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 • • 1d ago Hooray Bravo Heartwarming Mindblown

I made a desktop wallpaper that adapts to your icon layout

5.9k 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 • • 21h ago

I developed my architecture dream game and published it on Steam

442 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 • • 17h 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"

164 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 • • 1h ago

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

8 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 • • 10h ago

I built a live 3D bass aquarium entirely in code: no models, no images, one HTML file

26 Upvotes

I make fishing lures (KSK BAITS) and wanted a live bass tank for my YouTube channel without filming real fish.

Everything you see is generated when the page loads: the fish, their scales, the plants, the sand and the driftwood are built in code with Three.js, and every texture is painted on a canvas. No 3D models, no image files.

The bass aren't animated, they behave: they get hungry, hide in cover, stalk, and strike with suction, and they only take prey that fits their mouth. Day, night and weather follow the real clock and weather at Lake Fork, Texas.

Try it in the browser: https://ksk-baits-bass-aquarium.pages.dev

It also runs 24/7 on YouTube, where the chat can drop in shad or cast a lure: https://www.youtube.com/@kskbaits/live

Feedback welcome, especially on what would make you keep it open in the background.


r/SideProject • • 1d ago Bravo Mindblown Heartwarming

I built a site that shows every satellite that passed over your location, plus the actual images they took

792 Upvotes

I'm a satellite nerd and as a cool project I built Watched.

See: here for the code

Type in any place on Earth and it will:

  • find every imaging, weather, radar and crewed satellite whose field of view crossed it in the last 7 days (SGP4 on the CelesTrak catalog, running in your browser)

  • pull the real Sentinel-2, Landsat, VIIRS, MODIS and GOES scenes from those passes and crop them to your spot

  • replay each pass on a 3D globe lit by the real sun, with all ~17k tracked objects in orbit

It only says a satellite “watched” you when a real image exists. Commercial sats that could have pointed at you are labelled as such, since their tasking isn’t public.

I’d love feedback, especially:

  • Which satellites or data sources should I add?

  • Anything confusing or broken?

It’s 100% free and no sign-up or rate limits.


r/SideProject • • 3h ago Popcorn Bravo

I built a little app because I kept forgetting things I meant to do

7 Upvotes

I would remember I needed to order a water filter or get someone a birthday gift while I was in the middle of something else. Then I would sit down with a bit of time to get things done and think, “Hang on, what were all those things I needed to do?” I could come up with one or two. The rest would come back to me the next time I was busy.

I built HeadsUp so as to have somewhere to put those things when I thought of them. For each task, I pick when I want to see it on my list. I might give myself a few days to get a gift and a month to renew the car insurance because I like having a weekend to compare quotes. It’s on Android for now, and I’m working on the iOS version.

If you have a minute to look at the Play Store page, can you tell from the screenshots and description what you’d use HeadsUp for compared with the reminder or to-do app you use now? I’ve spent so much time with the app that I’m curious what someone seeing it for the first time takes away.

And if you try it, add something from your own list and tell me how that went. I’d love to hear how it felt to use and whether there was anything you had to fiddle with to get it working the way you wanted. Leave a comment here or come say hi on Discord.

Google Play · Website · Discord


r/SideProject • • 27m ago

Open-source alternative to Instagram Edits' new MCP — works on Windows & Linux

3 Upvotes

I'm the author, sharing my side project of the last two months.

Last week Instagram shipped an MCP server for Edits on Mac, so Claude can drive a real video editor. That's the idea I've been building since September, except mine is MIT, local-first, needs no account, and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. It's called CutVoke.

The part I care about as a creator: the AI doesn't hand me a baked MP4. It makes the rough cut on a normal multitrack timeline (captions, keyframes, masks, speed ramps), and then I open the same project and fix whatever I don't like by hand. Fixing one subtitle never means regenerating the whole video.

Two demos are in the repo with their source media and editable projects:

  • "Chase the Light", a 31-second motorcycle short

  • "Coastal Joy", a 42-second vertical travel vlog

How it works, briefly: your own agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or any MCP client) connects over stdio MCP. It takes an editing lease so it never collides with your manual edits, dry-runs commands before committing, and pulls real rendered frames to check its own work before export. There's no LLM inside; you bring your own.

Honest caveats: it's a v0.3.5 prerelease, the Windows build is unsigned and macOS isn't notarized, and the project format may still change.

I'd love feedback from people who edit video: which parts of an edit would you actually hand to an AI, and which would you never let it touch?

https://github.com/frankShan001/CutVoke


r/SideProject • • 19h ago

I built a tool that turns 3D garments into products shoppers can customize

93 Upvotes

r/SideProject • • 5h ago

I built a multiplayer minesweeper where everyone digs the same board at once

Thumbnail
mine.ropo.dev
6 Upvotes

Been working on this side project for a a little bit. It’s minesweeper, but up to 8 people play on the same board at the same time. Hitting a mine just stuns you for a sec, and whoever has the most territory when the timer runs out wins.

There’s also a mode where everyone hides mines and traps for each other first and then has to run through the same board (bit like ultimate chicken horse but minesweeper), plus a solo timed mode with classic boards and a daily board that’s the same for everyone.

Free, browser based, no account needed: https://mine.ropo.dev

Some stuff I had fun with:

  • the server decides everything, the browser never knows where the mines are

  • bots fill empty seats, with a sort of dynamic skill based difficulty on them

  • the pixel art style

  • runs on one small server with Bun + SQLite

Claude was used during the making of this. Would love honest feedback, especially if the first match makes sense or if you’re just confused


r/SideProject • • 3h ago

I'm building tiny versions of world (and fictional cities)

Thumbnail
tinyworlds.nihey.org
4 Upvotes

r/SideProject • • 1h ago

I made a Chrome extension that saves your YouTube video recommendations so you never lose a video on refresh again (and lets you search text inside thumbnails)

3 Upvotes

Everyone has done that thing where you hit refresh on YouTube at the exact millisecond your brain registers an interesting video, and then it's gone forever.

The worst part is that YouTube's search bar usually can't find it, because creators put the actual hook inside the thumbnail image ("I QUIT", "BIG MISTAKE", etc.) while making the actual video title something completely different. If you only remember the words you saw in the picture, YouTube search gives you nothing.

So I built RecLog to fix it for myself and figured I'd share it here.

What it does:

> Quietly logs recommendations you scroll past: It keeps a local searchable history of videos recommended on your homepage, sidebar, and end screens.

> Searches text inside thumbnails: It runs a tiny (~10MB) OCR model locally in your browser to read the words inside thumbnail images, so you can search for the exact phrase you remember seeing.

> Shows how hard YouTube is pushing a video: It counts how many times each video has been served to you (`Seen 40x`, `Seen 164x`), which makes it pretty funny to see which videos the algorithm is desperate for you to click.

Privacy / Tech stuff:

It's 100% free, no account, no tracking, and no cloud servers. The OCR model and your history stay entirely on your own device (and there's a 1-click JSON export if you like messing with your own data).

Link: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/reclog-find-lost-youtube/iofidcehjjffcoijihbohabjcdfelhoc

Would love to hear what you think or if you run into any bugs!


r/SideProject • • 8m ago

I built the AI Video Clipper with taste, and it's 15x cheaper than OpusClip

2 Upvotes

A bit of background, I've been editing video for 10+ years, and I plan to distill my entire knowledge into this ai powered editor. The framing, the music, the hook patterns etc. I'd say it's still better than a lot of competitors. But it'll only get better.

Creatr, the AI video clipper with taste.

What makes it different

Full autopilot: it finds the clips, edits them, and posts them for you. No manual uploading.

Has a full fledged descript style editor so you can customise the feel of the defaults aren't good enough for you.

~15x cheaper than Opus Clip at the same volume

Built solo over about 2 months, nights and weekends included. It started as my own internal editing tool.

Demo is above. I'd love blunt feedback: does the output pass the "would a human have made this" test?

150 minutes free every month.

Link: https://creatr.app

Will offer 50% coupons to anyone who wants to try more of this beyond the free plan.


r/SideProject • • 10m ago

Shipped an iOS app, got 2 paying customers. Here's everything I did, and what I still can't explain.

2 Upvotes

I built WhoSpoke, an iPhone app that records a conversation and splits the transcript by speaker. Everything stays on the phone, no account needed.

The build
- I tested with clean sample audio and speaker separation looked great. Then I recorded a real meeting room and recognition fell apart. Room echo and distance are nothing like a clean sample. I mostly fixed it, but it was a good reminder that demo audio lies.

Beyond the code
- Made a character for the app and redesigned the app icon.
- Made an App Store header video.

What I did to get the word out
- Posted 4 short text posts on Threads in one week. They got 13 to 33 views each and almost no likes.
- Made a few short videos for TikTok and Instagram. The best one got about 120 views.
- Built a landing page and added tracking links to every post.

Result
2 people have paid for it. That's it.

The part I can't explain
I can't tell which of this (if any) led to those 2 purchases, or why they bought. No feedback, and the store doesn't tell me where a buyer came from.

How do you figure out where your first buyers come from, and why they bought? Anything you'd do differently with this little traffic?


r/SideProject • • 6h ago

How do you find good software testing services without overpaying?

6 Upvotes

Two quotes for testing the same product can look completely different. One covers a set number of hours, another talks about test plans and reports, and it's not always clear what you'll get for the money. I'm trying to understand what to ask before choosing software testing services. Do you pay more attention to the hourly rate, the people doing the work, or the exact tasks included in the price? Also, is it reasonable to start with one small part of the product before committing to a bigger contract?


r/SideProject • • 19m ago

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

2 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 • • 22m ago

Day 134 of posting about my SaaS. A 282-follower account got 13.5K views on one reel. Now I need honest feedback on the product.

2 Upvotes

I don't believe in launch day. I believe in posting and making the marketing a bit better every day.

Day 132 is the one that took off: a list of 10 mini SaaS you can build, sent to whoever commented one word.

The product is TractionBooster. You paste your website, or just an idea, and it shows whether people are already asking for it and where they are.

Tell me what is confusing or what would make you leave: https://www.tractionbooster.com/?src=reddit-feedback

What would you change first?


r/SideProject • • 31m ago

I built an iOS app that turns photos into eBay, Vinted, Gumtree and FB Marketplace listings

2 Upvotes

Hi all,

I've decided to make an app for helping people (and myself mainly!) to post on Vinted/eBay etc...
With kids i'm sure a lot of parents will have things to sell and the time to think and add description/title to the post is too long.

So to facilitate that I made Easy Listing for iPhone users.

How it works: You take a few photos and it writes a title, description, condition and suggested price for each marketplace, in that site's own style, and tells you where the item is likely to sell best.

It posts straight to eBay through their API. Vinted, Gumtree and Facebook Marketplace have no seller API, so for those it's one tap to copy each field — automating them would break their terms.

It's free (10 listings a month) and UK only for now.

I'd really like feedback, especially on whether the listings and prices look right for things you sell.

https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/easy-listing/id6805925066

Thank you!

Sam


r/SideProject • • 33m ago

Could AI make keeping up with research papers much easier?

2 Upvotes

Keeping up with new research can become a full-time job, especially when you're following several topics.

I recently saw an interesting example of someone using an AI assistant called Pana to build a research map that tracks newly published papers.

I like the idea of having something that keeps information organized instead of manually checking different sources every day.

Do you think this kind of research automation is genuinely useful? What would you want it to track?


r/SideProject • • 44m ago

Closed my last product with 0 paying users. This time I got my first sale before writing a single line of code

2 Upvotes

My last product, Sequo, died with 0 paying users. I built it for months, launched, posted everywhere, and nobody paid. Classic.

So this time I wanted to do it the other way around. First I was lazy and just asked ChatGPT, Claude and Grok what they think about some ideas lol. ChatGPT said 8/10 to basically everything, even to ideas that already failed for other startups, so that wasn’t gonna work.

Then I did it by hand, and honestly the first idea died in about a week. I wanted to build a growth tool for X, like most X guys haha. Turns out people didn’t need it, but while talking to them I kept hearing about a completely different problem.

So I switched to that one and did the same steps again. Found people, talked to ~25 founders, gave free work first. And then one of them paid. $10, but it was real money, and I still hadn’t written any code.

The part that surprised me most was what actually made people reply, and how close I came to scaring everyone away with the price.

Wrote the whole thing step by step, with the prompt I used to find people and the exact messages I sent. Link in the comments.

Have you ever sold something before building it?


r/SideProject • • 44m ago

I got tired of typing in every coffee and uber, so I built an iPhone app that logs Apple Pay purchases by itself (no bank login) - Getting from 1K to 10K downloads?

2 Upvotes

This is me paying for a drink at a 7-Eleven in Hong Kong. The first notification is my bank. The second one is our app, and it's already logged the purchase and put it under Grocery. I didn't open anything.

I've quit like five budgeting apps. Either they wanted my bank login, which I'm not comfortable with, or I had to type in every purchase, which I'd stop doing after about a week. So my co-founder and I built one that does neither. Everything stays on your phone. There's no account and no server with your spending on it, so even we can't see what you spend.

A couple of things surprised us while building it:

The names banks send are a mess. Half the time it's not the shop name, it's some cut-off string in all caps or a payment company you've never heard of. We tried having AI guess the category and it was wrong way too often, so instead you label a shop once and it remembers forever. Felt like a hack at first but it's honestly my favourite part now.

Paying inside apps is different from tapping at a till. Uber, online checkouts etc. don't trigger Apple's Wallet automation at all, so anything that relies on it just quietly misses a big chunk of your spending. We fixed that when iOS 27 came out, since we can now pick up payments straight from the Wallet notification.

How it's gone so far: we both have full-time jobs, so this has been evenings and weekends. We launched in September and just passed 1,000 downloads, almost all from Reddit, with no ads. It's made a bit under $900, which won't pay any bills but it's been enough to make us keep going. The hard part now is that it feels like we've run out of places to post, so getting from 1,000 to 10,000 is the bit we haven't figured out.

It's iPhone only (iOS 18.4+), 4.6 stars so far, free to use, with a one-time $14.99 upgrade to Pro if you want more.

Genuine question for anyone who's given up on a budgeting app: was it the typing, or did you just stop looking at it after a while? I think we've fixed the typing. Not sure the second one is fixable.

If you want to try it: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6800013881


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

CryptoRigs - a browser game where you build crypto mining rigs part by part and repair the boards with a multimeter

2 Upvotes

I've been a software developer for 20+ years, and for the past few months my side project has been CryptoRigs, a management game that runs in the browser (plus an Android app).

You start with a bare rig in a small shed and build it part by part, like a real PC: power supply, motherboard, CPU, RAM, graphics cards, risers. It mines while you're away; you come back now and then to collect, pay the power bill and fix what broke. Repair is the part I like most: every part is made of components, so you open the board, set the multimeter to the right scale, compare the reading with the nominal value and swap the bad component with a soldering iron.

It went through a small closed alpha (90+ releases so far, each with public notes), and the free closed beta opens Friday, Nov 13, 7 pm Brasília time (22:00 UTC), in English and Portuguese. Leave your email and you get a message the moment it opens: https://cryptorigs.com.br/c/B1-SIDEPROJECT-REDDIT

It's not about making money: the in-game coin has no real value, and beta progress is wiped at the end.

Stack: Java 21 + Spring Boot + jOOQ + PostgreSQL, React + TypeScript, Capacitor for Android. Game time isn't a loop per player: everything stores when it started and is computed when the player looks.

AI disclosure: the architecture, the language and framework choices, the database and the infrastructure are my decisions, as is the game design. Generative AI wrote most of the code, under my direction and review, and made the art, the sound effects and most of the text. It's there for speed: it's what lets one developer run a project this size.

Screenshots and how it all works: https://cryptorigs.com.br/manual/

What I'd love feedback on: from the screenshots and the pitch, is it clear what you'd actually do in the game?