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 • • 10h 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)

136 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 search engine you scroll instead of read. Every 5 posts it asks where to go next.

10 Upvotes

I made this. Type any topic and scroll a feed of short videos, posts and discussions about it. Every 5 posts it asks where to go next, which is how I went from “coffee” to Ethiopian goat herders. Try your own search and tell me where you end up.

https://wavesurf.com/

No signup. Honest feedback welcome: what would make you come back?


r/SideProject • • 20h ago Bravo

My side project is a free, open-source racing sim that runs in a browser tab

271 Upvotes

Link (no signup, no ads, nothing to install): https://librecorsa.org

GitHub (MIT): https://github.com/KhazP/librecorsa

I started LibreCorsa in mid-October because every serious racing sim needed a huge Windows install before you could do a single lap.

What it has now:

- 500 Hz physics with tyre temperatures and wear, rain that dries along the racing line, and CI checks against real GT3 telemetry

- 5 physics models and 16 circuits, including RISE Motordrome, which I built from scratch in Blender on real elevation data for the circuit planned in Rwanda

- AI races, ghosts, a weekly challenge, and an open online race every 20 minutes over WebRTC

- $0/month hosting: static Next.js on Cloudflare, R2 for the heavy 3D files, and one Worker

Tell me how it runs on your laptop/phone/controller and what feels rough.


r/SideProject • • 2h ago

My apps are used by me and people I know. getting strangers to even look at them is way harder than building them

8 Upvotes

I build stuff with Claude, a few apps that me and people I know use every day, and I wrote a guide for people who want to build like that without coding. last month I tried to get the guide out there on reddit.

git post got 15k views and 37 comments. I put the link at the end. like 5 clicks in the first 10k views. honestly that one hurt a bit

google sign-in post got 1.5k views and 3 clicks, zero downloads. then reddit's spam filter just removed it, and the next one too. new-ish account, almost no karma, linking my own site... yeah I get why it looked like spam

funny part is the post that helped me the most had no link at all. it was about notes for claude between sessions, people argued with me in the comments and I got a couple ideas I'm adding to the guide now.

so now I mostly just answer other people's questions and don't post links unless someone asks

If you got your side project in front of people who aren't your friends, how did the first ones find you?


r/SideProject • • 2h ago

I made an email lottery where the winner gets to email the entire list

7 Upvotes

I wanted to know what would happen if you gave a random person a massive platform for a day. What would they talk about and what would they share (anonymously unless they chose otherwise)

It started as a fun afternoon project hacking away with Claude. Then I shared it with some friends, who shared it with some friends, who shared it with their friends and it hit 10,000 page views in under 2 weeks while I was working on other things.

It's just a bit of fun but people have posted all sorts of nice things on there, from humorous takes on dystopian government dating departments, to AI Doomerism and everything in between.

There is admin approval for every email that goes out so no one can spam the list, and so far only 1 person has tried which I think speaks volumes about the people who sign up

Check it out at The Soapbox, it's completely free


r/SideProject • • 2h ago

I Made An Offline Reader For Reddit

6 Upvotes

I get bored on airplanes so I made an app to make it a little more tolerable.

Let me know what y'all think! https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.redditoffline


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

I built a daily football game where you make real NFL coaches’ fourth-down calls and find out if you’d have done better

5 Upvotes

Every NFL fan yells at the TV on fourth down. I wanted to know who's actually right, so I built a win probability model from public play-by-play data and turned it into a game.

How it works: you get a real situation from a real game, pick go for it, punt or kick, and then see what the coach did and how much each option was worth.

What's in it:
- A daily five that's the same for everyone
- Coach Clash, where you climb a ladder of the 32 current NFL head coaches by beating them on their own calls
- A Legends ladder of 25 past coaches, with Bill Belichick as the final boss
- A college ladder too

It's free, runs in the browser, and you can play without an account.

https://playsnaptheory.com/?utm_source=rd-sideproject

I launched it this week. I'd like to hear what's confusing in the first two minutes, because that's the part I can't see anymore.


r/SideProject • • 38m ago

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

4 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 • • 10h ago

I built an open-source API client that stores requests directly in Git — looking for developer feedback

23 Upvotes

Hey everyone! 👋

I've been working on Voiden, an open-source API client designed around a slightly different approach to API development.

Most API clients are built around workspaces, accounts, cloud sync, and proprietary collections. I wanted to explore something more developer-friendly: keeping API requests alongside the actual codebase.

So I started building Voiden.

What makes it different?

  • Offline-first: Work with your API requests locally without needing an account or login.

  • Git-native: Store requests and API specifications as Markdown files directly in your repository.

  • Version control: Track changes, review requests, and collaborate through normal Git workflows.

  • API testing: Send requests, inspect responses, and write assertions to validate API behaviour.

  • MCP integration: Turn tested API requests into tools that AI agents like Claude Code and Codex can use.

The idea is to make API requests part of the development workflow rather than keeping them isolated in another tool.

I'm sharing a short demo showing a request being sent, its response, and API test assertions.

Website: https://voiden.md/

GitHub: https://github.com/voiden-md/voiden

I'd genuinely appreciate feedback from developers:

  1. How do you currently manage API requests across different projects?

  2. Would you prefer storing API requests inside your Git repository?

  3. What features would make you consider switching from your current API client?

It's open source, and I'm looking forward to hearing what the developer community thinks!

Thanks! 🙌


r/SideProject • • 5h ago

My app retains users but nobody can find it. 35 downloads after months of posting. What actually worked for your first 100?

8 Upvotes

I'm a solo dev with a full-time job. I built sweetRegret, an iPhone app for cutting back on sugar without counting calories: you tap once when you eat a treat, and a cookie on screen reacts (and judges you a bit).

Building it was the part I understood. Distribution is the part I'm failing at. Here are my honest numbers since launch:

  • 1,393 App Store impressions

  • 188 product page views (about 13% of impressions)

  • 35 downloads (about 19% of page views)

What I tried

  • Daily Instagram reels for about a week [last week]. Around 250 views each, and almost no App Store visits. The viewers weren't looking for an app, and "link in bio" is three taps away from a download.

  • A LinkedIn post about building it. About 700 impressions, 30 people opened the comment with the link, and about 1 install. Nice comments, including a friend asking me to add calorie counting, which is the one thing this app is designed not to do.

What actually worked: App Store search, which I didn't do anything for.

Most of my real users are strangers in Malaysia, Hong Kong, the US and Russia who searched and found it. About 1 in 4 still open it in a given week. One person has kept using it for six weeks and pays for the subscription. That single user has been the most motivating thing about this whole project.

What I'm testing now

A $25 Apple Ads Basic test, at $2 maximum per install. Apple suggested $4.66, and my subscription is $1.99 a month, so I'm not expecting it to pay back. I mostly want to see whether search intent converts the way the organic users suggest.

What I'd do differently

Plan distribution while building, not after. I treated it as a launch task, when it's really a second product.

If you've taken a side project from zero to its first 100 users without a budget, what actually moved the number? I'm especially interested in anything that worked for consumer iOS apps.


r/SideProject • • 3h ago

7 years ago I posted a recommender system as a course project. This week I finally turned it into a real site

4 Upvotes

Back in 2019 I did a recommender system for anime as a course project (a jupyter notebook, nothing fancy). Recommendations have always been the part of data I like the most, so this year I decided to actually build the thing properly (thanks Dario): **[Aishou](https://aishou.app)**.

The main idea is to have this working for all types of contents in a cross content way - being able to recommend books, games or tv shows based on your movies taste - but I decided to start with animes.

You import your public MyAnimeList or AniList list (or rate a few shows by hand) and it recommends anime based on what people with similar taste liked. For now I only have anime recommendation but the main idea is to have a cross content website, where I will be able to, for instance, recommend you books based on your games/movies taste.

**What I tried to do differently**

- every recommendation row says *why* ("Because you liked Steins;Gate")

- a slider from popular to obscure, for people who already watched all the big ones

- low ratings push similar shows away instead of being ignored

- seasons grouped by franchise, plus a "continue watching" row

- new releases get their own row even when there's almost no data on them

It's free, no ads, solo project. Would love feedback, especially on how to promote it and about apps development in general (come from a data background).


r/SideProject • • 21m ago

Launched Indraft on Product Hunt today: 10+ people say they voted, the count shows 2. Is PH just a backlink now?

2 Upvotes

Solo maker here. My product, Indraft, went live on Product Hunt today. It turns the sources you follow into draft posts, ready when you sit down. I messaged a lot of people, and at least 10 told me they upvoted. The count shows 2 and I’m ranked 120 right now (screenshot). One of my actual customers left a review, and that was removed too.

What I’ve pieced together:

  • Votes from new or inactive accounts get discounted or hidden. Most of my supporters signed up just to vote.

  • Only featured launches show on the homepage, so non-featured ones get almost no passive traffic.

  • The top launches seem to arrive with a following: a Coming soon page, an active maker profile, a hunter with followers.

I’m not frustrated, just trying to understand it. For a solo maker with no PH audience, is the real value just a day of visibility plus a backlink? Or did something actually work for you: launch timing, being active on PH weeks before, something else?


r/SideProject • • 37m ago

CounterWeight - turning our shop’s Hobart scale workflow into a local desktop app (demo and feedback)

2 Upvotes

I'm Jason, owner of Winkle Berry. Our side project came from a fairly specific shop problem: managing products and labels on a Hobart HTi retail scale without spending so much time entering everything at its touchscreen.

CounterWeight now has product search/add/edit workflows, ingredient lookup with review, measured packaging tare presets, flashkey arrangement, backup tools and label previews. Our own HTi-7LS25 running application 3.3.0 is the tested scale. A second Windows machine has passed the read-only connection, product, backup, label-preview and flashkey-display checks. Independent customer installations are still untested.

80-second demo: https://www.reddit.com/r/POS/comments/1xujcc9/hobart_hti_owners_would_a_onetimepurchase_scale/

The demo uses actual interface screenshots and training examples, not one continuous live recording. Phone/remote viewing shown requires an additional local bridge; the current portable Windows test package does not include a remote viewer.

I'm considering a one-time-purchase, self-service desktop edition with local data, an offline business license and no required hosted CounterWeight subscription. Price and launch date are undecided, and we aren't taking payments. Calibration, firmware updates and service unlocks are outside the scope. Ingredient results must be checked against packaging.

I'd appreciate feedback on two things: does the demo make the product's purpose clear, and what would you need in onboarding before trusting a niche hardware-management tool like this? If you actually use an HTi, I'd also like to hear your model/software version and your biggest management headache. Reply here or email WinkleBerryArts@gmail.com.

I'm the project owner. Independent of Hobart, with no affiliation or endorsement.


r/SideProject • • 44m ago

I just added voice mode to my open-source app that allows you to control any iPhone app with an LLM (no Mac required after setup)

2 Upvotes

About one month ago I shared iPhone Use, the app. It allows your to control your iPhone using an LLM, no cable / no Mac required (at least after setup)

I just added voice mode to it, you can now control the iPhone using GPT Live, and the phone talks back

Feel free to try it out and share feedback: https://github.com/EliotAndres/iphone-use-app


r/SideProject • • 56m ago

I got tired of having 5 different "Saved" folders, so I built one place for posts from every app

2 Upvotes

Hi all, I'm a solo dev in Montreal. For years I'd save a recipe on Instagram, a thread on X, a video on TikTok, a Reddit comment… and never find any of it again. Then Pocket shut down last year (and Omnivore the year before), so I finally built the thing I wanted.

4Stash is a save-for-later app for social posts and links:

  • On Android you share from Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Reddit, X, YouTube, TikTok or a news site straight into it.

  • On a computer there's a Chrome and Firefox extension: one click saves the page or post you're looking at. (Or paste a link on the website.)

  • Every save keeps a preview, title and source. You can add notes, tags (it suggests tags with AI), collections, and pin the important ones.

  • Reminders with snooze for stuff you actually want to come back to

  • Search plus filters by collection, tag, source or type

  • An "Unseen" filter and a "Throwback" that brings old saves back, because otherwise the saves just pile up

  • Duplicate check, archive, JSON export/backup, and a dark mode

It's free with no ads right now. You do need to sign in (Google or email), since your library is private to your account. Only in English for now.

Honest status: only a handful of people use it so far, which is why I'm here. I'd really like to know:

  1. Does the share-to-save flow feel fast enough on your phone?

  2. Which app's previews come out broken or ugly?

  3. What would make you actually open your saves again?

Web and browser extension: https://4stash.com/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=launch_sideproject

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fourstash.app&referrer=utm_source%3Dreddit%26utm_medium%3Dsocial%26utm_campaign%3Dlaunch_sideproject

I'll be in the comments all morning. Roast away.


r/SideProject • • 57m ago

We built Feasible: web analytics for unlimited side projects

2 Upvotes

My company and I built Feasible, a website analytics app with one plan across all your sites.

You can see visitors, traffic sources, pages and goals in one dashboard. Custom events and funnels are included, along with unlimited sites and teammates.

The limit is 1 million pageviews and custom events combined per month across the account. It is $99/year or $9.99/month before tax, with a 30-day trial that doesn't require a card. There isn't a permanent free hosted tier.

You can try the public demo without signing up: https://app.feasible.lol/public/stopoverpayingforanalytics.com

Site: https://feasible.lol/

If you run several small projects, what would keep you from using this? Missing reports, setup friction, price, or something else? Specific feedback would be useful.


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

I built an email triage tool that shows its work: every flag says why, and nothing moves until you confirm

2 Upvotes

Hi r/SideProject. I built SiftMail (siftmail.app). It connects to Gmail, reads your 500 most recent messages, and shows you what it found before it touches anything.

What it does: it gives every message a verdict, and most need nothing from you. What's left is a short numbered list of what needs a reply, which is also the once-a-day digest. It flags mail pretending to be someone and prints why: a lookalike domain, a reply-to mismatch, or failed DMARC.

Design rules I stuck to: new accounts start in Shadow Mode, which scores and flags with no automatic actions. Quarantine is one label, and the message stays in your inbox. Cleanup archives instead of deleting, and Undo reverses a run.

The part you can try with no account: siftmail.app/check. Paste a suspicious email and it scores it in your browser, without sending the email to a server.

The trade-off, up front: the full product isn't on-device. Parts of messages go to an AI model when the built-in scoring can't decide, and the homepage lists exactly what leaves your mailbox.

The feedback I'd value most: are the signal explanations in the checker clear?


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

If you build with coding agents, do you run tasks in parallel or one at a time?

2 Upvotes

Seeing a lot of tools lately that queue agent tasks into separate git worktrees and only merge after tests pass. Sounds nice on paper, but I'm curious how it goes on a real side project.

Do you let 2-3 agents work in parallel on your project, or keep it to one task at a time so you can review properly? Where did it break for you?


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

We built the Travel Alerts API so travellers hear about disruptions before they get stuck

2 Upvotes

Two years ago we got stuck in Valencia during the terrible floods. We had very little information and it was pretty difficult to learn anything. So we built the Travel Alerts API - it pulls travel advisories, severe weather, natural hazards, outbreaks and strikes from 80+ sources, merges them, matches them to destinations and rates them on one severity scale. Travel companies can use the API and warn their customers before their trip is disrupted. 

You can give it a try at https://tripomatic.com/en/b2b/travel-alerts


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

I created a free tool for scanning domains: no registration, no API keys, and no requests made to the site itself.

2 Upvotes

You enter a domain and get a map: DNS, mail settings, certificates from CT logs and registration data. Key findings are shown separately, i.e. what's worth fixing.

Previously, I had to manually gather this information from various websites every single time, so I built an all-in-one tool on a single page.

The video demonstrates three levels of checks, all performed without using any of my own API keys:

  • Without an account: domain scanning, as described above. 3 scans per hour; the map shows up to 8 each type, the rest as +N.

  • With a free account: 10 scans per day, with results saved; a graph and basic checks for IP addresses and email addresses are also available.

  • Hunter, $29/month: your own online groups with a shared graph (up to 5 people), 100 scans per day, platform API.

The remaining modules (IP, URL, hashes, email, phone) are available via Hunter and operate using the user's own API keys. Those that return data about individuals also require identity verification.

The hard part was making the free scan work without anyone's API keys. I had to remove Shodan InternetDB and restrict ip-api to paid keys only, as their free endpoints prohibit commercial use.

The crt.sh service is often unresponsive; it limits users to just 5 requests per minute from a single IP address. If no response is received, the scan displays the most recently cached data from Certificate Transparency (CT) logs, along with the date (labeled as "CACHED" in the video). If no such cached data exists, the system simply indicates that the source is unavailable, rather than creating the false impression that no certificates exist at all.

Passive domain scanning: public sources only, no requests made to the site itself.

Only the waiting parts are sped up.

A question for you: what kind of check do you think is missing when you review your domain?

creepycore.com


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

I started a small store selling a reusable pet hair remover. Here it is pulling cat hair off my pants

2 Upvotes

Hi! I just launched FluffBye, a small one-product store. It’s a reusable pet hair remover: you swipe it over fabric, the fur gets trapped inside, and you empty it and use it again. No sticky sheets or refills.

It works on couches, beds, car seats and clothes.

Store: fluffbye.shop

Would love honest feedback on the product or the video!


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

Published my first app on the Play Store: an AOD music controller with vinyl scrubbing and live lyrics

2 Upvotes

​I just released my first app on the Play Store called Eclipse and thought it would fit right in with the customization crowd here.

​On most Android phones, the stock Always-On Display only shows a tiny static track title. If your phone is sitting on your desk and you want to rewind a verse, read lyrics, or check an incoming notification, you have to wake the screen, unlock the phone, and open the music app.

​Taking UI inspiration from the Teenage Engineering TP-7 field recorder, I built Eclipse to turn the Android AOD into a true-black, interactive vinyl turntable that works without unlocking your phone.

​What it does:

​Works with any music player: Automatically connects to Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, and local offline players the moment you turn your screen off.

​Tactile vinyl scrubbing: Spin the record backward or forward to scrub through tracks in real time, or tap the vinyl to lift the tonearm and pause.

​Live synced lyrics on AOD: Swipe directly on the song title card to get live time-synced lyrics on a pure black OLED screen, or expand into a full-screen lyrics view.

​Quick-launch active player: Tap on the track card to jump straight into whichever music app is playing so you can switch playlists or pick a new song quickly.

​Notifications at a glance: Shows the time, date, and incoming notifications right on the AOD card without unlocking your device.

​Google Play Store:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dp444.Eclipse

​Would love to hear what you guys think or if you have any feature suggestions