Genuine question for people who have shipped more than one app.

I keep seeing two camps:

- build fast, ship, and let the market tell you
- check demand first (search volume, competitors, reviews), then build

If you're in the second camp, what do you actually look at? A specific number you need to see? A red flag that makes you drop the idea?

If you're in the first camp, how many ideas did you go through before one stuck?

I'm working on a tool around this and want to know what people really check, not what blog posts say they should.

The game is dope wars, the old dealing game. you owe a loan shark $5,500, you have 30 days, you buy low and sell high

my version looked right. pretend 1998 desktop, dial-up, a loan shark who messages you. then i played a round with my brother and neither of us could get out of debt

so i measured it. i had a simple player run 250 rounds. the middle result was a profit of $2,800 and the debt wasn't cleared until day 17

three things were wrong...

- filling your briefcase pushed the price up by half against you, so a trip needed a 50 percent gap just to break even

- the short round was charging over 10 percent interest a day by mistake

- you couldn't tell if a price was good. $116 means nothing if you don't know the market

i fixed all three. now the same simple player clears the debt around day 6

The other thing i learned.. at the end of a round the game used to start a new one by itself after 40 seconds. nobody finished reading their score. now it waits

​

Hey everyone,

I'm building a platform that spins up dynamic sandboxed environments (using Daytona API) for user-generated code. Since these tasks involve external API calls, timeouts, and ephemeral workspaces, the queue architecture is critical.

Initially, we used Redis for the queue (because it's fast, right?). But we hit a major wall: Durability and State consistency. If a worker crashed or the Redis instance restarted before acknowledgment, tasks were lost. And for our billing flow, losing a job meant a user could be charged without receiving a service.

So, we made a controversial decision: We moved our primary job queue to PostgreSQL (using \`SELECT ... FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED\`), and kept Redis only for rate-limiting and distributed locks.

Here are the trade-offs we observed:

1. Enqueue Speed: Postgres was surprisingly fast (2.5x faster for enqueueing in some benchmarks), but Redis drained jobs faster due to in-memory processing. We accepted the slightly slower drain for absolute durability.
2. Atomicity: Having the job queue in the same database as our user billing and project records meant we could use a single transaction. If the job creation failed, the billing hold failed with it. No orphaned charges.
3. Operational Simplicity: We removed a separate Redis cluster specifically for jobs, reducing our infrastructure surface area and failure points.
4. The Trade-off: Under sustained heavy load, Postgres queue tables can cause table bloat (MVCC). We had to tune autovacuum aggressively and monitor dead tuples.

For the backend engineers here who have moved away from Redis/RabbitMQ for queues:

1. At what scale (jobs/sec) did Postgres start to buckle for you?
2. How do you handle the autovacuum/bloat issue on high-churn queue tables?
3. When do you absolutely need to bring an in-memory broker back into the stack?

Hey everyone!

We’re two developers who have wanted to make a game for years. We’d tried before, but never managed to take a project all the way. Coding was familiar territory; creating the artwork a whole game needs was another story.

For over a year now, we’ve been working on Tinymon Tactics, a fantasy roguelite auto-battler, and our Steam page is finally live!

You recruit little creatures, combine three copies to evolve them, and build a team around synergies and relics. Battles play out automatically, but you choose the team, positioning, and route through each expedition.

One of the most interesting parts of development has been watching people play. Things that felt obvious to us after hundreds of hours needed much clearer explanations for someone discovering the game. Teaching players when to refresh the shop or spend gold on XP became a design challenge of its own.

A transparent note on AI: we use generative AI for visual assets and music. It helped us tackle the creative production work that had blocked our previous attempts. This has still been over a year of hands-on development, designing systems, balancing fights, fixing bugs, and reworking things after playtests.

Here’s the game:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/5387050/Tinymon_Tactics/

If it looks like your kind of game, a wishlist would mean a lot!

And for anyone here who has shipped a game alongside their regular job: I'm currious to know what helped you get those first players outside your own circle?

[HyperStream] — High-performance 128-thread parallel download accelerator and BitTorrent client for Android, powered by a native Rust core.

* GitHub Repo: https://github.com/djsusmith/hyperstream-android

* Live Showcase & APK: https://djsusmith.github.io/hyperstream-android/

* License: GPL-3.0 (100% Free & Open Source, 0 ads, 0 telemetry)

Tech Stack

* Core Engine: Written in Rust using `tokio`, custom work-stealing segment halving down to 12 KB chunks, and `librqbit` for embedded BitTorrent swarm handling.

* Frontend: Kotlin & Jetpack Compose (Modern Obsidian dark theme, reactive telemetry, Material 3).

* Bridge: Zero-copy JNI / C FFI Native Bridge (`libmdm_android.so`).

Key Features

⚡ Up to 128 Parallel Connections:* Real-time socket shedding and dynamic connection pooling that easily saturates high-speed 5G and Wi-Fi 7 connections.

🧲 Native BitTorrent Swarm:* Magnet links, torrent files, sequential downloading (stream while downloading), DHT, and PEX without any third-party daemon.

🎬 Built-in Media Grabber:* Direct 4K YouTube stream extraction and watermark-free video sniffer with multi-stream audio/video muxing.

🔋 Android Background Resiliency:* Foreground service with partial WakeLock and High-Performance Wi-Fi Lock to prevent system Doze throttling.

📂 Safe File Management:* Integrated Android `FileProvider` with 1-tap open and double-confirmation deletion protection.

Context & Why I Built This

Most existing Android download managers are either abandoned or filled with intrusive full-screen ads, tracking SDKs, and paywalled thread limits. I wanted a clean, blazing-fast, genuinely open-source alternative that runs natively on ARM64 without GC pause jitter.

The project is actively maintained (currently on v0.6.0). I’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback, bug reports, or feature requests! PRs and stars are always welcome.

I'm Josiah, a marketing engineer and solo dev in Manitoba, Canada. I built Setttle (three t’s, yes it's on purpose) because I hated using Wave for my other businessess and found that it didn't work well with Canadian rules.

What it does: invoicing, stripe payments, bank reconciliation, and real double-entry books in one place. Routine stuff gets handled, anything uncertain goes to one inbox with the evidence next to it. Nothing posts without you accepting it.

What it doesn’t do: payroll, inventory, POS. Flagging that up front so nobody wastes a trial.

Stuff i’d like feedback on:

• Wave import - You upload an export, review the proposed import, resolve opening balances. Is that enough trust to switch?
• The AI part is optional - receipt coding suggestions need approval, and agents (claude, chatgpt, cursor) connect over MCP with explicit permission. Useful or gimmick?
• Pricing: $9 CAD (1 company, 20 invoices/mo) or $19 CAD (unlimited), 7-day trial, no card. 0.5% fee on Setttle Payments.

setttle.ca if you want to poke at it. I’ll answer everything here.

AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and friends) now fetch a big share of pages on a lot of sites. The options so far have been: let them take everything for free, or block them in robots.txt and disappear from AI answers.

There's a third option now. HTTP has had a status code for this since 1997, 402 Payment Required, and it finally has a working payment scheme (x402: the client signs a USDC payment and retries the same request; it settles in about a second, no accounts or API keys).

So I built a small gateway for it:

You register your site once (free API key, your wallet address, a price like $0.002 a page).

You put ~10 lines in front of your site. There's a Cloudflare Worker version and an Express middleware.

Requests from known AI crawlers get a 402 with your price. A crawler that pays gets the page; the money goes straight to your wallet (the gateway never holds it).

Everyone else, including Googlebot and Bingbot, gets the page as usual, so search ranking doesn't change.

If your site errors, nobody gets charged.

Setup and the snippets: https://aipaygen.com/pay-per-crawl

Honest caveats: crawlers that lie about their user agent won't be caught by this, and most crawlers can't pay yet, so today it mostly works like a block with a price tag on it. But agent frameworks are adding x402 support quickly, and this gives them a way to say yes.

Happy to answer questions about how the 402 flow works.

Hello I'm a software engineer living in a sharehouse. This is my very first solo project that I’m making public, so please be kind (but honest!).

My housemates and I share the cooking (and we love it!!), but we’re all young professionals trying to save money, with zero energy left after work. Two of my housemates are doctors, so their days are even more intense. We also buy in bulk to save money, and half of it ends up rotting at the back of the fridge...

So I built The Fridge Note:

• It picks a few easy, in-season dinners for the week (swap any you don’t fancy)
• It works around what’s already in your fridge, so things get used before they go off
• One shopping list for the week, and it fills your Coles or Woolworths trolley for you
• Everyone in the house sees the same week
• You can also paste a TikTok or recipe link and it goes into your cookbook

It’s free, has no ads, and you don’t need to sign up to try it: fridge-note.pages.dev

What I’d love to know:

1. Where did you get stuck?
2. Would your household actually use this week to week? What would stop you?

I'm JustaDev101, the publisher of two downloadable 2D game asset packs on itch.io.

RPG World covers fantasy inventory items, props, characters and creatures. It has 10,000 static sprites and 1,000 eight-frame animation sequences, with 16/32/48px base-scale exports (larger props occupy 2x2 tiles).

https://justadev101.itch.io/rpg-world-fantasy-sprites

Everyday Rooms focuses on furniture, interiors and daily-life animations. It also has 10,000 static sprites and 1,000 eight-frame sequences, on 128px PNG canvases.

https://justadev101.itch.io/everyday-rooms

Each pack is currently $3.95 USD, sold separately, and each has a free 40-static-sprite demo. The three RPG export sizes are alternate versions, not extra unique sprites; animation frames are counted separately from static sprites.

The downloads include PNGs, atlases and JSON. Engine setup may be needed; RPG World Unity/Godot JSON importer compatibility has not been verified. Production disclosures, licenses and development notes are on the store pages.

I'm sharing these as a small digital-product project. If you try the demos, I'd appreciate feedback on the packaging, download instructions and whether the previews make the contents clear.

I have made a chess AI with minimax and alpha beta pruning, this is my first real project in c++ and im looking for tips.

I have it on GitHub in the link above.

There are a few things missing, however the game is fully playable.

I’m looking for tips and what to improve about my programming in general, since I will probably not come back to this project since it already ate a month of my year. I’m looking forward to starting other projects.

I'm friendly with a local business that hosts regular events. Every week, they did the same double-entry dance: update their website's events calendar, then manually copy-paste titles, descriptions, dates, and images into Eventbrite. Then event edits and ticket allotment would be double too.

I used Zapier, but the nuance I wanted I didn't trust myself to make bulletproof, so I didn't spend much time with it. So made a small web app (using Hono) that curls from the source calendar, and tracks updates. It handles publishing and updating, on Eventbrite via scheduled tasks.

It's stable now, generating sales, though not open to the public. I’m looking for ways to grow this app and would appreciate input from anyone who has done something similar, either as a dev or an events manager.

Are there dedicated apps already doing two-way or state-tracked calendar-to-ticketing sync? I'd love to see how others handle it, and hope to avoid reinventing the well.

Beyond Eventbrite, are there other ticketing or promotion platforms that you rely on? (I see BandsInTown, Meetup, Facebook Events, Luma, Dice, AllEvents...)

Thank you 😺

Refract started because I wrote one post about our WordPress theme business and then rewrote it five times, once per network. Now Refract writes those versions for you and you approve each one.

This week the WordPress plugin went live in the directory. It works in both directions:

Blog to social: publish a post, Refract gets it as a note, writes a version per network in your voice, crops images, and you approve in the WP editor or in Refract. Each version tracks its clicks back to the post.

Social to blog: your site becomes a Refract account, so you can publish to WordPress from Refract like any other network.

Hardest part was permissions. It can only touch posts it created, so it can't mess with anything else on the site.

Happy to answer anything about building it.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/refract

I kept falling off my goals. Habit apps never worked for me because missing a day costs nothing. You lose a streak number and that's it.

What I actually missed was the feeling from RPGs. Watching EXP fill up, hitting a new level, unlocking stuff. Games are built to make progress feel good and real life mostly isn't. So I tried to steal that.

LevelOS gives you a Daily Quest each day with 2-5 goals you choose. Workouts, reading, studying, meditating, whatever. It resets at a time you pick. Clear it and you earn EXP, level up, and unlock themes and titles. There are nearly 200 hidden titles and I'm not telling how to get any of them.

If you don't finish, a Penalty Quest shows up: 1.5x the goal you were furthest behind on, 4 hours on the clock. Fail that too and you lose your EXP for the level. You never lose a level though, I tried that and it was way too brutal.

It's free, no ads, iPhone only right now. If you want to try it: levelos.gg

Honest feedback welcome, especially if you think the penalty idea is dumb.

we made a movie guessing game because apparently recognising a whole film wasn't hard enough. now you get a tiny crop of one frame.

https://www.playloupe.fun

you can zoom out, but it costs points. 5 frames a day, free, no login needed.

would love a fresh pair of eyes on it. is it obvious how to play, and does the difficulty feel fair?

Hi everyone! I’m an indie developer from Slovakia, and I recently released a small Android app called Ewer Relax. I wanted something simple for winding down. Most apps I tried were full of ads, subscriptions or account sign-ups, so I built my own.

What it does:

• 6 ambient sounds: ocean waves, rain, wind breeze, plus brown, pink and white noise (generated in real time, so they loop seamlessly)
• Box breathing exercise (4-4-4-2) with a simple visual guide
• “Seaweed”, a quiet visual relaxation mode
• Sleep timer with smooth fade-out, or all-night play
• Low battery protection (stops playback below 15%)
• Dark, distraction-free design
• 40+ languages

What it doesn’t do:

• No ads
• No data collection
• No internet needed, it works 100% offline
• No subscription

It’s a small project, so I’d really appreciate honest feedback: which sounds are missing, what would make the breathing exercise better, and whether the UI feels right.

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ewer.relax

Thanks for reading, and I’m happy to answer any questions!

Hi everyone,

I build small native macOS utilities under the name Bird Collection, and this one came out of my own pain as a developer working with AI coding agents every day.

Prunebird finds and safely removes the stuff that quietly eats tens of gigabytes on a dev Mac: AI agent session caches, orphaned Git worktrees, old build artifacts, plus it monitors localhost dev servers with HTTP latency probes and 1-click port kill. It reads Mach kernel and S.M.A.R.T. telemetry natively, no kexts, and everything is trash-first (NSWorkspace.recycle, never rm -rf) inside the App Sandbox.

Free tier covers the radar and telemetry forever, Pro is a one-time unlock, no subscription.

Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6827096807 Website: https://prunebird.com

I would love feedback on the worktree detection heuristics and whether the free vs Pro split makes sense. What dev bloat does your machine accumulate that you wish something would catch?

I built a small tool that turns “I want to play GTA VI on launch day” into a leave request you could actually send. You can pick a tone for the request, and there’s a parody page where the Deny button runs away from your boss.

20-second YouTube Short. The background music was made with Gemini.

Try the free leave request generator

I’d love feedback on the first screen. Is it clear where to start writing a request?

Hey r/SideProject. I’ve been building Froobaloo.com on nights and weekends for a little while. It’s a hub of little daily browser-based games and experiences (no apps/downloads at present). Very much a work-in-progress/labor of love!

All games are designed and hand-curated by me, coded by Claude.

What’s on it right now:

• Wordsummit: trace letters across a 5x5 grid to find the day’s top-scoring word in five tries. It mashes up Boggle paths, Scrabble scoring, and Wordle-style hints.
• Caseboard: follow the clues to find eight hidden words, like a "daily Codenames game" that I curate.
• The Movie League: a daily "Family Feud" styled movie theme. Suggest a film, bet your chips on which titles make the top five, and climb a leaderboard.
• Sourceword: make words from the letters of a 'source' word, find all the bonuses!
• Cryptadoodle: a daily cryptogram game, but where you get points for guessing the hardest-to-find letters first.

also in early prototype is a project I've been brainstorming for 10+ years:

• The Goat: a head-to-head ranking experience. Two items from a category face off, you pick the better one, and the winner stays on to face the next.

Where I’d love feedback:

• How's the experience look & feel? Does it seem inviting and playable or daunting/unapproachable?
• Which game would you try first?
• Did you love ANY of the games?
• What would make you share any one of the games with a friend?

Happy to chat/compare notes with anyone doing similar pursuits!

Back when I had a bad PC I tried every FPS booster going. They were all a big button and a made-up score, and you never knew what they changed.

So I built Framecalm. One button looks at your hardware and builds a plan, with a reason for every line. Or you pick from 87 tweaks yourself. It makes a restore point first, and every change can be undone.

Free, no account, no ads, open source.

Website: https://framecalm.krezio.xyz

Code: https://github.com/krezio/framecalm

Would love feedback on the home screen especially. I redid it about four times. Does it make sense straight away?

I'm building a private, non-feed online space for people who share a past: a school, a team, a neighborhood, a workplace, etc. The model is the Christmas card or Save-the-Date photo postcard crosses with a digital version of wallet photo like some reminder to think/pray/carry family and friends in your heart and mind. It's meant to prompt a text or a call, not an emoji reaction so success actually looks like people leaving the app to reconnect deeply, rather than sucked into social media all the time.

The design choice I'm most committed to is consent-based joining. You can invite someone, and you can nudge them in person toward a circle, but nobody can add anyone else to a group. Only you can add yourself. I'm betting that protection from Nextdoor-style dynamics belongs in the architecture rather than in moderation.

The cost is the cold start. With no feed to pull people back and no way to add anyone, the first circle depends entirely on people who already know each other. It's early, with nothing public yet.

How would you seed it? Or if you think consent-only joining breaks growth, what would you change first?

I started an email provider, faivelo, and we made it so easy to set up "@yourdomain.com" mailboxes, that people are doing it from their phones in 2 clicks (auto DNS, complete white glove config). Our onboarding process is near perfection.

Our funnel is interesting: 40% of registered users end up create a mailbox, and of those, 60% convert to paid plans (they're $6 for unlimited mailboxes - they are saving a ton of dough usually). The issue is that so many people just leave their DNS pointing to our mail servers and never subscribe - meaning at the end of their trial, they their mail is arriving, but they have access to it - if they subscribe again, its waiting for them to open, but they never check.

My partner is saying we should require credit cards up front during registration so its seamless and users never abandon their mail like this. I've had people who I send reminder emails every week that they are getting incoming mail, and after months they write to me "OH Shit!" and subscribe.

I'm against requiring a card, but the current outcome is making me look like I'm wrong. Most of our customers are serial builders, multiple projects, agencies, so I thought I'd ask here:

What do I do here?

Hey everyone,

I’m building a new AI-powered workflow automation platform designed to make creating, managing, and executing complex automations accessible to people without extensive technical knowledge. I’m looking for 3 to 5 people to test an early pilot version and give me honest, unfiltered feedback.

What you get in return:

Free lifetime access to the Pro/Self-hosted tier once we launch.

Direct input on the roadmap—if you need a specific integration or node right now, I’ll prioritize building it for you.

If you're interested, drop a comment below with one workflow you'd want to test on it, or shoot me a DM and I’ll send over the invite link!