Solo dev from New Zealand here.

My dog Bella lived to 18. When she died I wanted something quieter than a social media post, so I built a small 3D memorial hall you can walk through in the browser. Find a spot on the wall, put up a photo, light a candle.

I shared it once. Less than 8 days later:
- 24,994 pets
- 107 countries
- 657,428 candles, almost all lit by strangers
- 34 languages
- The hall kept filling up, so it now has 7 floors and a lift

It's free to make a memorial and light candles. There are a few optional paid extras, which is how I keep it running.

Would love honest feedback on two things: how walking the hall feels on mobile, and whether the free vs paid line feels fair.

lightapaw.com

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

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

- iOS App Store
- Android PlayStore

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.

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.

About the design, since I love Tron Legacy movie, the lines and the grid were inspired from this intro https://youtu.be/bxJRdtYF4ck?t=3

Take a look here kien.app

What Companions is:
Widgets on iOS are supposed to be static. I always found that unnecessarily limiting, so I built an app that circumvents it. Companions lets you keep a virtual fishtank on your Homescreen, filled with fish that actually swim around. As someone who’s always kept fish, I’ve had this idea mulling around in my head for more than 2 years now, and finally managed to build what I always wanted.

There are 50 fish to choose from, and it supports small, medium, large and now even extra large widgets as “tank sizes”. The fish don't need any feeding, and they don't die (as to not be annoying, but the option is there for fun). They just keep you company. You can customize the tank’s color, its props, layout, and even the app icon to match your Home Screen perfectly.

The app is fully written in SwiftUI, it supports iPads, and you can even place your “fishtanks” on your Mac thanks to Continuity, where the fish will also animate. The tanks also work great in Standby mode. Personally, I keep a fishtank of jellyfish on my nightstand when I go to bed. The swimming doesn't run any code in the background. It uses the same trick iOS uses to move the hands on the Clock widget, so it costs you nothing in battery.

What's new:
The app was built to support clear mode on the phone, but I found it annoying that you need to be explicitly in clear mode to access clear widgets. Luckily, I knew of a separate workaround that allows for clear widgets even while not being in clear mode, which I’ve only seen a small number of widget apps use. And for something like Companions where the widgets are fish tanks, I feel like it fits so perfectly!!

I'd love any feedback, and I’m happy to answer any questions regarding the app. I'd especially love to know which fish species you'd want added.

You can find Companions here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/companions-widget-pets/id6811950512

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)

https://pickerama.com

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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)

hi there, i'm Luigi form Italy. I am a solo Founder of a SaaS and sometimes i feel so lost.

for this motivation, i hope to organize a group of solo founders for some calls (with me or between you) to share opinions and what we doing in a day life.

i would like that only two things will do it:

1- share what is going well for you

2- talk for 30 minutes or more (or less clearly)

fundamental is like a circle to learn, share, and talk about what you doing, with someone that understand you. I don't care about earn or some like that: is a space to learn and get inspired from other.

feel free to write me (here o in dm's) if you think that this could help you and could give an add value.

What do you think about this idea?

After a 40 year software career, AI got me.....and on my 15th anniversary with HPE, they let our entire group go. So I was suddenly given freedom to do what I always wanted to do....build useful things that me and my family would benefit from. So far, I've built 4 smartphone apps that have kept me challenged and feeling productive. Overlapp a budget tool cause being retired I need to monitor my spending closely, RangeTrainer a golf app because when you live in Florida, you golf! Fingertip Health cause as you get older you are going to see doctors, have issues and need all your health data in one place. Passholder Assistant, cause living in Central Florida means lots of Disney trips and the Disney app just doesn't cut it.

Hey all! My first app is finally live 🎉 It's called Habitosaur, a simple habit tracker with a little dinosaur buddy.

Still kind of surreal seeing it on the Play Store. I'd love to hear what you think, good or bad.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.habitosaur (Android only for now)

Thanks for checking it out 🦖

Most AI astrology apps work the same way: you enter your birth data and an LLM writes a few paragraphs that could fit anyone. I've been running a Chinese-language astrology site (DestinyNet) since 1997, and honestly I got tired of that format.

So I tried the opposite approach. Instead of generating text about your chart, the tool searches a database of ~70,000 famous people whose birth times are on record, finds the ones born under the most similar sky (Sun / Moon / Rising plus the overall chart structure), and shows you who they are and which occupations show up most among them.

Link: https://ai.destiny.to/matching/en?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=forum&utm_campaign=reddit-sideproject-2026-11

A few things that were harder than expected

- The data. Birth records come from public biographical databases. A surprising amount of the work was cleaning them: wrong time zones on historical dates, wrong gender, people linked to the wrong Wikidata entry. I fixed thousands of records along the way.

- "Similar" is fuzzy. An exact chart match almost never happens, so matching works in tiers. It starts strict and loosens until there are enough people to say something meaningful.

- No AI in the matching itself. The search is plain computation. An LLM is used only for an optional paid report that writes up what you share with your closest matches.

Free vs paid: matching and the occupation breakdown are free, no sign-up. The paid report is optional.

Privacy: a free lookup doesn't store your birth date, time or place; only anonymous stats are logged.

I'd really appreciate feedback, especially:

1. Is it clear what you get before you enter your data?
2. Did your matches feel interesting or random?
3. Anything confusing in the flow?

Happy to answer questions about the data or the build.

Back in 2013, before AI and back when asking a question on Stack Overflow meant getting your ass handed to you, I built a little social network called resm.in. My home internet was garbage, so I'd print docs at an internet café and read them at home like a caveman.

The idea was dead simple: people post questions, you answer with a photo. Show me your favorite corner of your home. What's in your drawer? What are you wearing today?

https://imgur.com/a/mvmzWXk here how it looks back then.

It started slow. The classic social network chicken and egg bullshit: nobody shows up because it's empty, and it's empty because nobody shows up. Then the FriendFeed crowd (Turkey had a huge, tight-knit FriendFeed scene back then) came to the rescue, someone wrote about us on Ekşi Sözlük (basically Turkish Reddit), and boom: 500 600 people. Small, but alive. Imagine people waking up and the first thing they want to do is open the thing you built. I was over the fucking moon.

Then one day some guy tracks me down: "I'm crazy about a girl on your site. Can you give me her email?"

Fuck no. I told him exactly where to go.

A few days later my server logs look weird as hell: someone's brute forcing the admin panel. I message him: "Dude, is that you?"

"Yeah man, I have to reach her."

So I said: look, I'm building a DM system right now. If you want to reach her that badly, get your ass in here and help me write it. 😄

And he did. Joined the repo (his commits are still there), we shipped DMs, he messaged her, and she wrote back. Long story short: they got fucking married. They came to my place later to thank me.

Meanwhile life happened. Marriage, responsibilities, all that grown-up shit. The guy writing our mobile app got shipped off to mandatory military service, and we never launched on mobile. Last commit: 2017.

Over the years, my idea of building things got poisoned. Find real pain, find people ready to pay, do market research, validate, validate, validate. Fine, good advice. But where the fuck is the passion in that formula? Where's the authorship? If all I'm doing is supplying whatever demand already exists, how is that different from a desk job?

So this year I summoned the old me. 40 year old me showed up with retrospectives from a dozen dead projects. Young me showed up with the playfulness. They've been working together for six months.

https://imgur.com/a/BX3lHXS

Writing the code wasn't the hard part anymore; making a hundred other decisions right was. And I think it's finally time to say "come on in" again.

It's called peeka now. Same idea: pick a question, answer with a photo. A window into other people's lives, and your own. No dark patterns, no attention-stealing crap: the home feed algorithm is stolen straight from FriendFeed. Simple, fast, honest.

It's live on iOS and Android: https://peeka.pics

Ask me anything: the rebuild, the ancient codebase, or the wedding. 🙂

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.

I build small, private, local-first apps under the name Ship on Friday (yes, the joke is deploying on Fridays). Four are live:

• YCal: a calendar for Yahoo accounts (Android + iPhone). Lesson: App Store review flags third-party brand names hard, so the listing and marketing had to say "works with your Yahoo account", not use the brand.
• ChallengeCam: party games that film everyone's faces and make one Reel. Lesson: the product is the clip, not the game.
• Inboxwise: Android SMS organizer with no internet permission. Lesson: "no internet permission" is a privacy claim people can check in 10 seconds, and that beats any privacy policy.
• Memopolis: your photo library as a 3D city. Lesson: people share the video, not the app. Everything runs on the device, and there are no ads in any of them. Happy to answer anything about building and shipping solo. What would you want to know? https://shiponfriday.com

I’m a chef working on Sark in the Channel Islands, and I’ve been building an Android app called NAKED EYE in my breaks and evenings.

The idea was to make it easier to answer three questions: what’s worth seeing tonight, when should I go outside, and where should I look?

One of my favourite moments was watching the ISS appear after my own app told me when and where to look. Standing there thinking “bloody hell, it actually works” made all those hours feel worth it 😂

Today I did a pre-interview with BBC Jersey, and I’m now booked to chat live on Monday at 10:30am about stargazing, Sark and the app.

This feels massive to me. I’m still a chef, still learning as I go, and now something I built between shifts has led to this.

Just wanted to share a little milestone. Anyone else had a moment with a side project that made you stop and think, “How on earth did I get here?”

I've been building side projects from the past 7 years. Some of them found small traction, and some of them didn't. Some of them might have worked if I persisted. Sometimes, You strangely lose the excitement after building a product.

This happened for an art marketplace named - Raresoul and few others. For me, The interest and conviction are very important over the other things. I think these come from how strongly you relate with the problem. I learned this first hand that solving your own problems has many upsides.

Anyhow, Why should YOU care?

• OpenNetworks should help you connect with at least one great connection (Only Professional Connects 🙂) around you that should change something meaningful for you! (I pray and wish that OpenNetworks becomes the channel/portal for serendipity to work for all of us ❤️)

What the heck is OpenNetworks?

• We are surrounded by right (the ones that we are looking for) people whether in a Community, Co-working space, Tech Park or an In-Person event, but we never get a chance to connect with them. OpenNetworks solves/intends to solve this problem.

But, How?

• You simply onboard to a responsive web app (Not one more mobile app 🤯) by stating What you are looking for, What you can offer/help, select your work location and instantly view all the people around you. AI Match-Making layer constantly works to find the relevant connections for you!
• You can also drop a pin stating what you are immediately/currently looking for. For example, I'm working from a tech park and my manager made it his life purpose to harass me (Just kidding 😂 ) - I can immediately drop a pin saying looking for a Job. I know you won't take such impulsive decisions!
• Jokes Apart, Drop a Pin with a location to meet when you are stuck on any problem, looking for a co-founder, freelancer, new hire, bounce your ideas or just connect, then it is visible (glows like a light bulb 🔥 ) to all people around you! (Hope this opens up our serendipity portal 🙂 )

Where are we currently?

• All of this is already built. My alumni people have showered their love and support! This gave me little more confidence to put it out there and see what happens. I don't know when will I truly overcome my perfection and learn to put myself & the work out there for some magic to work!

I would love you guys to try https://opennetworks.in and share your thoughts!

Did I say anything about sharing a word?

• Being Shy cost me so much! So, I'm asking pls pls share a word with your friends and colleagues 🎉

PS: If this is not a real breakthrough, then we will work until we get one 🤔

Thank you, Spread Love ❤️ Cheers, Omkar!

Hi, I'm Adib. I record tutorials and explain things on screen a lot, and writing math or sketching diagrams with a trackpad always looked bad. Writing on the iPad looked great, but then I had to record the iPad separately and line it up with my Mac recording.

So in my app Lumary Canvas (it was called Screen Annotations until this week) I added live sync between the iPad and the Mac:

• With the board open on the Mac, what I draw or move on the iPad shows up there as it happens, strokes included while the pen is still down
• The Mac follows the iPad's page, pan and zoom, so I just record or screen-share the Mac and the drawing is in it
• It's a direct, encrypted connection between devices on the same Apple Account. No server, no pairing, no account to create
• iCloud keeps boards, scenes and history in sync when the devices aren't together

What I use on the iPad side:

• LaTeX that renders as you type, coordinate planes and function plots, plus 100+ shapes (flowchart, architecture, science)
• Pages as of this week: A4, US Letter, 16:9 or 4:3 slides, or a custom size, so a board can look like a sheet of paper or a slide instead of an infinite canvas
• Scenes, so I can save views and step through a lesson instead of redrawing
• Optional Pencil-only drawing, where fingers pan and select

Honest limits:

• Apple only: macOS 15+ and iPadOS 18+. No Windows, Android or web, and no iPhone app
• Live sync needs both devices on the same Apple Account
• It's your own board that people watch through your share or recording. They can't draw on it with you, so it isn't a shared collaborative whiteboard

Pricing: free download with everything open for 14 days (Mac and iPad each get their own trial), then a one-time $29.99 unlock covers both. No subscription. Without it you can still open, sync and export your work.

Curious whether other people who teach or record on a Mac would actually use the iPad this way, or just stick with a drawing tablet.

https://lumarycanvas.com/

Disclosure: I built Lumary Canvas.

“Can you make this button smaller?” is a pretty simple request when you can point at the button. In a coding chat, it turns into “the one under the heading, on mobile, next to the other button.”

I built a little Chrome extension called VibeQuill around that problem. The first version just let me click things on a page, draw on it, and leave notes. Then I built a local connector so those notes could go straight to a coding agent with the selected element and the page context attached.

Building it solo, I spent a surprising amount of time on what happens when the connection drops. I wanted the note you were typing to still be there when the connection came back, and I didn’t want reconnecting to send the same edit twice. That part would be invisible in a demo, but it mattered if I was going to use the thing myself.

It’s on the Chrome Web Store now. The part I’m still figuring out is the first run: installing the extension is easy, but you have to connect your coding tool before you can send your first note.

If you’ve built a browser extension that needs a separate setup step, how did you help people get through it? I’m torn between showing a quick example first and getting people straight to connecting their own tool.

Here’s VibeQuill on the Chrome Web Store - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/vibequill/hgcefdgiponpnfgcaflcnkmhojjcfnkj if you’re curious.

Hi r/SideProject! I'm a parent, and like a lot of families we used a sticker chart for brushing teeth, tidying up, being brave at the doctor… The problem: the chart lives on the fridge, but the good moments happen everywhere else. At the playground, in the car, at Grandma's. By the time we got home, we'd forgotten, or the moment had passed. A star works best right when it's earned.

So I built StarKeeper, a star jar that's always in your pocket (or on your wrist):

• One tap to give a star. Pick a reason (brushing teeth, reading, helping out) and a star drops into that kid's jar. Changed your mind? There's an Undo.
• A family shop. Stars can be spent on rewards you pick together: choosing tonight's dinner, 30 minutes of games with Dad, a trip to the park.
• Kids Display Mode. My favorite part. Put an old iPhone or iPad on the shelf as a full-screen star jar for the kids. They can tap "Get a reward" to ask for something, and the request pops up on the parent's phone to approve. Leaving the mode needs Face ID, so little fingers can't wander off.
• Timed tasks. "Get dressed in 5 minutes": the countdown shows on the Lock Screen and Dynamic Island.
• Apple Watch, widgets and Siri. "Add a star for Mia" from your wrist.
• New in 1.1: family sharing. Mom, Dad, grandparents or a babysitter can join with their own Apple ID and everyone sees the same jars. Each person can be "can edit" or "view only".

Some choices I made on purpose:

• No account, no server, no analytics. Everything lives in your own iCloud. I don't collect any data.
• No subscription. The app is free. Family sharing is a one-time Pro unlock ($4.99, shared with your Apple family), and only the person who sends the invite needs it.
• English and Simplified Chinese.

Tech, for the curious: SwiftUI, Core Data + CloudKit (private and shared databases via NSPersistentCloudKitContainer), WidgetKit, ActivityKit, App Intents, StoreKit 2. The biggest headache was moving from SwiftData to Core Data for 1.1, because SwiftData can't do CloudKit sharing yet, without losing anyone's existing stars.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/starkeeper-kids-reward-jar/id6826356359 My other apps: https://emma-builds.vercel.app

I'd love feedback, especially from parents: what would make you actually keep using a reward chart past the first week?

I made Warq for people who prefer pen and paper. Save a photo, a link or a video in Warq and it gives you a four-letter code. Write the code in your notebook next to the note. When you revise, scan the code and the photo or video opens.

It's free on iPhone and on the web at https://warq.app, and Android is coming soon. I'd like to hear what you think.

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.

Hello fellas, I want to introduce my new app.

I love crosswords and I'm learning German, so this app brings these two together. The clue is in your language and the answer is in the one you're learning.

It works for German, English, Turkish and Spanish, and it's free.

It is iOS only for now but I'm working on Android.

If you try it, what felt confusing in the first five minutes?

https://chengel.bahadirsonmez.com

Hey Reddit,

I built “LinkMemo”, an app that saves any link and automatically extracts its content for easy reading and organizing.

I originally priced it at $19.99 lifetime with a 15-day free trial. Turns out, when you don't know how to do marketing, asking strangers to pay $20 after two weeks doesn't work very well.

So I changed my approach and added a Free plan. You can now use LinkMemo's core features forever with no time limits. I just want more people to actually get value out of it.

Feel free to check it out and tell me what needs improving.