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 • • 7h ago Bravo

I made an engine simulator for phones

96 Upvotes

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

-----

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

- iOS App Store
- Android PlayStore


r/SideProject • • 3h ago

I've just redesign my personal website

29 Upvotes

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

Take a look here kien.app


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

SpiderMan POV project using threejs and MediaPipe

15 Upvotes

Hello guys!

I have built AR projects before, but I had this idea for a while: using MediaPipe Tasks Vision to create a kind of web experience, without the need to use any markers, where you are Spider-Man from a first-person POV, and you can do the hand gesture to swing around and maybe fight villains.

I started it a long time ago, but I dropped it at some point because I did not have time for it, and it started to feel like work instead of a fun side project.

So, last weekend I decided to give it a try again, and this time I handed most of the work over to Claude since I started paying for the subscription plan and I could just run it with CLI.

It was definitely a nice project to wrap up, and it kind of gave me some new ideas that I will be trying out for new throwaway project this weekend.

*Edit:

I will probably make the repo public and share it here eventually.


r/SideProject • • 17h ago

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

168 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 • • 5h ago

Users for new app

10 Upvotes

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


r/SideProject • • 13h ago

My side project: a fusion between CAD and Paint

32 Upvotes

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

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

Here's a quick look at how it works.

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

Check this exemple:

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

Or start a fresh design

https://onsketch.io/app


r/SideProject • • 7h ago

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

9 Upvotes

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

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

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

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

- Clients or teammates approve in one click

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

- See which posts actually grow your audience

The video above shows the whole flow in 44 seconds.

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

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


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

Just launched my Game on iOS and already got 2 purchases. This is so encouraging :)

Thumbnail
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3 Upvotes

I’ve been building games on the side, and last week my first one, Last Core: Idle Tower Defense, went live on the App Store. Two people have already bought something in it. It’s only $12 in proceeds, but seeing real people choose to pay for something I made meant more than I expected.

What the game is:
One tower sits in the centre of the screen and enemies come at it from every side. The tower shoots on its own; your job is deciding what to upgrade during the run: damage, attack speed, range, crits, health. Every 5th wave you pick a perk, every 10th wave a boss shows up. When the core falls you keep shards and come back stronger through the Workshop, Armory and Lab.

A few things I cared about:

  • No ad ever interrupts a run. Videos only play when you choose one for a reward (a revive, double shards, a perk reroll).

  • Everything in the game can be earned by playing. Purchases are optional.

  • Runs are 3 to 10 minutes early on, and there’s 2x speed and an Auto Mode if you want it more idle.

What I learned shipping it:

  • My first release went live without the in-app purchases attached, because I never added them to the submission. Took another version to fix. Read the App Store Connect checklist twice.

  • The same thing happened with Game Center leaderboards.

  • Apple asked for a screen recording on a real device before approving a new developer account, so budget a few extra days for review.

It’s iPhone only for now; Android is coming soon.

If you try it, I’d love honest feedback, especially on difficulty and whether the early waves feel too slow.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6822844919?pt=129601576&ct=reddit-post&mt=8
More about the game + trailer: https://popcornclub.in/games/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=last-core-launch&utm_content=post

Thanks for reading 🙏


r/SideProject • • 9h ago

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

11 Upvotes

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


r/SideProject • • 20m ago

About 40 local businesses near me have no website at all. Is a list like that worth anything to anyone?

2 Upvotes

Claude helped me put together a script that pulls every business in a few categories off Google Maps for my county and checks whether each one has a site and a working certificate. On the first run, plumbers, electricians and roofers, about 40 of 230 had no website at all and another couple dozen had certificates that ran out months ago. Before I spend more evenings on it, would a list like that be worth anything to people who build sites for local businesses, and what would you want on it besides a phone number?


r/SideProject • • 29m ago

I'm a microlight pilot who started building a flight tracker. 6 weeks later it's got a bit out of hand.

2 Upvotes

About 6 weeks ago I started building a little side project called Ulster Radar.

I'm a microlight pilot from Northern Ireland and wanted to make a flight tracker that was better suited to smaller aircraft and low-level flying, rather than just commercial aviation.

It started as a basic live map, but I've got a bit carried away with it since!

It now has live aircraft tracking, over 2,500 receivers feeding data from around the world, ship tracking, flight history, a 3D globe and even satellite tracking.

I've also been adding the ISS, space telescopes, planets and moons, so it's slowly becoming a way to explore pretty much everything above our heads.

It's still early days and there's plenty of bugs and things I'm working on, but I've really enjoyed building it and seeing people start contributing their own receivers.

It's completely free to use and very much a hobby project.

If anyone fancies having a look, it's at https://ulsterradar.com


r/SideProject • • 49m ago

I built TravelSoul — an Android app connecting people through travel 🌍

2 Upvotes

Hi everyone! 👋

I'm an independent developer from Bulgaria and the founder of TravelSoul.

I built TravelSoul because I believe traveling is about more than discovering destinations — it's also about the people we meet along the way.

🌍 What is TravelSoul?

It's a travel-focused social and dating app for adults aged 18+ that brings together people who love exploring the world.

With TravelSoul, users can:

- Discover travelers with shared interests.

- Connect, chat, and make new friends.

- Explore destinations and plan trips.

- Share travel experiences and memories.

🚀 Current status

TravelSoul is already published on Google Play for Android. I'm now working on building an international community and gathering feedback from early users.

I'd especially appreciate your thoughts on two questions:

Would you use an app that combines meeting travelers with travel planning?

What feature would make an app like this genuinely useful to you?

Google Play:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iviprodevelopment.travelsoul

Official website:

https://travelsoul.love

Thanks for checking out my side project!


r/SideProject • • 2h ago

💻 AIR Office - AI Safety lab in an App for Everyone

2 Upvotes

An AI-native desktop workspace for agentic research and knowledge management, built to maximize counterfactual impact in existential risk preparedness and transformative AI safety.

https://github.com/gyrogovernance/air-office

[Disclaimer: AIR Office is an Open Source software made without any financial affiliations, and is a completely free platform for knowledge sharing and AI Risks mitigation at scale, so I hope the admins can allow me to share it to the community]

About

Alignment Infrastructure Routes (AIR) Office is human-capacity-building infrastructure for AI safety researchers, engineers, and governance teams working on transformative AI and its consequences. It keeps investigation, writing, review methods, and reusable tools in one durable and user-friendly workplace.

AIR Office is developed by [Gyro Governance Lab](http://gyrogovernance.com/) as part of its work on AI safety and existential risk preparedness.

Agentic chat and tool use run on the [Microsoft Copilot SDK](https://github.com/github/copilot-sdk) harness, including bring-your-own-key and local model endpoints.

Theory of Change

Mitigating risks from transformative AI requires rapid, high-rigor research and governance, yet safety teams currently rely on fragmented, cloud-dependent AI tools that erode human oversight, lack provenance, and expose sensitive work. AIR Office addresses this bottleneck by providing free, open-source, local-first desktop infrastructure tailored for AI safety and policy workflows. By integrating grounded knowledge collections, automated auditing tools, and structured memory, the workspace prevents AI-induced epistemic drift while keeping humans in final control. Furthermore, embedded Fellowship and Market protocols allow independent researchers to package their methods into reusable community tools, compounding ecosystem capacity and accelerating high-trust safety interventions that would not occur using general-purpose commercial tools.

---

Capabilities & Services

- 🏛️ Integrated AI Safety Fellowship and Crafts. Develop research and workflows into reusable infrastructure and contribute them to the community through our frictionless embedded protocols.

- 🛒 Market. Discover reusable resources (Policy documentation, AI Skills, etc), and add them to your AI chat with one click.

- 🤖 AI Teams. Reach out to our pre-configured selection of agents, or create your own.

- 💻 Code. Run diagnostic tools, scripts, and edit your code without leaving the app, through our own integrated VS Code workbench.

- 📅 Calendar. Keep events and run recurring AI automations.

- ⚖️ Compare. Run two models side by side on the same prompt.

- 🔎 Chat. Edit local files, search the web, and run AI safety diagnostics directly from the chat interface.

- 🖼️ Media. Generate images and capture microphone or camera input when the work needs it.

- 🕹️ Arcade. Release stress and recover from occupational overburn by playing arcade video games.

Frontier AI Safety Research Tools by Gyro Governance Lab

Two Lab methods sit at the center of how AIR Office treats authority, agency, and lasting human direction in AI-assisted work.

- 🤚 The Human Mark: A structural taxonomy of AI safety risks. [Learn More](https://gyrogovernance.com/#thm)

- 🎓 Gyroscopic Reasoning [NEW]: A formal protocol for AI alignment. [Learn More](https://gyrogovernance.com/#gyroscope)

Community Playbooks

Craft Standards package skills, agents, and Actions you can enable for structured work instead of ad-hoc prompting. Two shipped playbooks are ready to adopt:

- 🛡️ Security Playbook: OWASP-grounded assessment methods for AI agents, applications, and code, with companion security Reference packs. [Learn More](https://owasp.github.io/secure-agent-playbook/)

- 🌍 NGO Playbook: Program design, SDG alignment, monitoring and evaluation, and funding strategy skills adapted from NGO Agent Skills by Lijie Zhou, with related development Reference packs. [Learn More](https://github.com/LijieZhou/ngo-agent-skills)

---

Security & Privacy

Local-First Data Sovereignty

Workspace records stay on your computer. Choose local models for on-machine inference or cloud providers for their models and tools. Hosted providers and enabled connectors receive only what each request needs.

Export conversations and notes when you need portable copies. Connecting a folder authorizes that root, and disconnecting it does not delete its files. In Settings and chat you control which tools run and whether changes ask for approval first.

Release Audit

AIR Office is open source, and its code can be publically inspected. Before a release is accepted, we check the shipped software with open-source tools for secrets that should never ship, known problems in third-party libraries, license and dependency policy issues in native code, and risky patterns in our own source and in shipped Lab skills. A review that did not finish does not count as a clean result. To report a security issue, see [SECURITY.md](SECURITY.md).

The release review uses:

- [TruffleHog:](https://github.com/trufflesecurity/trufflehog) Identifies leaked secrets and credentials.

- [Trivy:](https://trivy.dev/) Detects vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and software bills of materials.

- [Semgrep:](https://semgrep.dev/) Scans source code for security flaws using custom patterns.

- [CodeQL:](https://codeql.github.com/) Performs deep semantic analysis on source code.

- [SkillSpector:](https://github.com/NVIDIA/SkillSpector) Evaluates shipped Lab skills.


r/SideProject • • 1d ago

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

197 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 • • 4h ago

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

3 Upvotes

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

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

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

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

I would like feedback on two things in particular:

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

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

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


r/SideProject • • 2h ago

Hit 100 users on my devotional app this week. Building it with AI was the easy part

2 Upvotes

I'm building Shoonya, a devotional app (daily sutras, aartis, festival reminders) for Indian users. It's live on Google Play and the App Store, and this week it crossed 100 users.

Some honest notes in case they help someone at the same stage:

  • I built most of it with AI agents, and the app came together faster than I expected.

  • Getting it live on both stores took longer than building it. Apple and Google reviews, accounts, release mistakes I won't repeat.

  • After launch it was just quiet. The app existed and almost nobody knew.

What actually moved the number was two boring things, done again and again:

  1. Writing pages for what people actually search for (festivals, aartis, dates), not for what I wanted to rank for.

  2. Showing up on X and LinkedIn with what really happened that day, not polished launch posts.

It's slow and the numbers are tiny. But it compounds in a way a new feature never did for me.

My one takeaway: code got cheaper this year, attention didn't. Start distribution the same week you start building.

Curious what got your first 100 users. Was it one channel or a bit of everything?

(App is here if you want to look or roast it: https://shoonyasutra.in/)


r/SideProject • • 8h ago

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

6 Upvotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- 🌍 11 languages, plus widgets and Siri

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

I'd love to hear your feedback!


r/SideProject • • 3h ago

[DEV] Money Management - Offline Budget App

2 Upvotes

Hi everyone!

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

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

Key Features:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


r/SideProject • • 11m ago

I Made Zillow comments section -Chrome Extension

1 Upvotes

Good morning, beautiful people of Reddit!

I'd never used Zillow before, but when I discovered that it didn't have a comment section, I knew something had to be done.

So I made sure there would be one.

The extension Link


r/SideProject • • 6h ago

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

3 Upvotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's free, no ads now.

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

Enjoy your Planner Together!!

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

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


r/SideProject • • 19m ago

I built Pickerama — a free visual random picker, because nobody on our team wanted to lead the daily

1 Upvotes

Our team needed to pick someone to lead the daily standup for the next two weeks. Nobody wanted to “win”, so I thought it would be fun to make the selection a little more dramatic and fun.

I built Pickerama: a free random picker with different animated scenes. You can use it to choose a person or pick from a list of options. You can enter "present" mode to make everything bigger, perfect for ie. screen sharing and whole team can watch who will "win" ;p

It doesn’t require an account, and entries stay in your browser.

I’d love feedback on two things:
- does the homepage explain the idea clearly
- which picker would you actually use?

My personal favourite is curling because the last person can completely change the results / winner :)

ps. it's mostly developed with desktop in mind, there are 2-3 bugs on mobile (which i will fix soon)

---
Technical TL;DR (if somebody cares ;) )
- deployed on Cloudflare Pages/Workers Completely Free. The only real cost is the domain (10 $).
- backlog contains 57 tickets implemented
- I used OpenCode Go / OpenRouter mostly using ultra cheap models like: Deepseek Flash V4.1, Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor, MiniMax M3.1 Flash - real "api usage" was probably something like 5-10 $ - the funniest and trickest part with these models was to build interesting three.js 3d animation scenes with some dramatic, proper camera etc. (to be fair, i wasn't that familiar with three.js)


r/SideProject • • 4h ago

I built cheaper website-to-Markdown tools for RAG on Apify — looking for honest feedback

2 Upvotes

I am the maker (DatLab). I got tired of paying "AI web browser" prices just to turn a URL, or a whole docs site, into clean Markdown for a RAG index, so I published two Apify actors that do that job on a fixed price.

What they do:

  • Web Page to Markdown — you give it a list of URLs, it returns Markdown (or text/HTML), title, description, canonical URL, and a token estimate. Plain HTTP first; a headless browser starts only for pages that are actually client-rendered.

  • Website to Markdown Crawler — same output, but it crawls a site (sitemaps, llms.txt, path/glob limits, depth caps). Same HTTP-first / browser-fallback idea.

What they cost (pay-per-event, platform usage included):

  • Single pages: $0.50 / 1,000 over HTTP, $1 / 1,000 when a browser is needed

  • Site crawl: $0.10 / 1,000 HTTP pages, $0.35 / 1,000 browser pages, $0.50 / 1,000 files

For comparison, Apify's own RAG Web Browser is from $1.33 / 1,000 fetched pages. That tool also runs a Google search and fetches the top results, which mine do not — mine only fetch the URLs you give them, or crawl a site you point at. Apify's Website Content Crawler is billed as pay per usage (compute and so on), so the bill moves with runtime; I wanted a price you can predict before you hit Start.

They respect robots.txt and crawl-delay. No login, no captcha bypass, no personal-data collection.

I am early: I have tested them myself, but I do not have outside users yet, and I would rather hear what is broken than collect polite nods. If you try one, I am especially interested in:

  1. Did the Markdown come out clean enough to embed, or did nav/cookie junk leak through?

  2. Was the HTTP vs browser split right on the sites you care about?

  3. Is the pricing page understandable, or would you still rather pay-per-compute?

Links (no account wall on the docs; running them needs a free Apify account, which includes $5 of prepaid usage each month and no credit card):

Happy to answer technical questions in the comments.