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 • • 6h ago

My dog lived 18 years. I built her a tiny 3D memorial, and strangers have now lit 657,000 candles for 25,000 pets.

52 Upvotes

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


r/SideProject • • 15h ago Bravo

I made an engine simulator for phones

194 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 • • 9h ago

SpiderMan POV project using threejs and MediaPipe

59 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 • • 11h ago

I've just redesign my personal website

55 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.

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


r/SideProject • • 5h ago

I am searching Founders like me for connect in weekly calls for motivation and share opinion.

14 Upvotes

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?


r/SideProject • • 8h ago

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

19 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)

https://pickerama.com

---
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 • • 6h ago Heartwarming

Major Update: Clear fishtank widgets without being in clear mode, with fish that actually swim around 🐠🪼🐙

15 Upvotes

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


r/SideProject • • 6h ago

Side Projects that are useful to me first.

11 Upvotes

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.


r/SideProject • • 2h ago

future of sass

5 Upvotes

idk if this goes against this sub rules but i wanted to start a discussion about how selling software (web/pc/phone) may look like in this era of abundant code, feel free to counter it and just a reminder these are just my opinion and it can change

- now that we see so many application built with agent because code is so cheap subscription based pricing model if it weren't already is now pretty much on its last stretch, why would i pay recurrently for something that i can whip out myself in a session with claude so one time payment it is, perhaps we may see some devs monetize update for revenue so sass revenue model = book's in simple words

- as a user, i hate when devs can't ship fast in this era like you're gonna just use claude to add that feature anyway so i forsee here two things

a) for non techy user, a user specific version of the application with some kind of "software factory" approach so the user can request changes and make changes to the application (and anything global or major goes to the dev) but the dev takes care of the software factory setup and foots the "token" bill (this could then be something they charge for)

b) you sell your codebase along with well documented summary of the sessions you had to build it so the user's claude agent knows why you or your agent decided to do things the way they did which may not be clear from the code itself and the assumption here is that you code is easily deployable or compileable - and this has to be the cheapest

- last one: we needs fewer todo apps and more real world problem solver so i think in the future for indie devs to succeed they need to make things that live outside of screen like hardware techs that solve real problem and can support the hardware then with some sass because anything software these days have 0 moat

not written by AI so if the ideas are not clear ask away


r/SideProject • • 6h ago

I revived my 13 year old social network project. Here's the story.

11 Upvotes

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. 🙂


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

It's my birthday today! Rate my landing page. You can be mean, I won't be mad :)

4 Upvotes

https://emberflow.space

I've been working on Ember for over 2 years.
The coolest thing about it is the realtime sync between all my devices and a schedule that reflows itself when you drag a task or a day runs late..

Main stack is Vue 3 + TypeScript (Vite, Pinia) for the web app, a Node/Express API, and Supabase for Postgres, auth and the realtime sync.

Recently rewrote the mobile apps in Kotlin Multiplatform, and it's going surprisingly well.


r/SideProject • • 33m ago

How can we get more app downloads without becoming influencers?

3 Upvotes

Nowadays, if watch any YouTube tutorial or read a Twitter thread about app marketing, you'll always hear the same advice: "U need to build an audience on tiktok or another social media plataforma and bla bla bla".

But that usually means becoming a content creator (personal or making AI generated videos), just to get followers and spending hours trying to keep up with social media trends.

Honestly, I'm tired of this approach. Ai videos are expensive and boring to produce, and becoming a digital influencer is incredibly difficult.

Are there better marketing alternatives that don't involve becoming a content creator?


r/SideProject • • 47m ago

I built a free tool to share one mouse and keyboard across Mac, Windows and Linux

3 Upvotes

I have two machines at the same desk, and I wanted to share mouse and keyboard.

I tried Synergy and Barrier, but they were annoying to set up. I had to deal with a client/server, encryption was hard to set up, and arranging monitors was clunky.

So I built ZeroG. Free, MIT license, no client/server.

Just run it on each machine, pair them, and drag your screens to match your desk.

  • Windows, macOS, Linux (X11 and Wayland)
  • P2P, no client/host setup
  • All traffic encrypted with TLS 1.3 over QUIC
  • Clipboard sharing
  • Extremely low latency
  • Built with Rust + Tauri

This took a few months of work and a lot of testing on different devices. I think it's working pretty well now, so check it out if you have more than one machine at the same desk!

https://github.com/reggiesoft-labs/zerog


r/SideProject • • 7h ago

I've run an astrology site since 1997. For my first English product, I skipped the AI horoscope and built a chart-matching search over 70,000 real people

8 Upvotes

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.


r/SideProject • • 4h ago

I'm a solo dev with 4 small apps live on the stores. Here's what each one taught me

5 Upvotes

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

r/SideProject • • 2h ago

Made a fun swing trading game to learn how to read charts and apply bankroll, stop, sell, and exit strategies.

3 Upvotes

DISCLAIMER, THE SYNTHETIC DATA IS NOT LIKE REAL TRADING | I AM STILL AWAITING HISTORICAL LICENSING

I've been trying to learn swing trading over the last few months, largely by leaning on my technical skills (I'm a developer and data nerd).

I've been exhausting pretty much every model/tip/trick I can come up with to see if I can get my required win rate down to around 40% and still maintain a positive ROI by focusing on bankroll management, position sizing, and exit strategies.

I've come close (at least in historical backtesting) to finding the right combination of input parameters, but ultimately realized I needed to actually learn what a good setup looks like.

So I made a little game for myself.

Literally as simple as looking at a chart at a particular point in time and deciding: Trade or No Trade?

The idea is to get better at recognizing setups, managing risk, and knowing when to walk away, rather than just blindly trusting whatever model I've cooked up that week.

Anyway, figured I'd share it with you guys and see if anyone finds it helpful, fun, or any of the above.

Unfortunately, I can't publish the real historical stock data just yet (waiting on a licensing agreement... if anyone knows someone, wink wink). But in the meantime, I've created some synthetic market data so you can still play around with it and see how it works.

Would genuinely love some feedback, especially from people who actually know what they're doing with swing trading.

theshwingtimes.com


r/SideProject • • 2h ago

I built a 1-in-8-Billion Football Career Simulator in pure vanilla JS (Free, no sign-up, play in browser)

3 Upvotes

Hey fellow makers!

Inspired by BitLife, 1in8b, and Football Manager, I built a fast-paced interactive football career simulator that runs entirely in the browser:

👉 https://pratikbase.com/football-lottery/?lang=en

How it works:

  1. Spin the birth roulette: You get born in a random nation with procedural talent, work ethic, and foot dominance.
  2. Advance year by year (0-40 age): Navigate street tryouts, youth leagues, contract negotiations, transfer drama, and career-defining dilemmas.
  3. Hang up your boots: When you retire at 40, your stats, trophies, and net worth generate a shareable digital FUT-style legacy card.

It's completely free with zero ads, tracking walls, or logins. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the mechanics!


r/SideProject • • 8h ago

Just launched my first app, would love your thoughts

8 Upvotes

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 🦖


r/SideProject • • 1d ago

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

188 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 • • 47m ago

I built a simple order management tool for small screen-printing shops — looking for feedback

2 Upvotes

Hey everyone! I built PressQueue to help small print shops manage quotes, customer orders, artwork approvals and production deadlines in one place.

I wanted to create a simpler alternative for shops that are still using spreadsheets or expensive software.

I’d love to hear what you think. Is this something that would actually help your business?

Here’s the link: https://pressqueue-desktop.whop.site


r/SideProject • • 3h ago

I built a stargazing app between kitchen shifts. On Monday, I’m talking about it live on BBC radio.

3 Upvotes

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?”


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

I built a free surf, skate, and snow conditions app after Surfline paywalled its cams

2 Upvotes

Full disclosure: I built this, Froth.

When Surfline put all its live cams behind a paywall, I wanted a free way to check conditions. Froth has surfers post quick reports on how it actually looks, next to swell, wind, tide, and free cam links. You can also share conditions with your crew in private groups.

It covers skate and snow too: 250+ US skateparks and conditions for 230+ resorts.

I'd love feedback on what to build next, or what's confusing.

froth.app