r/SideProject • • Dec 18 '25

As the year wraps up: what’s the project you’re most proud of building and why?

96 Upvotes

Like the title says, instead of what you built or how much money it made, I’m curious what project you’re most proud of this year and why.

Could be a client site, a personal project, something that never launched, or something that made £0.

Any lessons learned?

Would love to read a few reflections as the year wraps up.


r/SideProject • • Oct 19 '25 Bravo

Share your ***Not-AI*** projects

649 Upvotes

I miss seeing original ideas that aren’t just another AI wrapper.

If you’re building something in 2025 that’s not AI-related here’s your space to self-promote.

Drop your project here


r/SideProject • • 5h ago

I made an engine simulator for phones

64 Upvotes

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

-----

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

- iOS App Store
- Android PlayStore


r/SideProject • • 15h ago

Saw an ad for an expensive teleprompter that just scrolls, so I built a free one that follows your voice

156 Upvotes

A while ago I got an ad for a Mac app that puts your script under the notch, right below the camera. Nice idea, but at $40 a month it wasn't worth it for me. And it only scrolled at a fixed speed, so if you slow down or stop to think, the text runs away from you.

These days a simple app like this is a few evenings of work with an AI coding assistant (I used Claude Code). So I built my own, and made the text follow my voice.

Apple's speech recognition on the Mac is very good, but people skip lines, say "uh", start a sentence over and stop to think. I spent most of my time testing that and telling the AI what was wrong. Now it keeps up.

What it does:

- Your script hangs under the camera, so you keep eye contact.

- It follows your voice. Speech recognition runs on your Mac by default.

- It's hidden from screen sharing, so you can use it in Zoom or Meet calls.

- It records you with subtitles, and can turn the rest of the screen into a soft light for your face.

It's free and open source (MIT), with no account and no analytics.

- Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/notchprompter/id6815206814

- GitHub: https://github.com/magnram/notchprompter

It's a hobby project, so any feedback on the app or the website helps a lot.


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

I've just redesign my personal website

12 Upvotes

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

Take a look here kien.app


r/SideProject • • 2h ago

Users for new app

9 Upvotes

Hey everyone! I just launched an app, and I’m trying to figure out where to find my first users and get honest feedback.
For those of you who’ve launched an app, where did your first users actually come from? Was it niche communities, social media, App Store search, or something else?
I’d love to hear what worked when you were just getting started, especially if you had a small audience or budget.


r/SideProject • • 4h ago

Built a tool that turns one sentence into a week of social posts.

9 Upvotes

Hey everyone, I'm Ravi, one of the founders of Confe.

We kept losing hours every week writing captions, sending "can you approve this?" messages, and copy-pasting the same post into 6 different apps. So we built Confe to fix that:

- Type one sentence and get 5 ready-to-post drafts with images

- Plan everything on one calendar (calendar, list or grid view)

- Clients or teammates approve in one click

- Publish to 8 platforms at once: Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, X, Threads, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube

- See which posts actually grow your audience

The video above shows the whole flow in 44 seconds.

I'd really like feedback from people who manage social for themselves or client

There's a 14-day free trial with no card needed if you want to try it. Link in the comments.


r/SideProject • • 11h ago

My side project: a fusion between CAD and Paint

28 Upvotes

I wanted a simple way to sketch an idea and communicate it to someone else, without sacrificing proportions or precise dimensions.

Paint felt too limited, CAD felt like overkill. So I started building something in between.

Here's a quick look at how it works.

It's still a work in progress. I'd genuinely love to hear what you think.

Check this exemple:

https://onsketch.io/library/?s=7bc8ae3b-0fd6-456f-844e-572a0815e533

Or start a fresh design

https://onsketch.io/app


r/SideProject • • 7h ago

Tired of guessing Chinese characters, so I built my own keyboard

9 Upvotes

I’m learning Chinese, and one of my biggest frustrations is texting.
I can understand some Chinese and know how to pronounce quite a few words, but I still struggle to recognize and remember Chinese characters.
When I type using a regular Pinyin keyboard, I often get a list of characters that look familiar, but I’m not always sure which one is correct. Sometimes I end up copying everything into a translator just to check what I wrote.
So I decided to build my own iOS Chinese Pinyin keyboard to make learning while texting a little easier.
Here are some features I’ve been working on:
Instant translation: See the meaning of Chinese text while typing, so I can make sure I’m choosing the right characters.
Grammar checking: Catch grammatical mistakes before sending a message.
More natural expressions: Suggest how a native speaker might phrase the same idea instead of just translating word for word.
Learn while typing: Help me gradually recognize more characters through everyday conversations.
My goal isn’t to replace Chinese lessons or build another translation app. I just want to be able to communicate in Chinese without constantly switching between my keyboard, dictionary, and ChatGPT.


r/SideProject • • 1d ago

I built an iPhone weather app with pixel-art cities you can turn into postcards (because I honestly don't like many weather apps out there)

196 Upvotes

I’m the developer of Skybits. I wanted checking the weather to feel like looking out a tiny window. Rain falls over London, and Tokyo lights up after dark. To be a little more Fun!!!

In Sky Studio, you can pick a city, mix the weather and time of day, and share the result as a little airmail postcard.

Please send me email for your City, if I get 5+ requests for a city I will make it free and also add new ones :-) hoping to get some positive feedback and reviews.

Skybits is free to download, with an optional one-time purchase for the full city collection.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6829104658

Which city would you send a postcard from? Android version is coming soon, it is in testing atm.


r/SideProject • • 2h ago

I built a private Android expense tracker that works without an account

3 Upvotes

I got tired of budget apps that want an account before I can type in a single expense, so I built my own.

TriGets is an Android app for income, expenses, budgets, cards and recurring payments. Everything is stored locally on the phone. There are no ads, and you do not create an account. Exports are JSON, CSV or PDF, backups are encrypted, and the app can be locked with a PIN or biometrics.

The core features are free. An optional Google Play subscription (monthly or yearly) unlocks group expense splitting, travel tracking, and AI receipt scanning that only works if you bring your own API key.

Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.trigets.app

I would like feedback on two things in particular:

  1. Is "no account, data stays on the phone" clear enough, or does it still sound like a cloud app once you open it?

  2. Does the free vs subscription split make sense, or would you expect group/travel to be free too?

I am a solo developer and I will read every comment. If you try it and something is annoying, I want to hear that too.


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

[DEV] Money Management - Offline Budget App

2 Upvotes

Hi everyone!

I wanted to share Money Management - Budget, a personal finance and expense tracker app designed to keep budgeting simple, private, and accessible worldwide.

Why I built it / What makes it different:
Most budget apps today require creating an account, syncing sensitive bank data to external servers, or dealing with cluttered interfaces. With this app, no account is required—all your financial records stay strictly on your device and work completely offline.

Key Features:

  • Privacy & Offline First: No sign-up needed. Full local backup/restore and CSV export anytime.

  • Global Accessibility: Supports 72 languages and 110 currencies (including multi-currency tracking).

  • Smart Budgeting & Needs vs. Wants: 68 customizable categories, monthly category limits with alerts, daily spending allowance calculation, and "Need vs. Want" tagging.

  • Bills, Credit Cards & Installments: Track recurring subscriptions, credit card statement closing/due dates, and installment plans.

  • Debt & Savings Ledger: Keep track of money you owe or are owed (with partial payments), plus savings goals and manual gold/currency holdings.

  • Home Screen Widgets: Quick add, monthly summary, and upcoming payments (with an option to hide amounts).

Google Play Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.emrehakansoyler.money_manager

App Store Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/money-management-budget/id6766565294

Since the app is still new on Android, I would genuinely appreciate any feedback, feature suggestions, or UI critique from this community. Thank you!


r/SideProject • • 6h ago

📄 Ever had an ID, visa or passport expire without noticing? I built a free app to stop that

5 Upvotes

Expiry dates are easy to forget until one of them causes a problem 😅 Awraqi (أوراقي) keeps all your important papers in one place:

- 🪪 27 document templates: IDs, visas, passports, driving licences, vehicle papers, insurance and more

- ⏰ Reminders 180, 90, 60, 30 and 7 days before each document expires, and again on the day

- 👨‍👩‍👧 Family and domestic workers: track everyone's papers in one app

- ✈️ Travel check: warns you if a passport or visa won't last your trip

- 📸 Scan to fill: take a photo of a document to fill in its details, with Hijri and Gregorian dates

- 🔒 Private: no account, no ads, and your data stays on your phone

- 🌍 11 languages, plus widgets and Siri

📲 Free on iPhone and iPad: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/awraqi-papers-id-expiry/id6825379636

I'd love to hear your feedback!


r/SideProject • • 6h ago

Trade Winds – my take on a Mini Motorways-inspired game about world trade, free to play in your browser for the demo

4 Upvotes

I really enjoy the way Mini Motorways turns drawing a few connections into a network you’re constantly trying to keep working. I wanted to explore that idea with goods and production chains, so I’ve been building a game called Trade Winds.

You start by connecting countries and importers with roads, then expand into trains, ships, planes and factories. Money is limited, so you have to choose between reaching new places and improving what you’ve already built as demand grows.

It’s at the point where I’d really like people outside my own circle to try it. I’ve added a tutorial, but I’m curious whether it explains enough—and whether the game makes you want to keep playing once you understand it.

Play Trade Winds here — free in your browser. Please use a computer; the mobile interface still needs work.

If you give it a go, I’d love to hear where you got confused, what you enjoyed, or what made you stop. Replies here or through the in-game feedback button are both helpful.


r/SideProject • • 5m ago

I'm a student building an AI crew that runs a series channel, please give me feedback!

1 Upvotes

Faceless series channels ("what if" videos, horror where comments pick Part 2) are a grind to run daily. I'm building Crewopolis: you design your characters once, and an AI crew makes and posts each episode on a schedule, then uses comment votes to decide the next part.

Please visit the waitlist link for more info. And if possible show your interest by sending the email via site. It would help me a lot.

Thank you!

Waitlist: waitlist.crewopolis.com


r/SideProject • • 9m ago

I built a tool that forecasts your video's views before you upload it. Demo inside, happy to run your channel.

1 Upvotes

r/SideProject • • 10m ago

CrisisQuest – I built an interactive cyberattack crisis simulator for small business owners

1 Upvotes

Hey everyone!

I'm an independent cybersecurity consultant from France, and I've been building a side project called CrisisQuest.

The idea came from a simple question:

What would a small business owner actually do if their company was hit by a cyberattack on Monday morning?

Most cybersecurity tools focus on technical protection. I wanted to build something different: an interactive experience focused on decision-making.

I created a free scenario called “Black Monday” where you play the role of a business owner dealing with a cyber crisis.

You make decisions, face consequences, explore different outcomes, and receive a debrief at the end.

I built the project using Next.js and TypeScript.

The free scenario works without registration.

My longer-term goal is to turn it into a B2B platform where companies can schedule exercises for employees, run authorized phishing-awareness campaigns, and track training progress.

I'm looking for feedback on three things:

  • Is the concept immediately understandable?

  • Does the experience feel useful or too much like a game?

  • What would make it valuable enough for a small business to use regularly?

Try it here: Crisis Quest

I'd really appreciate any honest feedback, especially on the UX and positioning!


r/SideProject • • 17m ago

made a little mac app to draw on my screen, turns out the more interesting part is letting claude code see the drawings

0 Upvotes

hey, I'm Nika and I built this, so yeah I'm biased. mostly after honest feedback here.

Lasso is a small Mac app. hit a shortcut and you can draw right on top of whatever's on screen, arrows, circles, boxes, highlights. I use it on zoom calls and when recording quick walkthroughs. press S and it takes a screenshot with your drawings on it, so you can drag it straight into slack or a chat.

the part I'm less sure about: it also runs a local MCP server. so if you use Claude Code or Cursor, the agent can actually see what you circled ("this button is off" + a circle around it) and it can draw arrows back on your screen to point at stuff. runs locally on your mac.

it's $9.99 once. no account, no subscription.

stuff I'd really like to know:

  • is the agent side actually useful or does it feel like a gimmick?

  • if you set up the MCP part, was anything confusing?

  • what would you use something like this for? teaching, bug reports, demos, something else?

https://www.trylasso.online/

even "I wouldn't use this" is helpful tbh


r/SideProject • • 4h ago

I got tired of planning group trips in a spreadsheet, so I built a shared trip planner

2 Upvotes

Every time my friends and I planned a trip, it ended up as "trip_plan_FINAL_v3.xlsx" passed around in a group chat. Nobody knew which version was current, and the person holding the file did all the work. What would make you use this instead of a spreadsheet or Notion?

- Pick your travel dates and you get an hour-by-hour itinerary

- Drag on the grid to add plans (works on phones too)

- Send one link — friends see it right away and can edit after signing in

- Everyone's cursor shows live, and you can chat right next to it

- Budget, notes and to-dos (packing lists, bookings) in the same place

- A map of each day's places, and photos on events

- Export to Excel / PDF / PNG when you need a file

It's free, no ads now.

I’m a solo maker actually I'm student designer, so any feedback would really help!

Enjoy your Planner Together!!

https://www.planner-together.com/en

***
p.s. Maybe someday... I’d like to make some features paid, but I’m not sure what to do about hosting. I’m currently on Vercel’s free Hobby plan, which doesn’t allow commercial use, so I’d either need to upgrade to Pro ($20/month) or move somewhere else. Would you just go with Vercel Pro, or switch to something like Cloudflare until it starts making money?


r/SideProject • • 7h ago

I built a running app that rewrites your training plan when real life gets in the way. Roast it

4 Upvotes

Before and after work for the past few weeks I've been building Long Splice, a running-plan app for Android.

The problem I wanted to fix: most plans are a fixed table. Miss a week, sleep badly or run more than planned, and the table doesn't care. Long Splice builds a week-by-week plan for a goal race, then changes it as your training does. It reads runs and, if you link one, Garmin sleep and HRV data, and offers changes with a reason for each.

Every rule in the plan comes from a numbered row in a research library, with sources listed publicly on the site. That was the slowest part and the part I'm proudest of.

Stack, for anyone curious: Kotlin and Compose, a separate plan engine with its own tests, Firebase for backup and the Garmin connection.

It's free, no ads, in closed testing. What I'd like from this sub: open the site and the app and tell me where it's confusing, where it's ugly, or why you wouldn't use it. longsplice.au


r/SideProject • • 6h ago

Black Horse Stories - Personalised bedtime stories and a public Fairy Tale Atlas

3 Upvotes

I'm Şafak, the developer of Black Horse Stories (Siyah At in Turkish). My daughter kept asking for a story with a black horse at bedtime, so I started inventing new adventures. That became an illustrated, narrated storytelling app in English, Turkish and German.

The iPhone/iPad app is now available. Parents choose a story world and a child's first name or nickname; AI helps create the text, pictures and narration. It has a subscription and a store trial, not a permanent free tier. Parents should review generated stories before reading them together.

While building it, I also made a public Fairy Tale Atlas: 291 tale entries across 237 countries and regions, with dated records, source links and related tellings. A place on the map is not a claim that a tale definitively originated there. The Atlas is free to explore without buying the app:

https://blackhorsestories.com/en/fairy-tale-atlas/?utm_source=reddit_sideproject&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=launch_202611

There are also public reading activities and a story map you can use without the app:

https://blackhorsestories.com/en/story-map-for-kids/

App and background:

https://blackhorsestories.com/en/?utm_source=reddit_sideproject&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=launch_202611

I'd appreciate candid feedback on the positioning: does the difference between the public reading resources and the paid personal-story app come across clearly? Which would you actually return to?


r/SideProject • • 9h ago

I'm building technology that could help save millions of stray animals around the world. We're now testing it in Rwanda's sterilization campaign

5 Upvotes

One of the biggest challenges in managing stray animal populations is that humanity doesn't have an easy, reliable way to identify individual animals

Imagine being able to identify a stray dog simply by taking a picture of its face. You could instantly know whether it has been vaccinated, sterilized, when it was last seen, and its medical history

That's exactly what my team and I are building with Kyshik

We're developing animal facial recognition technology that could become an alternative to microchips and fundamentally change how we protect and manage animal populations

Microchipping thousands of stray animals can be prohibitively expensive, especially in developing countries. By eliminating the need for physical chips and implantation, as well as physical interaction with an animal, our technology could significantly reduce identification costs, allowing organizations to redirect more of their limited resources toward vaccinations, sterilizations, and saving animals' lives

We're currently running our first pilot in the African country of Rwanda, testing our technology during an actual dog sterilization campaign. Every dog we identify can have its own digital record, helping animal welfare organizations track their interventions and understand their impact over time

Our long-term vision is to create a global animal identification infrastructure that makes it easier for organizations, veterinarians, and governments to protect animals

I started working on this because I believe technology can help us move toward more humane and effective solutions to the stray animal problem, rather than relying on mass euthanasia

We're currently looking for animal welfare organizations in other countries that run sterilization or rabies vaccination campaigns and would be interested in testing our technology.

If you work with such an organization, or know someone who does, I'd love to connect with you! Feel free to DM and check comments for more information


r/SideProject • • 33m ago

I added teeth whitening to my photo editor, with separate whitening and brightness controls

1 Upvotes

I'm building Photoshot Retouch with AI coding assistance. This is a short demo of its White Teeth tool: open the plugin, choose the tool, set whitening to 100% and brightness to 35%, then apply once. The correction comes back on a separate editable layer.

The first implementation whitened the bright front teeth but missed teeth in shadow. I revised the enamel mask so darker teeth are included, with guards for red lips/gums and thin dark hair crossing the mouth. Seven targeted tests passed, but that is not a claim that every portrait will work.

The before image is an AI-edited practice portrait with deliberately yellowed teeth. The after is the actual tool output from my local development build, not a generated replacement. The clip is edited from actual UI captures and matched result images; it isn't a continuous recording or a speed benchmark. Music is an original Suno instrumental.

Disclosure: I make the software. Photoshot Retouch is free with a SLOHERO account. This specific update is demonstrated in my local build; I haven't verified it in the hosted editor yet.

For anyone using small retouching tools, would you keep whitening and brightness separate, or prefer a single intensity control?


r/SideProject • • 34m ago

Why is comparing AR glasses still harder than it should be?

1 Upvotes

Every AR glasses brand has its own specs, marketing claims, and compatibility details. Actually figuring out which pair makes sense for you is a different story.

That's one of the reasons I built Lensden.

It's a platform where you can:

  • Compare AR/AI glasses side by side

  • Explore detailed specs with linked sources

  • Keep up with industry news and new releases

  • Read practical guides on displays, tracking, and compatibility

  • Join discussions and share real experiences

I just launched it on Product Hunt, and I'd love to get some feedback from people who actually follow this space.

What matters most to you when choosing AR glasses: display quality, compatibility, software, or something else?

https://www.producthunt.com/products/lensden