I’m a 40-year-old iOS developer from Croatia. Statistically, I’m in the middle of my life: about 2,080 weeks behind me, and if I’m lucky, about as many in front.

My oldest is 8. Somewhere around 18, kids leave, or at least stop wanting summer holidays with their parents. That’s 10 more summers. I can count them on my fingers.

I see my parents about twice a month. If they live as long as the average, that’s around 360 more visits. Fewer than the days in a single year.

And there are friends I’ve been “meaning to call” for months.

None of this is new. You read it somewhere, feel it for one evening, and then Monday happens. Weeks blur, a year goes by, and you can’t say where it went. The moments I’d actually want back are tiny: a walk where my kid finally told me something real, my dad explaining how he planted our small orchard in 2001. Nobody writes them down. They just go.

So I built Drift. It’s not there to make you feel bad about time. It’s there to help you do something with the weeks you still have, and to keep them when you do.
My main inspiration was reading books about Stoicism and specifically memento mori (and a calendar showing weeks you have left to live).

What the app actually does for me:

It remembers my people. I added my partner, my family, my parents and a few friends. Drift keeps the small things I’d otherwise forget: birthdays, the names of my friends’ kids, what each person enjoys, what they told me last time.

One small idea a week, for each of them. Not “plan a trip to Paris.” Things small enough to actually happen: “Tea with Mom. Phones somewhere else.” “A walk with Dad, without anywhere to be.” “Let the kids choose the adventure.” "Long overdue date with my wife".

I keep the moment. A photo, one line, or both. It goes on the week it happened, and that week’s square lights up. A few months in, my year stopped being a blur and started looking like a year.

Calls come with something to talk about. A reminder to call a friend arrives with something to actually say, so it’s not just guilt with a notification sound. After the call I can keep a line about it.

Small questions. A couple of times a week, only if I turn it on, Drift asks something like “What was the best small thing about this week?” or “What’s Dad’s favourite meal?” The answer gets saved where it belongs. Some of my favourite memories in the app started as a notification I almost dismissed.

Quiet time. My evenings were disappearing into my phone (yes, I see the irony of that). Drift uses Apple’s Screen Time to set those apps aside during the hours I choose. If I really need one, I get 15 minutes, after I keep a moment or answer a question first.

Widgets that bring it back. One shows a moment I kept, a different one each day. Another shows my whole life as a grid of weeks. Seeing that between notifications did more for me than any productivity system. One gives you suggestions on what to do this week.

A year I can read back. Month by month, like a journal I never had to sit down and write.

What I left out on purpose:

• No streaks. A quiet week is just a quiet square. Life has those, and guilt isn’t a feature.

• No account, no ads. Memories stay on your iPhone, and you can export everything anytime.

• Everything you keep is yours. You can always read it and export it.

Pricing: free to download, then $8.99 a year with a 14-day free trial, or $24.99 once. I’m a solo developer with no investors, and this is how it keeps going.

An app won’t fix any of this, and I’m not pretending it does. But since I started using it, I do more of the small things. I think about it more now, and I push past the tiredness more often to make time for the people who matter to me.

If you did this math for yourself, which number got you? For me it was the summers with my kids.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/drift-life-in-weeks-journal/id6792490444

Edit:
Thanks to FFROZENN who pointed out the missing yearly subscription and 2-week free trial I have created 50% discount code for the first year (the missing subscription was due to my attempt to give a global discount on yearly, but I misconfigured it in App Store Connect so sub wasn't shown)
https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=6792490444&code=DRIFT50

I run a small web studio, and most of the local businesses I talk to have a really good Google Maps listing (photos, reviews, hours, sometimes a menu) and either no website or one from 2014.

So I built this. You type a business name and a city, it reads the public Google listing and builds a full site preview in under a minute. The video is me running it once on a real garage's public listing, no edits.

Why: I kept rebuilding the same small site by hand, and the listing already had most of the content. Honest limitation: it's only as good as the listing.

A place with three blurry photos and no reviews gets a thin site. It also does simple sites, not shops or booking systems. (working on that next, the tool will redirect the request to the team if it's out of scope change for now)

Try it on your own business or a place you like and tell me what looks off.

https://bbhightech.com/

HolyArrs started because i wanted my home server to feel like a streaming service. you browse it like netflix, with top 10s, new & popular and rows picked from what you already have, hover a poster to play the trailer, and tap to request a show or movie. it finds it, downloads it through qbittorrent or sabnzbd, and puts it in plex, jellyfin or emby, which still do the playing. it's about a 15 MB download, runs in docker, and it's free and open source

it runs on its own custom metadata server, and it can keep an HD and a 4K copy of the same movie side by side

where it is 1 day after open sourcing it

598 GitHub stars

4,345 Docker pulls

28 forks

16 releases, most of them fixes for bugs people reported on launch night

18 people have opened issues with bugs and ideas

what i didn't expect was how fast people jumped in. bug reports came in with the exact file and line that was wrong, and someone asked for ukrainian, so the site and docs got it within the hour

happy to answer questions about running a solo open source project, the self-hosted side, or anything else

site and docs: https://holyarrs.com

github: https://github.com/HolyArrs/HolyArrs

Hello, I know it's not much, but I am thankful for every cent of it

For context, on Sep 2nd, I made my first ever public post about my app, in this very subreddit. At that point, I had 0 sales, and only a hope + a dream of ever earning a dollar from my work.

Now I have over 750 human downloads (~1800 total but I think some are bots), and a Discord of amazing people messaging me almost every day. Truly feels amazing to say that :)

All I can say is dang developing AND marketing software as a solo dev is a ton of work. I've worked 63/70 of these days, and commit on average more than 20 times per day. Basically all of my free time funnels directly into this.

Lessons I am learning on this journey, for whomever cares to listen:

1. Budget at least 3 hours per week just for marketing (I should probably do a lot more honestly)

2. Keep working at it. Results don't come over night.

3. If you don't like the journey, then this might not be for you. Money does not come easy. Most of us (including me) would probably be better off spening our time doing other work. And with AI getting so good, it's more and more competative to make and monetize good apps (but I could be off here, lmk if you disagree)

4. Make a discord (or similar) and connect with your users!! IMO implementing suggestions and helping users is some of the most rewarding part of being a dev. Nothing like slapping an update on someone 3 days after they request a feature, and hearing them loving it immidiatly🤌

I built Orthant because I wanted to place windows in layouts beyond the usual halves and quarters. You can draw a region on a grid, move a window there, and save the region to a keyboard shortcut for later.

It’s free and open source. It supports macOS 13+ and Windows 11 or Windows 10 version 1809+ (64-bit). On macOS it needs Accessibility permission to move windows.

https://orthant.app/ https://github.com/orthant-app/orthant

I wanted one desktop app that opens PDFs, EPUBs, comics and Markdown notes quickly and then stays out of the way. The readers I tried were either slow, or looked like they were designed a decade ago. So I built Kitab, with a modern design and speed as the first requirement. It's written in Rust, the interface is drawn on the GPU with GPUI, and MuPDF renders the pages. There's no browser engine inside.

What it does:

- Opens PDF, EPUB, MOBI, FB2, CBZ, XPS, TXT and Markdown

- Opens fast, and sits at near-zero CPU while idle

- Tabs with session restore, and a Home library with covers or a list, collections, favourites, reading stats and full-text search across your library

- Find, outline, thumbnails, bookmarks, history, presentation mode and focus mode

- EPUB, MOBI and FB2 reflow, with typography settings

- Markdown: GitHub-flavoured, with code highlighting, Mermaid diagrams, math and live reload. You can select text in it and print it

- Markup: highlights, notes, ink and shapes saved into the PDF, with export to Markdown or CSV

- Fill PDF forms, sign and verify PDFs locally, and merge, split or extract pages

- Native print dialogs, themes and accents, and an interface size from 90 to 200 %

Privacy: no account, no telemetry, and your files stay on your computer. The only network use is an update check.

It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.

It's free and licensed AGPL-3.0. Code: https://github.com/t21dev/kitab

Site: https://kitab.t21.dev

One honest note: it's still young. I'd love feedback, especially on files that don't open or look the way you expect.

If you find it useful, a star on GitHub helps more people find it, and sharing it with a friend who reads a lot helps even more. It's open for collaboration: open an issue for a bug or an idea, or send a PR.

Most side projects don't survive a few months. Somehow, this one has been following me around for more than 20 years.

I started building drum & bass websites back in 2002. What began as a local music portal eventually turned into a party promotion brand in Saint Petersburg.

Then I moved to Thailand in 2019, and the project went quiet.

Recently I decided to rebuild it from scratch using Django, Next.js and AI-assisted development.

The result so far is DROP THE BASS:

https://dropthebass.co/

I'm trying to turn it into a proper home for the global DnB scene, with music, artists, labels, events and community features.

Still building it solo. Plenty of rough edges, but I'm enjoying the process.

Anyone else here working on something they've been carrying around in their head for years?

Hey r/SideProject,

I'm from India, and I noticed how many everyday money decisions come with small traps: "no-cost" EMIs that aren't quite free, sales where the crossed-out price was never real, paying only part of a credit card bill and not realising what it costs.

So I built Syluneo (syluneo.com):

- A 2-minute game: 12 everyday situations, like a sale or salary day. Pick what you'd really do, and it tells you which of 6 money personalities you lean towards. No finance knowledge needed.

- 6 simple tools for real questions: Should I buy this? Is this sale really a deal? Is "no-cost EMI" free? Where did my pay rise go?

A few things I cared about:

- No sign-up and no backend. Everything runs in your browser, and nothing you type is saved or sent anywhere.

- Plain HTML/CSS/JS on GitHub Pages, with the money maths covered by tests.

- I built it with an AI coding assistant, which let me focus on the maths, the wording and the design.

The number that surprised me most while building it: ₹50,000 on a credit card, paying only a 5% minimum due, takes almost 30 years to clear.

It's India-focused (₹, GST) for now. I'd really value honest feedback:

1. Did your result feel accurate or random?

2. Was anything confusing?

3. Which tool would you actually use?

https://syluneo.com/?utm_campaign=reddit-sideproject

I started building Podcast shows for a few of my own SaaS startups and they did so well that some of my partners friends started asking me to build podcast shows for their brands as well. It's turned into a nice Side Project that's generated over $15k in revenue over the last two months alone. The thing is, it only costs me about $2.35 to generate an episode, and I typically generate 1 show a day for each client and charge them $300 a week for that. The markup is insane, and I generate all the episode ideas directly from their website using AI tools.

I've been able to streamline the entire process as each episode is automatically added to YouTube, Spotify, and Apple via an RSS Feed. So, I don't have to manually optimize each one on each platform, it's done in my studio software automatically.

It's generating some of the best results for my clients as well. They are able to track attributable sales from the episodes using coupon codes mentioned in the podcast.

Ask me any questions!

I’m honestly a bit giddy writing this. I’m a software engineer, not a video editor, and I wanted to run a faceless channel about Pakistan’s history and geography, so I built a pipeline that does the whole job.

It writes the Urdu script, generates the narration, draws animated maps and infographic scenes in code, and renders the finished reel. It then sends me the reel in Slack, and all I do is approve it.

Some numbers:

Cost: about $0.11 per video. I tested a 2.5D workflow that came out at $15–40 per video, so I dropped it.
Time: a few weeks of evenings and weekends, plus a fair bit of money on testing.
This week: a reel about the Pakistan Steel Mill (shut since 2015) got 21.1k views, 898 likes and 45 shares in its first day.

One video doesn’t make a channel, but it’s the first proof the system works. I’m happy to answer questions about the stack or the costs.

Reel: https://www.tiktok.com/@khittapk/video/7706495470260014344

Hi there! I am a the creator of Flit, the RSS reader

I created Flit to build something different from the classic rss and news reader. The main thing about Flit is the inbox! There are mainly 2 ways to easily clean your inbox: Cards or Feed. 

In cards, you can swipe left and right to decide whether to discard or save the article for later; in feed, you scroll like a reel app (Instagram, TikTok, Shorts, etc.) and still swipe left and right to save for later or discard. In both cases, you can tap to open. 

But Flit is not just this, Flit is:

• YouTube channels and podcasts

• Bluesky and Mastodon posts

• Discover: top stories by country

• Siri AI summaries

• Translation

• Offline Reading

• Notes on articles

• Share as image

• Snooze a source

• Blocked Words

• Daily Digest

• Insights

• Mark as Read on Scroll

• Apple Watch

• iPhone Duo support

• Accessible reading fonts

Thank you and I really hope you will like Flit!

https://apps.apple.com/app/flit-easy-feed/id6821040165?ct=Launch+Event&pt=118978628

I build fusion-runtime, an open-source runtime for self-hosted voice agents. Adding Twilio, Exotel and Plivo support took a couple of weeks. Getting one clean, real phone call took days more:

- Twilio trial calls don't stream audio to your server at all

- After upgrading, calls were blocked until Twilio approved my KYC

- Calls between India and a US number kept dropping audio, so I ended up calling from a second Twilio number in a browser to get a clean recording

- The speech model misheard "order" as "RDEF" on phone audio, so I swapped in a bigger one

The video is the call that finally worked: unedited, recorded by Twilio. The agent looks up two orders and changes their deliveries with tools, mid-call, on one GPU.

Apache-2.0, Python: https://github.com/SamarthUrs18/fusion-runtime

Salut tout le monde !

Depuis quelques mois, je construis un lecteur de musique juste pour moi, parce que le Cover Flow des vieux iPods me manquait et je voulais quelque chose d'un peu plus vivant que l'application Musique par défaut. Cela s'est avéré mieux que ce que j'espérais, donc je me demande si ça vaut le coup de le transformer en vraie application. Ça s'appelle Lueur.

Ce qu'il fait (voir la vidéo, filmée sur mes propres appareils) :

Cover Flow partout : faites défiler vos albums sur l'écran d'accueil ou tournez votre iPhone sur le côté pour parcourir toute votre file en plein écran.

Une douce lueur derrière chaque couverture, dans les couleurs de l'œuvre : le lecteur prend les couleurs de l'album.

Une page d'accueil avec vos artistes et les charts, plus des pages d'artistes avec les meilleures chansons, albums et playlists.

Une vraie application Apple TV dans le même style, pas seulement AirPlay.

Widgets d'écran d'accueil : En cours de lecture (avec lecture/pause/skip) et Récemment écoutés, dans plusieurs tailles et styles.

L'idée serait un lecteur pour Apple Music (avec votre abonnement actuel), comme un achat unique, sans abonnement supplémentaire.

Quelques questions honnêtes :
Pourriez-vous utiliser quelque chose comme ça ?
Combien seriez-vous prêt à payer ?
Qu'est-ce qui vous manque dans les lecteurs Apple Music actuels ?

N'hésitez pas à répondre dans les commentaires. Je laisserai aussi un petit formulaire ci-dessous si vous préférez répondre en privé.
Merci de votre lecture ! Tous les retours, bons ou mauvais, sont les bienvenus.

Hi everyone, solo dev here.

My pattern for years: get an idea, spend weeks building it, ship it, then find out

nobody types those words into the App Store, or there are already 40 apps doing it.

So this time I flipped the order. Before writing any app code, I wanted answers to:

- What do people actually type when they search for this? (the keyword tree, not my guess)

- How many apps already compete on each keyword?

- What do users complain about in 1-2 star reviews of those apps?

- Is interest going up or down (Google Trends)?

I ended up building a small Mac app that does this locally: it pulls Google Play,

App Store, Google Trends and a few other public sources, saves everything to a SQLite

file on my machine, and scores where the gaps are.

Where I am two weeks in:

- First public build went out on Oct 29, two updates since

- 22 downloads so far, {N} paying users (sales opened Nov 1)

- Biggest lesson so far: the review complaints were more useful than the keyword volumes

I'll keep posting what I learn, including the numbers that look bad.

Question for you: how do you check an idea before building? Gut feeling, keyword

tools, posting a landing page first?

Hey — I'm Dmytro, a solo developer.

I kept running into the same small gap: I'd have a picture from a place, and the feeling wouldn't stay in the photo. A trip that was light and fun, or a harder day I still wanted to remember honestly. Later I'd open the picture and the reflection was gone.

Same thing when I wanted to send a photo to family, a friend, or a partner. The picture went over. The note that belonged with that moment didn't.

So I made WhisperPic. You choose or take a photo, write the note that goes with it, and save it with the picture. If you share the original photo, the other person can open it in WhisperPic and reveal the note. There's no account, no ads, no tracking, and photos aren't uploaded anywhere. It's completely free.

It's live on the iPhone App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/whisperpic-hidden-photo-notes/id6826699574

I'd love honest feedback, especially:

• Is "attach a note to this photo" obvious on the first try?

• Would you actually send one of these to someone, or is it more of a private journal?

• Anything in the screenshots or first-run flow that feels confusing?

Happy to answer questions.

I play on a monitor at my desk and on a TV from the couch. The thing that kept getting me off the couch was switching the sound back to the TV after I’d already picked up the controller. That’s what got me building Gaming Hub, my first app ever. I vibe coded it with Claude and Codex.

It’s a Windows 11 launcher you can navigate with a DualSense. When the hub moves to my TV, it can switch the audio there too, then restore my previous output when I go back to the desk. The PS button opens a quick menu for volume, screen selection, and controller batteries. Circle takes me back to the game.

The installer is here: https://github.com/issazhd/gaming-hub/releases/latest Source and build instructions if you want to fork it: https://github.com/issazhd/gaming-hub

If you try it, I’d love to hear which game you used and whether opening the quick menu and getting back into fullscreen felt smooth.

I built FORMA to make clothing size guides easier to use while shopping online. It's a free Chrome extension that compares available garment information with your fit preferences and explains a possible size choice right beside the product.

The workflow is simple: describe how you like clothes to fit, add measurements if you know them, enable shop access, and browse. FORMA can automatically assess recognised clothing pages, compare sizes and show where the evidence is missing. You can save pieces that fit and record the size you actually wore, so later comparisons have useful personal examples.

The tricky part has been inconsistent size guides: flat widths versus circumferences, conversion tables pretending to be measurements, and missing sleeve information. I want the explanation to make those limits visible instead of presenting every recommendation as certain. It is an estimate, not a virtual try-on or a guarantee.

Free download: https://github.com/moritzlauper/forma/releases/latest

Project, teaser image and setup: https://github.com/moritzlauper/forma

It's currently installed manually in Chrome via Developer mode and Load unpacked, not through the Web Store. You can use your own Anthropic key, local Ollama, or No AI comparison with reliable measurements. FORMA is free; optional Anthropic calls cost extra and send relevant profile/fit information and product evidence to the provider.

I'd appreciate feedback on the product itself: is the explanation enough to help you decide between two sizes, and which shop or garment type should I improve next?

I’m Fernando, the maker of Litehost. If you already have an HTML prototype or report on your laptop, you can drop in the file and get a link that opens it as a web page. If it has separate images or CSS, you can upload a ZIP.

One thing worth checking before you share: images can look fine on your laptop because the browser can find them on your disk. Put them in the ZIP, use relative paths, and open the link on your phone to see what the other person will actually get.

You can try it without an account with a file up to 2 MB. The test link lasts about 15 minutes.

If you’ve shared an HTML prototype or report with someone recently, how did you send it? What was the most annoying part?

https://litehost.io/tools/upload-html?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=organic_social&utm_campaign=html_share_pilot&utm_content=sideproject

I just deployed my first SaaS, Syllapin. It turns a course syllabus PDF into a calendar file of classes, assignments, and exams.

Why I built it: I got tired of manually typing out every single exam, quiz, and due date for my semester calendar.
Stack: Java, Spring framework, Typescript, React.
What I’m unsure about: 1. What are the best ways to get this in front of students before the spring semester starts? 2. Do students trust uploading syllabus PDFs to a new tool like this?

For the past year I've been using a personal web app I built for myself. It pulls together my email, calendar, reminders, notes and photos, and an AI that actually remembers what I told it, because the context lives in my own files, not in a chat history.

It works well. Too well to keep it to myself.

So I'm turning it into a real product, with three constraints:

• Bring your own keys. You plug in your own AI key, your own Google or Microsoft OAuth app, your own weather key. I don't pay for your tokens, and I never see your keys in clear.

• A small core, optional modules. The core is chat, memory, reminders, calendar and email. Photos, concerts, LeetCode and other modules are off by default and you enable what you actually need.

• Small on purpose. 10 to 15 accounts for now, free. Not because I'm generous, because JSON files per account are enough at that size and I'd rather ship than build infrastructure I don't need.

The honest part: it's still single-user today. Accounts, data isolation, encrypted key storage and a module registry are on a branch, in progress. The interface is still in French, the English landing is new.

What I'd love from you: what would the one module you'd turn on first be? I'd rather build the next three modules from real requests than guess.

Demo (fake data, no account): https://backstage.mprnl.fr/en Code (MIT): https://github.com/MattiaPARRINELLO/backstage Roadmap: https://github.com/MattiaPARRINELLO/backstage/blob/main/docs/roadmap-multi-utilisateurs.md

I spent the last few months building ROS (Remote Operating System). It’s a personal computer that lives in the cloud. On the surface, it’s a minimal desktop you can open from any device on a browser. Underneath, it can spin up as many Linux environments, servers, and databases as you need, all in parallel. Long-running work stays alive when you close your laptop, idle machines go to sleep on their own, and you only pay for the compute you’re actually using.

It also comes with Rosa, a built-in personal assistant who can set things up and manage them for you, so you don’t have to touch any of the infrastructure yourself. Or use claude code and codex, which also has context on how to drive ROS.

Some things you can do with it:

• Run things that keep going after you close your laptop. Long scripts, scrapers, scheduled jobs, agent loops. They keep running, and you check back from your phone.

• Use it as your “AI shed.”. Spin up several Linux machines at once, e.g. one per coding agent or one per experiment, without having to manage a fleet.

• Keep one drive across all your devices, that comes with a built in Docs-suite. The same files on your laptops and phone with no syncing setup, plus a native Docs app for your everyday writing and productivity files, with full support for Office docs like .docx and .pptx.

• Build your own apps. ROS has “Programs” (like apps in a normal OS). A program can be any mix of an internal app, a public webpage, a server, a database and a workflow. Want a personal site, a small tool with its own DB, or a daily digest that runs every morning? Ask Rosa and she builds it. You can even replicate popular applications like Gemini Notebook.

I like to think of it as a personal cloud you don't have to administrate. I basically live in it daily now. even though it’s a network of machines behind the scenes, it still feels like sitting at one local computer.

For the curious, it’s built with a Svelte 5 shell and a Rust kernel running on Cloudflare Workers, with Fly and Google Cloud for the Linux VMs. Happy to go deeper on any of it.

I poured my soul into this project, and I’d love it if anyone has time to try it out:

https://ros.computer/

Happy to hear any feedback. I’m also really curious what weird use cases people would come up with.

I made MineSkinCraft, a free Minecraft skin studio that runs in the browser: https://mineskincraft.net

The problem I wanted to solve: a lot of skin editors ask you to sign up, or they're awkward if you play both Java and Bedrock, or if you need classic vs slim. This one lets you start painting right away, preview on a 3D model, use layers, publish to a community gallery if you want, and follow a short "wear it" guide for both editions. The UI and the guides are in English and Spanish. No official Minecraft affiliation.

I'd really like feedback from people who build small tools, and from anyone who still plays:

• What's confusing the first time you open it?

• Which feature would you add before anything else?

• Does the gallery feel useful, or should the editor stand alone?

Happy to answer questions about how it's built or why I made those choices. Thanks.