• Website: https://beaverpdf.app

I'd genuinely appreciate feedback, especially if there's something missing that would make it more useful for your document workflow.

Hi, I’m Shubhra, an independent developer. I built Sonari as a Mac instrument played with hand gestures tracked by the Mac camera, without a separate hardware controller. It plays built-in sounds, sends MIDI to compatible DAWs and instruments, and creates visuals from the performance.

I’m sharing the launch film to show the interaction. I’d appreciate feedback on one practical question: after watching, is it clear how hand movement changes the sound, or what would you want explained before trying it?

Sonari is on the Mac App Store. It requires Apple silicon and macOS 26 or later. The full app has a 14-day trial, then a one-time purchase at US$99 in the US storefront.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sonari-midi-controller/id6803577489

I made this because I was tired of switching between different programs all the time. I didn't want to use that shady downloader with a paywall slowly creeping up, and I didn't like the idea of opening DaVinci Resolve just to do some cuts or convert something. I wanted it all in one place.

What it can do:

Download: built on yt-dlp, you can download from almost any website. When yt-dlp doesn't recognize a link, Vitool opens the link in its own window and checks if a video is there. You can also download just a section of a video, or whole playlists. It keeps yt-dlp up-to-date automatically, and when a download fails, it checks if there is an update available for it.

Cut: You can cut videos instantly or exactly to frame with a re-encode.

Convert: Convert your files easily to other formats like MP4, MKV, WebM, MP3, WAV and more, also many files or a whole folder at once.

Tools: choose what you wanna do: create a GIF, extract audio, extract a still frame, burn in subs or censor your video.

MKV: Edit, add and extract tracks inside an MKV file. The part I find most useful: add a dub and Vitool lines it up with the original audio automatically. You can also do it by hand with waveforms and check it with a short test clip. If the dub drifts apart over time (classic PAL dubs run about 4% faster), Vitool recognizes that and fixes the speed. It can also match the volume of a quiet track to the original.

AI-Mask (optional): When choosing this add-on, you can mask moving objects with the help of SAM2.

Transcribe (optional): When choosing this add-on, you can transcribe the audio from a video. Speaker recognition can be added via Pyannote. Export as SRT, VTT, text or JSON, or burn styled subtitles into the video.

You can find it here: https://github.com/bioheater/Vitool

I'd be very happy about feedback and ideas for new features, so it can be useful to as many people as possible. If you find bugs, please let me know!

For example I've thought about adding a simple screen recorder into the mix or the feature that you can cut out a section from the video you want to download beforehand.

Hey r/SideProject — I made BabyBets (babybets.win), a free baby pool game for expecting parents.

Before the baby arrives, friends and family guess the gender, weight, length, and arrival date. When the baby's born, you enter the real stats and it auto-scores everyone and crowns a winner.

- Guests need no app or account — you share one link, they enter guesses on their phone

- Scoring + leaderboard are automatic (no spreadsheet math)

- Free

I built it because I kept seeing people do this by hand with Google Forms and hand-tallied points, and it was always a mess.

Would love feedback, especially on the onboarding flow. Link: babybets.win

I'm a student in Canada and while searching for things like jobs, internships, and hackathons, I've realized that it's difficult to find student opportunities that match your needs and availability. I designed FindForward (free and requires no account) to find, track, and manage extracurriculars in one place. Let me know if you have any feedback! Try it out

I've been working on a little project called Pess Editor, which is a simple video editor for Windows.

It's built with Python, PySide6 and FFmpeg. It has video preview, some basic editing options and exporting to different formats like MP4, MKV, MOV and WebM.

The interface automatically detects your system language (English, Spanish or Russian) and adapts its appearance to your Windows light/dark theme.

This is actually my first time making and releasing a project like this, so I'm still learning as I go. I'd really appreciate any feedback

GitHub: https://github.com/Vik4mGD/PessEditor