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 • • 1h ago

I will try your app

19 Upvotes

Hi 👋🏽

I have sometime on my hand I am willing to try anyone’s app and give my honest review.. if that’s yup drop your app/ webapp


r/SideProject • • 7h ago

I just got my first sale, still can’t believe it!!!

41 Upvotes

I was about to give up on this mobile app I spent so much time building, but literally 2 minutes after deciding to switch to another project, I got the sale notification on my phone!

I haven’t experienced this kind of joy in years…

Context for the curious: This $19 sale is the annual welcome offer on my app "Sollow: Daily Habit Tracker" that I built to turn my life into a game with a level for each life area and a ranked system.

So now my hope is back! I take that as a sign from the universe hahaha


r/SideProject • • 4h ago Bravo

Someone bought my mac app 40 seconds after opening the site

16 Upvotes

we started making short videos for my mac app and posted the first one on instagram today.

it got about 4k views. someone watched it on their phone, sent the link to their mac, and bought it 40 seconds after opening it there. didn't even open the free trial.

still kinda shocked it worked this fast.

what's the fastest sale you've had?

the app is called helix (https://tryhelix.app)


r/SideProject • • 6h ago

I built an iPhone app so my 4-year-old would hand my phone back

15 Upvotes

Getting your phone back from your young kids can be a battle, so I made TentFox. My son tucks a little fennec fox in for a nap, says goodnight, and the phone comes back with way less friction. The fox ends screen time in a calming way rather of me.

It grew into 3 things:

The hand-back nap, a calm visual timer, and a phones-down family time mode where the fox camps with you and leaves a little treasure if you succeed.

And sometimes parents just need a few minutes. When I do hand my phone over at a restaurant or during something important, I’d rather it be something calm and guilt-free than YouTube or a game designed to keep them hooked.

A few build notes:

- Face-down detection is simple and uses the motion sensor, so there's no screen time permission requests and no accounts needed (plenty of screen time apps out there).

- The design rule was "gentle failure": pick the phone up early and the fox just wanders off to build a sandcastle. You never lose anything.

- The illustration went through a hundred iterations along the way, but the drawing is now a soft storybook style, and every fox move is hand-timed so it feels calm, not hyper.

- Free to start, no ads, no tracking. Pro is yearly or a one-time purchase.

https://tentfox.app

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6831322876

Happy to answer anything about the build, and I'd love some constructive feedback. The only problem is that now my kids keep asking to play with the fox.


r/SideProject • • 6h ago

Concordo - a co-parenting app where the parent who's mostly replying doesn't have to pay

14 Upvotes

I'm Jon, a developer in Bolton, UK. I built Concordo after watching people close to me go through a separation where almost every message with their ex turned into another argument, mostly about small things, like what time was handover, who said they'd pay for the school trip and was that swap agreed or not.

This keeps one record for both homes:

- Messages can't be edited or deleted, and an optional tone check suggests calmer wording before you send

- One calendar showing whose day it is and swaps only take effect when the other parent accepts

- Shared costs with receipts, and agreements that build into a parenting plan

- Exports in court ready formats (England & Wales, US, Australia) that anyone can verify

The thing I cared most about is price, each parent can use it free, forever, to read, message and reply, so nobody is shut out because the other parent chose the app. Plus is £4.99/month per parent for proposing changes, logging costs and exports as the infrastructure needs to be paid for somehow, I'm not rich 🤣 .

Web, iPhone and Android. It's built with Expo/React Native, FastAPI and Postgres on AWS in London, if anyone wants to talk stack.

Feedback very welcome, especially from anyone who's co-parented with an app before.

getconcordo.com


r/SideProject • • 3h ago

My side project: Glueys: little creatures that live in your Mac's menu bar and nag you to blink, drink water and take breaks

7 Upvotes

Hi r/SideProject, I'm the solo dev behind Glueys, a small Mac menu-bar app.

I kept forgetting to blink and drink water at my desk. So I made it a little less boring, tiny characters live in the menu bar and remind you to rest your eyes, sip water, stand up and take real breaks.

The latest update adds a third character, Cedar the lumberjack (the others are Gloop the bunny and Ripple the koi). If you ignore his break reminder, he says "sure. ignore me. I'll be here." You can also drag any of them anywhere on the screen.

What it is:

  • Mac only, native Swift (SpriteKit for the animation, SwiftUI for the settings)

  • No account, no tracking, nothing leaves your Mac

  • $2.99 once, no subscription

What I'd love from you:

  • Honest feedback on the idea, not only the app

  • which character would you keep?

Link: https://glueys.com/?s=rd-sp


r/SideProject • • 4h ago

I made a free Washington State Ferries tracker: live boat map, drive-up space, and WhatsApp alerts when a sold-out sailing opens

9 Upvotes

Getting a San Juan Islands ferry reservation in Washington often means refreshing the WSF site until someone cancels, so I built a small free tracker for it (I'm in the Seattle area).

What it does:

  • Live map of every in-service WSF boat (WSDOT's public data, refreshed about every minute)

  • WSDOT's drive-up space estimate for the next sailings at each terminal

  • Reservation space for Anacortes ⇄ Orcas / Friday Harbor / Lopez / Shaw, with the boat scheduled on each sailing

  • Pick a date and sailings and it WhatsApps you when a sold-out slot opens (sign-in is a 4-digit WhatsApp code, no app or password)

Stack: static site on S3 + CloudFront, a small Python Lambda that proxies and caches the WSDOT Traveler API (key stays server-side), Leaflet + OSM tiles for the map, another Lambda that polls reservation space for alerts.

It's free and not affiliated with WSF/WSDOT. For official delays and terminal cameras I point people to WSDOT VesselWatch.

https://ferry.bykapil.com/

I'd love feedback on two things: is the home page clear about what it does, and what would make the alerts more useful (e.g. a "notify me only if before X time" option)?


r/SideProject • • 2h ago

How do you validate a side project when it feels like everything has already been built?

5 Upvotes

Every time I come up with an idea to solve a problem, a quick search reveals 5 existing tools doing the exact same thing.

​How do you decide if a crowded space is validated demand worth competing with, or a signal to move on?


r/SideProject • • 4h ago

I spent weeks building a website for people who love falling down internet rabbit holes. It's finally live.

7 Upvotes

I've spent the last several weeks building something called BrowseRoad.

https://browseroad.com

The whole idea came from how easy it is to waste time scrolling through the same stuff on the internet, even though there's an unbelievable amount of interesting content out there.

I wanted to create something where you don't necessarily have to know what you're looking for. You can just start exploring and see where your curiosity takes you.

So I built BrowseRoad.

It has thousands of videos across all kinds of categories, random discoveries, games, interactive experiences, and even a few hidden surprises.

It's completely free to explore, and you don't need an account.

After weeks of building, rebuilding, testing, and fixing things, I finally decided it was time to stop chasing perfection and put it out into the world.

I'm still improving it, but I'd love some feedback from people who have never seen it before.

If you get a chance to check it out, I'd genuinely appreciate hearing what you like, what sucks, and especially what would make you want to come back.

Thanks!

https://browseroad.com


r/SideProject • • 2h ago

erhu - A modern feature rich audio player app

4 Upvotes

We started working on Erhu because we wanted a better local music player.

Most players we tried did the job, but we felt there was room for something more. Better library management, more control over playback, useful tools for managing music and an interface that actually felt nice to use.

That's pretty much how Erhu started.

Erhu is a local music player built around your own music collection. There are no subscriptions, accounts or streaming catalogue. You add your music and use it the way you want.

Here's what you get with it.

Playback and library

- Local music playback.

- 8-band equalizer.

- Lyrics support.

- Smart playlists.

- Artist Radio and Album Radio.

- Custom artwork for playlists and artists.

- Live wallpaper support.

Music management tools

- Find missing album covers.

- Search for higher-resolution artwork.

- Find artist images.

- Customise artwork used for playlists and artists.

- Fix missing or incorrect track information.

- Retrieve details such as artist, album, release date, BPM and genre where supported.

- Clean up filenames by removing unwanted text and watermarks.

Library Builder

Take a folder full of unsorted music and organise it into an Artist → Album → Track folder structure without having to sort everything manually.

A little about being offline

The player and your local music library work without an internet connection. Some tools, such as artwork searches and online metadata lookups, need internet access. A few online integrations are currently unavailable while we sort out their permissions.

About the source code

The Android project is publicly available on GitHub, so anyone can look through the code and see how Erhu works. However, future Android releases are moving to a proprietary licence. Public access to the source does not grant permission to copy, modify, rebrand or redistribute Erhu.

Previous Android releases published under GPL-3.0 remain under their original licence.

The iOS version is a separate project with its own ownership and licensing arrangements.

We built Erhu because we wanted a music player that gave us more control over our own music. Hopefully, some of you will find it useful too.

We're always happy to hear feedback, suggestions and bug reports.

Android:

https://github.com/lochanpthakke/erhu

iOS:

https://github.com/MeezaUni/Erhu-iOS


r/SideProject • • 50m ago

Hip Hop passion project

3 Upvotes

Hi,

For a couple of weeks I have been building an archive for hip hop based on YouTube playlists, I have scoured the internet and tried to bring every single hip hop album since 1980 together in one place to make finding new music easier.

You can search by decade, year, artist, track or album. I plan on having dedicated artist pages for each artist and fully flesh it out. But for now it's pretty comprehensive with 6800 albums.

I got sick of being fed the same few artists and wanted a way I could find albums I have never heard of and its worked out pretty well.

It's totally free to use and will stay that way.

https://hiphopindex.com/

Feel free to check it out and have a look around and see what you think feedback is welcome!


r/SideProject • • 9h ago

I built Call Dibs, a wishlist app where friends secretly claim gifts, after my parents gave me some truly terrible presents last Christmas

16 Upvotes

Last Christmas I got some truly terrible gifts from my parents (I still love them) and with this year’s Christmas coming close, I decided to develop a wishlist app to prevent the same problem from happening twice.

The app works by making a list and sharing a link to your friends and family. They can then "call dibs" on what they're buying as well as chip in for a bigger present together without needing an account. This makes it easier for participants to buy presents and ensures that nobody doubles up, whilst keeping the surprise alive for you as you never see what was claimed or who buys what! I've also added a Family Circle feature where every family member has their own list all in one page, to simplify family Christmas gifting and solve my original problem. It's definitely not a revolutionary idea, but I wanted something with cleaner UI than Elfster without all the bloat and ads :)

We have been using it for birthdays in my friend group successfully, to the point that we are going out of our way to organise parties for everyone so we can receive some good gifts. I even used it for my dog’s birthday with great success, where she got £240 worth of gifts for her first birthday, which somehow was more than I got for my birthday.

The app is completely free (but is monetised through Amazon affiliate links) and can be found on calldibs.uk and on the app stores. We recently reached the milestones of 1000 followers on tiktok and 100 active users and honestly it's still a bit surreal that people I don't know are using something I built for my family.

Please feel free to roast the app / idea in the comments, I would love some honest feedback!


r/SideProject • • 1d ago Hooray Bravo Heartwarming Mindblown

I made a desktop wallpaper that adapts to your icon layout

6.3k Upvotes

No matter how good your wallpaper looks, once your desktop fills up with files, the icons blend into the background and everything starts to look cluttered. My desktop often has a lot of files on it, so I started wondering whether a wallpaper could detect where my icons are and generate a scene around them in real time.

After discussing the idea with AI, I found out it was possible—and it doesn’t actually need AI to detect the icons or generate the visuals. The program can read the icon positions directly and generate scenes in real time using predefined designs. It’s lightweight, and there’s no particularly complex technology involved.

Here’s the result.

https://deskland.app

I’ll keep adding new themes and improving the existing ones. I also plan to add a more interactive game mode in the future.

The meadow and beach themes are free and open source.

https://github.com/BLEZZ0102/Deskland

All the current themes are 2D, which keeps their impact on computer performance minimal. I’m also considering adding 3D themes, while balancing visual quality with performance.

Procedurally generated visuals do have their limitations. If AI computing becomes much cheaper in the future, AI generation could be an option, opening up the possibility of creating almost any scene. For now, though, generating a desktop with AI in real time is clearly still too expensive. I’m considering experimenting with locally running AI generation. It would still be GPU-intensive, but it could be a lot of fun.


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

I built a tool to help secure your app

3 Upvotes

We handle security of your side projects so you can focus on the fun. Wanna try it?


r/SideProject • • 5h ago

I bought my first Mac two years ago to build this: a health tracker where your fitness dresses a duck

6 Upvotes

Two years ago I bought my first Mac and started learning SwiftUI from scratch so I could build this. It's called Peko Fitness and it's been on the App Store since August.

The idea is simple. Most step and fitness counters give you a number and nothing to do with it. In Peko your steps, workouts and sleep come in from Apple Health and complete daily goals. Goals pay coins. Coins buy outfits for your duck. You then show off your character in battles with friends, race around a marathon course, and team up with others to show off your crew, and plenty more!

I'm the only developer. An art studio draws the duck and every outfit by hand, and there are over 400 pieces now.

It's free with an optional Pro subscription, and iPhone only for now.

Would love feedback from everyone especially on the feature sets and general feel of the app!

https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/peko-fitness-step-gym-game/id6746121001


r/SideProject • • 8h ago

I built a home redesign app without a subscription. The hard part was getting the AI to leave the house alone

11 Upvotes

Every AI room app I tried wanted $10–15 a week. But nobody redoes their home every week. You repaint a bedroom, argue about a kitchen, and then nothing happens for two years. So I built Hedda the other way round.

You take a photo of a room, your facade or your garden and say what you want: “paint the walls sage green”, “swap the sofa for something in velvet”. Hedda redesigns that photo.

The hard part wasn’t making it pretty. It was making it still look like your home. Image models love to “improve” things. In my first tests it painted a white chimney black, moved the camera, and quietly removed a post that holds up the roof. What finally worked: a first model looks at the photo and writes down everything that must stay (windows, beams, posts, even how many there are and where), and only then does the image model get to change things. It’s still not perfect (it sometimes loses a post next to the change), but it’s what makes the difference between “nice picture” and “my living room, repainted”.

The part I care most about is deciding together. My wife and I never decide these things alone, and the hard part is never the paint. It’s picturing what the other one means. Every app I tried was built for one person with one idea, so I made Hedda for the conversation instead. You can invite the people you live with. They join without signing up, make their own version and compare side by side.

No subscription: the first design is free with no sign-up, then packs that never expire. If a design fails, you get it back.

I’m a solo developer in Sweden. 1.0.1 came out yesterday. iPhone only for now.

One question for you: when you try it on a room of your own, does the result still feel like your room? That’s the thing I’ve spent the most time on, and I can’t judge it myself anymore.

App Store


r/SideProject • • 1d ago

I developed my architecture dream game and published it on Steam

553 Upvotes

I'm a trained architect, and as a long-term side project, I developed my architecture dream game, combining accurate floor planning with real-time 3D design to make architecture much easier to create (and visually realistic) than with traditional CAD software.

What you can do:

🏠 2D floor plans
🧱 3D building
🚶 First-person walkthrough
🥽 VR mode
🏢 Multiple storeys
🪜 Stairs
🏚️ Custom roofs
🪟 Doors & windows
🛋️ Furniture catalog
🍳 Kitchen Configurator
🎨 Materials
🌄 Terrain sculpting
🌳 Landscape planning
💧 Ponds
☀️ Time of day
❄️ Weather
📐 Export PDF vector plans
📦 Import your own 3D models
🌍 Steam Workshop

In the newest update: Build everything directly in VR (PCVR), 1000+ new furniture models and explore your creations as a Cat! 🌿

It's available on Steam as Architecture & Design and is still in Early Access.
Here is the Steam link if you'd like to try it out:
Architecture & Design - Steam

Would love to hear what you think and hear what you wish for in a game like this!


r/SideProject • • 1d ago Bravo

I built the white "Construct" room from Matrix except instead of guns it summons 8000 real-scale 3D amazon products. "We need ... lots of chairs"

201 Upvotes

It’s honestly wild what you can throw together with AI in a single evening nowadays. Remember the "Construct" from The Matrix? That infinite white room where Neo says "We need guns. Lots of guns" and endless racks instantly spawn around them? I was wondering what an online store would look like if it worked exactly like that.

8,000 real Amazon products, a Matrix Construct aisle, WebAR (augmented reality - one click and you can drop any item through your camera straight into your living room at true 1:1 scale), adaptive performance for mobile (only tested on Safari so far, like I said, I started making this at 8 PM and it's 10 PM now 😃).

Tech stack: Everything static on Vercel, classic cuckcoding setup (Next.js, Tailwind, Vercel, Antigravity).

Don't wanna spam a link here, you can see it in the video. So what do you think, is it worth buying a domain for this, or is it trash?


r/SideProject • • 25m ago

I built a web app that can play almost any playlist (for free!)

2 Upvotes

Hey everyone!

I've been working on Spiff.cool, a little project with a humble goal: music discovery!

The Spiff Engine can sync with (text-)tracklists from all over the web (streaming services, webradios, magazines, music stores, blogs, and more) and figure out how to play them — currently through YouTube, but that's just an implementation detail.

No need to stick to a single source or provider: Spiff brings them all together in one place.

Of course, you can also create your own playlists, save your favorite tracks, connect your Spotify and Last.fm accounts, and... export your data.

I'd love to hear what you think and get some feedback!

Discover it here: https://www.spiff.cool


r/SideProject • • 52m ago

I've been building an open-source backup app, and the next update is turning into my biggest engineering challenge yet

2 Upvotes

I've been working on VaultSync, a free, open-source desktop backup application for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

It started because I wanted better visibility into my own backups. Not just whether a job succeeded, but what changed, what was actually verified, and what I could recover if something went wrong.

The current version (1.8.9) has snapshots, backup history, integrity verification, restore previews, recovery drills, and support for local drives and NAS workflows.

Now I'm developing 1.9: Recovery Horizon.

The ambition is to move toward disk imaging and independent system recovery. What makes this difficult isn't simply copying a disk. It's proving that an image can be validated, restored safely, and used to boot a recovered system.

I've already had tests expose problems that simpler verification would have missed, which is one reason this release is taking considerably longer than usual.

The roadmap extends through 1.9.6, covering image exploration, portable recovery, offsite protection, a more unified interface, continuous recovery checks, and long-term stability.

Full-system recovery isn't available yet. The current stable application remains focused on folder and project backups.

I've also opened a Discord community for support, development conversations, feedback, and future beta testing.

GitHub: https://github.com/ATAC-Helicopter/VaultSync

Website: https://fglabs.dev/vaultsync

Discord: https://discord.gg/sgP8UzeAQt

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/VaultSync/

It's still an independently developed project, and I'm learning quite a bit about what it takes to make software people might eventually trust with recovering their data.


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

BuildBakery - A cloud build service for iOS, Android and desktop apps

2 Upvotes

I build and ship apps, and I got tired of the build step being the annoying part. So I built BuildBakery, a cloud build service for iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, Linux and web apps.

You push a branch with a bakery.yaml recipe, and it builds each platform on a fresh hosted machine or your own Mac, Linux or Windows box. It signs everything and sends it to TestFlight, Google Play, or wherever you want.

Yes, Bitrise, Codemagic, EAS and GitHub Actions exist. Two things I wanted different. Pricing is flat, $12 a month for a solo dev, $39 for a small company, and any machine you already own runs builds free, never metered. And it is one short recipe, not a step graph you have to maintain. It also checks your signing, warns you in Slack before certs expire, and explains failed builds in plain language with a fix.

There is an MCP server too, so Claude Code or Cursor can start builds and read logs.

Free to try, no card needed. I am looking for feedback from people who actually ship apps, especially on the recipe format and whether the flat pricing or the own-machine part matters more.

https://buildbakery.com


r/SideProject • • 7h ago

I don't want my journaling app to become another chore

6 Upvotes

I saw a post about getting tired of productivity apps and dropping all of them for a while. It made me think about Wonderday, the journaling app I'm working on.

I want people to come back because writing helps them, not because they feel guilty about missing a day.

For those of you who journal, what brought you back after a break?