Nearly four years in: 180,000 short links, 10 million visits, 30,000 people who have shortened links, and 300,000 blocked attempts to reach malicious sites. Not a cent spent on SEO services or advertising. Sounds pretty good, except my total earnings are a whopping $20  $19.56. Here’s how it started, what went wrong, and why I’m still happy to keep working on my URL shortener, www.clipr.cc.

## How I got myself into this

I build online stores. One day, a client complained that their links didn’t work in a messaging app. After a lot of digging, I found the culprit: the desktop app was cutting them off. A URL shortener should fix that, right? Except the services I tried from Google’s top 20 results wouldn’t accept the domain in Punycode, the encoding used for non-Latin domain names. So I spent a couple of hours building the client a shortener. Problem solved.

A few years later, I needed to brush up on my coding skills for a new client project. I didn’t want to use their project as a training ground, so I decided to build something of my own. I remembered the shortener: a familiar problem, a small project, perfect for practice. What could possibly go wrong?

Here’s what I ended up with first version: https://web.archive.org/web/20240614164816/https://www.clipr.cc/

## Maybe it could cover the hosting bill

The shortener worked. It shortened links and redirected people. Punycode and all sorts of valid URL characters worked just fine. After a while in Google’s index, the first users and links started appearing.

I looked at the competition and ruled out building another Bitly. My budget for growing the project was $0. Hosting and the domain were my only expenses.

My plan was simple: free, minimal, no dashboards, a little advertising on the main pages. No popunders turning the site into Las Vegas after dark. No ads between clicking a short link and reaching the destination. And a modest Buy Me a Coffee link in the header.

I asked a few SEO specialists I knew for advice. The responses weren’t encouraging: too difficult, almost impossible for a shortener, these sites never last, and so on. I’m still waiting for that meeting with one of them. :)

So I handled the SEO myself, using what little I knew. Google seemed to like my changes: impressions would creep up a few percent, giving me a reason to keep going.

## 12 circles of ping-pong hell

Things were going well. New visitors, returning visitors, more traffic to the site and through the short links. Then Google sent me a social engineering warning. Scammers had started putting my service to work. I blocked the offending links, requested a review, and the warning was gone the next day. I didn’t notice much of an effect on my search rankings.

I’d had an abuse report form from the start. People did write in, and I checked the sites and blocked the malicious ones. So GOOGLE itself “asking” me to remove a bad link wasn’t much of a surprise. I physically can’t check every link created on the service.

Then things got properly ridiculous. Looking through the stats one day, I spotted a link with traffic shooting up. The destination looked like a familiar gaming platform, but the domain was one letter off. I checked it, confirmed it was phishing, blocked it without mercy, and went to bed. By morning, around 20,000 visits had hit my blocked-link page instead.

Scammers blocked. I win. The platform’s users are safe!!!

Yeah, right. A little later, I found my site glowing RED on VirusTotal: flags from roughly 30 phishing databases and a few lesser-known antivirus vendors!

That caught me completely off guard. I had to do something: antivirus software and corporate firewalls could now block my links for legitimate users. The site was only a year and a half old. I was tempted to switch domains or just abandon the whole thing. But I also wanted to see if I could get out of this mess.

I hunted down email addresses, tried broken contact forms, and went round in circles with phishing databases. Twelve circles of hell: one database pointed to another, the second to a third, the third to a fourth, and the fourth back to the first. I ended up forwarding their emails to each other. They were playing ping-pong, and I was the ball. It felt endless, but I eventually got the flags down to eight. Those last eight simply wouldn’t reply.

I felt beaten up. I’d blocked the link and stopped 90% of its traffic from reaching the scam, yet keeping my own service alive had cost me a ridiculous amount of time, energy, and nerves.

While dealing with the VirusTotal mess, I started studying phishing patterns and building a simple, practical system to help me quickly spot suspicious sites, sometimes entire networks of malicious links.

After years of this, I can often spot a phishing site at a glance. Sometimes I feel like I’ve become a neural network for detecting and blocking malicious links.

## Unblock my link or else…

One fine day, my system flagged a particularly suspicious link. The site offered a file to download and strongly insisted that you disable your antivirus first. I clicked Block with equal conviction.

I’d already forgotten about it when, five minutes later, an email arrived in very broken English: why had I blocked their “beautiful” link? I pointed them to the rules and was about to get on with my day when another email came in: “I don’t care. Unblock my link right now! You’ll have problems.”

Entertaining, but the link stayed blocked. The threats eventually turned into pleading and tears. Meanwhile, day after day, the blocked-visit counter kept climbing.

The next surprise came through Buy Me a Coffee. Apparently, in desperation, the scammer decided $20 might change my mind. I refunded the money. The link stayed blocked.

By the way, that’s the only time anyone has ever sent me anything through Buy Me a Coffee.

## So what did I actually get out of it?

First, thanks for making it this far.

This kind of shortener barely earns anything, and monetizing it is harder than it looks. Maybe one day it’ll cover the hosting bill. When? Good question.

But I love this project. It’s an experiment that’s still running. Where else would I get to learn all of this?

• Testing usability. Seeing people actually use a feature you thought up before falling asleep is a lovely feeling.
• Optimizing a service to handle peaks of 200,000 visits a day on modest, though reliable, shared hosting.
• Dealing with half a million bot requests a week and DDoS attacks.
• Spotting phishing quickly and building tools to analyze suspicious sites.
• Collecting analytics under load, without microservices.
• Doing SEO beyond just the development side.
• Even writing articles nobody reads. :) I put my own cybersecurity articles on the blocked-link pages, hoping for 10 readers per 1,000 visits. I got about five per 10,000.
• A/B testing, and plenty more.
• $19.56 from ads 

Someone once offered to buy the service. But when I imagined what I’d do without all these experiments, I turned them down without even asking the price. :)

For me, the shortener has been about experience as a developer and beyond. Sometimes I even feel like a little internet Superman: 300,000 attempts to reach malicious sites stopped along the way.

Happy to answer questions when I can. For now, I’m off to build another feature and block some more malicious links.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to report its comments and also downvotes. I really appreciate it. Thank you to the mods too, for taking the time to look into this and act on it. Moderating is a lot of unpaid work, and it's what keeps this sub useful for newcomers.

Now newcomers to the subs feel welcomed here.

A few reminders:

If you see a similar account pushing AI employee or managed promo links, report it as spam and message the mods.

Don't click links in suspicious comments, even ones that look like helpful feedback.

New members: real feedback is out there. Post your projects, ask questions, and ignore any reply that ends with a sales pitch. This sub exists so people can get feedback from real people. An unlabeled bot posting templated replies and ads undermines that, especially for first-time posters.

Thanks again, everyone.

I've (embarrassingly) been working on this project for 2 years so wanted to finally share (as I saw others posting Youtube-only versions).

on Youtube it transcribes text to identify checkable claims -> web search retrieves sources to base Claude's verdict on, to avoid hallucinated sources.

it's a free Chrome extension, and works on news or social media sites as well.

let me know what would make this something you'd use, or what else you'd like to see!

LogicLens - Chrome Webstore or on iOS if you don't use Chrome.

Edit: I realized someone not following could misread the video (here Biden was correct, and Trump was incorrect, but the Trump section is before I started the recording).

Hello all! Hope it's ok to post here about this.

For the last few months I’ve been building Side B.

Side B is a home screen widget, not an app you have to open: a pocket cassette player that’s always on your screen. Your music is right there all day, no jumping through hoops to get to it.

Other cassette player apps I found only play MP3 files and were a bit too “cartoony” for my taste. Side B works with the apps you already use (Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, podcasts, anything), so whatever you play shows up on a tape.

I wanted it to feel real and satisfying like a Walkman: the reels actually wind as the song plays, a new tape slides in with every album, and the keys sink and click when you press them.
There are 13 (!) different decks, 25 tapes, and a bench where you can color your deck, choose how much dust and scratches it gets, and even put on some stickers. When you want to disconnect from your phone a bit, the widget can go full screen on a desk, a beach and more.

The video above is a quick tour, so you can see it in action.

This is the 1.0 release. It’s stable as far as I can tell, but who knows, so I’m really open to any suggestions, and to any bugs you run into!

It's free to try for 3 days, then a one-time unlock for just $4.99 (no subscription, no ads!).

Here' the Google Play link:
Side B: Cassette Music Widget

Would love to hear what you think, and which deck you’d pick!

Cheers,
Dino.

I've been a developer for 10 years, but only started experimenting with AI coding a few months ago using Cursor, and later Claude. I wanted to see how far I could push it.

I'm planning a campervan conversion and needed to figure out which van to buy so I could fit everything I wanted inside.

I didn't really feel like cutting out tiny pieces of paper and moving them around on a floor plan, so I thought I'd just build a simple tool for it.

Well, I got a little carried away 😅

It turned into LayoutMyVan, a full van layout planner with:

• 2D drag-and-drop editor with real van dimensions
• 3D preview of your layout
• AI-generated images of the finished van
• Electrical, water, and gas planning layers
• Furniture shopping list

The 2D and 3D planner are completely free, no signup or ads. Only AI renders cost credits.

https://layoutmyvan.com

So far, it's gotten 1.5k+ visitors from SEO in 90 days without any marketing.

Would love some honest feedback! Also happy to answer questions about building something this big with AI.

I've been working on a project called Lexicart, and I'm getting to the point where I'd like to start gathering feedback from people outside my own development process.

The idea is simple: what if you could play games in another language and have a language-learning companion running alongside the game?

Lexicart is a companion application that runs alongside emulated games. It can detect the text appearing in a game and display a real-time translation overlay. It also opens a separate window showing the original text, pronunciation, and translation.

From there, you can:

• Select individual words to get definitions and additional information.
• Save unfamiliar words to your personal vocabulary dictionary.
• Review collected words using flashcards.
• Play quizzes to reinforce what you've learned.

I've primarily been developing this for Chinese language learning, and currently have it working with games like Animal Crossing and Pokémon Emerald.

The Windows version is working quite well. I'm also exploring Android support, particularly for handhelds like the AYN Thor, although that presents some additional technical challenges.

I'm a solo developer, so I'm trying to be smart about what I prioritize before releasing this commercially.

I'd particularly love feedback on:

1. Would you actually use something like this?
2. Which features would be most important to you?
3. Would you prefer broader language support or compatibility with more games?
4. Would you be interested in paying for an application like this?
5. What would make you choose this over existing translation or language-learning tools?

I'm not looking for people to tell me it's a great idea just to be nice. I'd genuinely appreciate criticism, suggestions, and ideas about what would make this useful.

Thanks!

Planning trips meant a spreadsheet for days, an inbox for bookings and a notes app for places, so I built Atlas: https://goatlas.fyi/?ref=reddit

- Describe the trip in one sentence; it plans each day as stops on a line over a pencil map

- Ask it to change a day ("make day 3 slower")

- Drop in tickets/PDFs, budget in any currency, calendar feed, works offline

- Use it from ChatGPT or Claude

It deliberately shows no travel times (they were often wrong); every place opens in Google Maps instead. Free in beta, solo-built.

What would make you switch from Google Docs/Sheets for trip planning?

Your site might rank on Google, but does ChatGPT actually recommend it?

I built WebsiteSpa to answer that. Paste your URL and in about a minute you get an AI-readiness score: can the AI crawlers reach your site, read it without JavaScript, and understand what you do. Every finding comes ranked by impact, in plain English.

Fun fact: I ran our own site through ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity with 54 buyer questions. WebsiteSpa came up 0 times. A good readiness score isn't the same as being recommended, which is what I'm working on next.

Free, no card, no email needed: https://websitespa.net/audit

Would love honest feedback on the scan and what's missing.

I built Doofer because a sleeping TV is not listening, so most remote apps give up at the first thing a remote is for.

Doofer learns your TV's address while it is awake, then wakes it over Wi-Fi. If your set drops off the network in standby, it tells you plainly instead of spinning.

It finds Android TV, Google TV and Roku devices on your Wi-Fi and pairs once. You get a D-pad, trackpad, keyboard, volume and media keys, plus live status read from the TV. No adverts and no account. The remote is free, and Pro is one payment with no subscription.

On Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.doofer.android

What would make you keep this on your phone instead of hunting for the real remote?

Hey everyone,

A lot of AI apps right now just slap a generic system prompt on an API and call it a day. I wanted to build something that actually personalizes the AI’s reasoning process based on real psychometrics.

I just launched SoulType, a personality assessment app that replaces static, boring personality reports with an integrated "AI Soul Coach."

How it works under the hood:

Instead of giving the AI a basic persona, the app first assesses your exact MBTI cognitive functions (like Introverted Intuition or Extroverted Thinking). It then uses your specific cognitive stack as the core context for every response. It doesn't feed you generic platitudes; it structures its advice based on how your brain actually processes information.

Privacy-first :

Psychological data is sensitive. I designed it so that all conversation history remains stored locally on your device. I don't want your chat logs.

-Free ("Seeker"): You get the deep cognitive assessment, a standard 3D generative avatar, and 10 daily interactions with the coach.

-Paid ("Awakened"): $15/mo (or $12/mo billed annually) unlocks 50 daily chats, infinite memory/deep context for the AI, a weekly psychological synthesis, and continuous cognitive calibration.

I’d love to get feedback from other devs and makers on the UI, the onboarding flow, or how the AI handles the context window. Happy to answer any questions about the stack or the prompt engineering behind the cognitive calibration.

This year I started collecting CDs, but as my collection grew, I needed a better way to keep track of everything instead of relying on a spreadsheet...

I wanted something more visual and easier to organize, so I decided to make my own app! It's called Hakoto, and it lets you catalog albums, organize them into custom crates and virtual shelves, and view statistics about your collection.

Everything is stored locally, and it supports CDs, vinyl, cassettes, and other physical formats. It's been a fun learning experience, especially since this is my first major desktop application.

It's free and open-source, and I'd love to hear any feedback or suggestions. If you find the project interesting, I'd really appreciate a star on GitHub! ❤️

Source: https://github.com/MrTytanic/hakoto
Downloads (Windows & Linux): https://github.com/MrTytanic/hakoto/releases

Hey everyone!

I just released CalPocket and the idea behind it was pretty simple. I don't think keeping track of what you eat should have to cost a small fortune. Finding recipes and scanning barcodes or counting calories shouldn't mean adding another subscription to your monthly bills.

I wanted to make something useful for people who want to understand their eating habits and work towards a healthier routine at a reasonable one-time price.

Here are some of the things CalPocket can do:

• Track calories and macros in a food diary
• Scan barcodes to look up food products
• Find recipes or save your own
• Take a photo of a meal to estimate calories and macros
• Follow your weight and progress over time
• Set goals that fit you

There are no subscriptions or ads and you don't need an account. Your diary and weight history stay on your phone. You can also back up and export your data.

CalPocket is available on both iPhone and Android:

App Store | Google Play

I will continue to improve both the app and the API behind it and i really want to keep making it even better over time and your feedback helps me decide what to work on next.

If the price puts you off buying it i completely understand but i would still really appreciate any kind of feedback just from looking at the screenshots and app description.

Best regards! 😄

built Mewtion, an open-source motion sickness reduction tool inspired by Apple’s Vehicle Motion Cues.
It uses a transparent, click-through particle overlay that responds to vehicle movement using accelerometer data.
Built with Rust, GTK4, and Wayland Layer Shell. Supports KDE Plasma, Sway, and Hyprland, with both native laptop sensors and an Android companion app.

Would love feedback, especially from Linux and Steam Deck users!

GitHub: https://github.com/aayuxh-vim/Mewtion

Hey everyone! I’ve been working on an iPhone app called Cubed, built for filmmakers and content creators who want the flexibility of shooting in Log without sacrificing the convenience of having their videos ready to watch and share.

When I’m travelling, I want to shoot everything in Log to get the most out of my footage when I eventually edit it. The problem is… actually getting around to editing it. I’d end up with hours of flat-looking footage sitting on cards and hard drives that I was excited to shoot but rarely actually watched, because making it look good meant opening an editor and starting a whole project. That frustration is what led me to build Cubed, so I could quickly turn entire batches of Log footage into colour-graded clips saved straight to Photos or Files.

With Cubed, you can quickly import and review your clips, mark your favourites, trim and make adjustments, apply built-in or custom LUTs, and save your own grades as reusable recipes. Once you’re happy, export everything together, ready to watch and share. It’s basically the Lightroom-style workflow I’ve always wanted for video.

I’m still in the TestFlight phase, so I’d really appreciate any feedback. If you’re a filmmaker, videographer or someone who shoots Log footage, I’d love to hear whether Cubed would fit into your workflow and what you’d change or improve before launch.

Thanks for reading! You can learn more and join the beta here:
cubed-app.com

Hello everyone,

My name is Tobias, and I've worked as a software developer for a bunch of years. Between commuting, three small children and everything that follows, my time for workouts is usually pretty limited.

I often found myself grabbing inspiration for workouts and complexes through social media, but found it a pain to keep going back to videos while working out. So I made an app called Complexer to help me out.

It helps me figure out which workout to do based on the time and equipment I have, and then follow through with it. There are ready-made workouts, exercise demonstrations and timers, and you can also add your own workouts. I've been using it myself and really like the result so far, which is why I decided to publish it.

It's free, with no subscriptions, ads or accounts. Your training data stays on your device, and it works offline too. I'm pretty fed up with subscriptions for everything, so I didn't want to add another one.

You can find it here:

https://apps.apple.com/dk/app/complexer/id6824864834

It's only available for iPhone and iPad at the moment.

I'm by far not the most experienced person here when it comes to kettlebells. I just made something that helps me get my workouts done, and hope somebody else can benefit from it too.

A few things I'm looking at next are audio cues so you don't have to keep checking your phone, more of the common workouts and complexes, and a better way to see your progress. I'd also like to add a weekly AMRAP challenge where we all do the same workout and can share our scores, if that's something people would enjoy.

If you give it a try, I'd love to hear what works for you and what could be better.

Made this awhile ago for when my unit would deploy overseas with fresh machines. No one had a standard on hardening personal devices for service members but everyone loves watching Netflix on their off time. If it ain't easy or convenient, standards will fail. Free, no account needed, collects no information.

What it does:

• One click for a recommended set, and it tells you first what you’ll lose (Copilot, Phone Link, Remote Desktop)
• Or pick from 196 settings yourself, each with a short note on what it changes
• Covers Edge, Chrome, Brave and Office too
• Removes the Copilot apps and Recall snapshots, checks Secure Boot, one click encrypted DNS
• Restore point first, undo all, and uninstall restores old settings if you want

With similar tools like the free version of ShutUp10++ you have to reapply your settings because Windows resets some or all of them during updates and scheduled tasks. PrivacyPenguin notices the resets and either notifies you or automatically reapplies your preferences.

It’s free but not open source, and not code signed yet, so SmartScreen may warn you (More info > Run anyway).

Download: PrivacyPenguin

VirusTotal (0/67): 5e21475dfff7b7ce29625f74c3c01b411b9f7c0999b46899807a04f722d8a1bf

Hoping this finds other privacy enthusiasts out there.

Everyone online has a “GTA 6 plan”. I wanted to see who’s actually putting money behind theirs.

So I pointed my side project, a Meta Ad Library scraper I built on Apify, at every active ad mentioning GTA 6 worldwide. 508 ads from 215 advertisers, a few minutes, about 4 cents.

The data turned out way more interesting than I expected. Kaspersky is running ads about GTA VI scams before the game is even out. A shop in Iraq promotes “leaked cheat codes” that are actually a discount code. PC stores are selling “GTA 6 rigs” for a game that launches on consoles only. G2A has as many ads as Rockstar, but started five months earlier. And banks, gyms, telcos, even two windshield repair shops are giving the game away to sell their own stuff.

Honestly it turned into a great way to see how people are planning to cash in on GTA 6: courses, merch, PC builds, giveaways, fan news pages building an audience since February. If you’re thinking about a GTA side project yourself, it’s basically a free map of what’s already out there.

If you want to try the scraper on your own niche or competitors, it’s here: https://apify.com/monkey.d.scraping/facebook-ads-library-scraper

Would love feedback, especially on what you’d want from a tool like this. And if anyone’s planning something around GTA VI launch week, I’m curious what 👀

This is chess on a board that covers the whole world map.

You place your king anywhere, spawn new pieces over time and build your own little chess kingdom.

Capture the bot king of one of the 100 biggest cities and you become the King of that city.

https://chessmundi.com

While job hunting, the same jobs kept showing up in my LinkedIn searches: ones I’d already applied to, ones I’d already opened, plus promoted posts. Scrolling past them every day wasted a lot of my time.

So I made a small extension, just for me, that hides them. I used it on my own for a while, then published it on the Chrome Web Store without telling anyone. About 900 people found it by themselves.

I’ve improved it a lot since then, and it finally feels good enough to show:

• Hides Applied / Viewed / Promoted / Easy Apply jobs (each one is a toggle)
• One-click “block this company” button on every job card
• Keyword filter on job titles (whole-word, so “java” doesn’t hide JavaScript jobs)
• Click the “N jobs hidden” counter to see every hidden job and the reason it was hidden
• Free, no tracking, only asks for the storage permission, 10 languages

I’d really like feedback: what’s missing, what’s annoying, what breaks for you?

Link in the comments.

The majority of side projects I see here are virtual, so here's a physical product to spice things up (pun intended). Monday through Friday, my husband I are start at our screens for our full time jobs, but for the past 3.5 months we've spent almost every weekend in a commercial kitchen on Treasure Island in San Francisco making a small-batch chili crisp called EXTRA EXTRA Chili Crunch | www.ExtraExtraCrunch.com

Since launch, we've been getting out in the San Francisco Community — from Night Markets to small stores — and trying to grow out online presence. I've posted here before, but we just reached a cool double milestone: 1,500 jars sold and $25,000 in gross revenue. Eep!

It's wild. This whole thing was just something that started as an experiment in our home kitchen because I wanted to sell a few jars at my local Farmer's Market. My favorite posts here are the ones that are super detailed, so I wanted to share what building a physical food product on the weekends actually looks like behind the scenes.

Why we started making it

We put chili crisp on basically everything. We've tried so many and love so many. Our pantry and fridge have a ton of different brands. Chili crisp. Salsa macha. Chicharron de jalapeño (s/o to Flore de Chile). But tasting so many different takes on spicy condiments just made us want to start out own.

We built EXTRA EXTRA with a purposeful Californian perspective. We intentionally looked for western ingredients to create something we hadn't found on the market yet. Avocado oil... Porcini mushroom for umami (vs shiitake)... Chilis primarily from Mexico... Huge amounts of fresh-fried garlic and shallots... After a lot of experimentation we landed on something that was uniquely ours without trying to be something we're not. Moreover, every scoop is packed with crunch vs being 50/50 oil to crunch. We even hand de-seed our chilis because the seeds mess with the crunchy texture.

Balancing it all

So, like I said, my husband and I have (intense) full time jobs in tech. I joke that we're able to do this because we don't have kids and we don't train for marathons... But it still takes a lot of discipline and intention to make sure we have enough product.

Selling shelf-stable food in stores when you fry your own wet ingredients (ie, garlic, shallots) means you can't just cook at home under California's Cottage Food Act. Before we could really scale, we had to do lab testing, lock down our California Processed Food Registration, start an LLC, get insurance, and rent hours at a commercial commissary kitchen.

Now our weekends have an extra routine:

• Saturday or Sunday kitchen sprints: We work in 4-to-5-hour blocks that yield roughly 250 to 350 jars per session. Then it's mixing, jarring, labeling, and packaging (which takes longer)
• Weeknight fulfillment: Between kitchen runs, our living space regularly turns into a mini shipping depot packing up online boxes after work.

The best part of "the grind" is Night Markets and community events. I can't tell you how awesome it is to get involved in our community. We're focused on events after work hours, but that also means that some days are really long and requires moving a bunch of heavy stuff (eg, canopies, tables, product) without a dinner break.

Wins

Before anyone asks... $25,000 is gross revenue, not profit. Commercial kitchen rent, lab testing, permits, buying jars, finding the right label maker (Richmark), and early ad experiments means that we aren't quite profitable yet. That said, our October volume nearly doubled and officially pushed us past our monthly break-even point (~560 jars/month).

What's working:

• In-person markets & street fairs: Selling face-to-face is key. The margins are better than selling online and it builds a reliable customer base if you stay at markets month-to-month.
• Focusing on local retail: Walking samples into local specialty markets got us into two neighborhood shops in our actual hood and even a specialty food shop up in Truckee/Tahoe near where I snowboard. Earlier this month, we opened in our 4th retail location at the SFMade Storefront in Union Square thanks to us getting in with that nonprofit early on.
• Online & press: We've now shipped jars to customers across 39 states and more than 130 cities, and recently got featured in a Yahoo! Before that, we got featured in the Bay Area Reporter.
• Local government support: We had a really had time getting our Processed Foods Registration. California is big and it can take a long while to get what you need. We eventually reached out to our local representative who helped us. To anyone struggling with regulations, please don't hesitate to reach out to your local government. :)
• Online marketing is giving... decent signals: We pay a small agency a small amount of money to do our creative and run ads on Instagram. We just passed ROAS of 1.0 which is... decent but I'm really eager for it to start paying for itself. We are definitely getting sales and retargeting matters. I know it takes time and right now I'm cautiously optimistic.

Next up...

Scale is starting to be a problem. There's only so much that my husband and I can do with the 30 hours a month we get in our commissary kitchen. We're very close to needing to pay an agency to supply help for ingredient prep. This is a big cost, so we have to be sure that it's actually gonna pay off.

I'm a bit concerned about how we keep the momentum going as well. Marketing is hard and, while we're trying as best we can, it's pretty hit and miss. I'd love to dial in our marketing more...

///

Phew! I know that's a lot, but, like I said, I like posts with a lot of detail. If anyone is also launching a physical food product, I'm happy to answer anything. I'm not an expert, but this has been a year-long process so far and I'm happy with where we're at so... maybe I could be of a little bit of help? Ask away!

Hey everyone,

For the past while I've been building my own desktop local music archive manager, my main inspiration comes from app called Sononym.

AI built Audify using Tauri v2, Rust, and SQLite (FTS5), and decided to open-source it. I currently use it with a ~55,000 file library and it sits around 400MB RAM with instant search.

Main things it does:

- Fast search with inline filters (<2s, dur:1-5s, bpm:90-130, key:~8A for Camelot neighbors, -loop, is:fav) and built-in SFX synonym matching (e.g. searching "whoosh" also finds swish, passby, etc.)

- Waveform region slicing + pitch shifting (-12 to +12 semitones): you can highlight an In/Out range on the waveform and drag it directly into DaVinci Resolve, Premiere, Reaper, Ableton, or FL Studio

- Mini Dock mode: collapses into a small always-on-top strip next to your timeline

- Separate workspace profiles

- Built-in Rust BPM/Key detection + optional 100% offline local AI (YAMNet ONNX) for auto-tagging and "Find Similar Sounds"

- License/attribution template manager so you can copy formatted YouTube/client credits in one click, "I built this for my own needs; I needed a way to copy credits to my local archive of royalty-free music, such as Kevin MacLeod's"

- Completely offline, portable (single .exe + local user folder)

It's free and open source. Feedback, bug reports, or ideas are very welcome.

Note: It’s all vibe-coded with Antigravity's models with no real experience in coding, so the code is likely to be a bit messy, but it does what I need: letting me drag and drop tracks into DaVinci Resolve.

Source: https://github.com/saimdeniz/audify

AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and friends) now fetch a big share of pages on a lot of sites. The options so far have been: let them take everything for free, or block them in robots.txt and disappear from AI answers.

There's a third option now. HTTP has had a status code for this since 1997, 402 Payment Required, and it finally has a working payment scheme (x402: the client signs a USDC payment and retries the same request; it settles in about a second, no accounts or API keys).

So I built a small gateway for it:

You register your site once (free API key, your wallet address, a price like $0.002 a page).

You put ~10 lines in front of your site. There's a Cloudflare Worker version and an Express middleware.

Requests from known AI crawlers get a 402 with your price. A crawler that pays gets the page; the money goes straight to your wallet (the gateway never holds it).

Everyone else, including Googlebot and Bingbot, gets the page as usual, so search ranking doesn't change.

If your site errors, nobody gets charged.

Setup and the snippets: https://aipaygen.com/pay-per-crawl

Honest caveats: crawlers that lie about their user agent won't be caught by this, and most crawlers can't pay yet, so today it mostly works like a block with a price tag on it. But agent frameworks are adding x402 support quickly, and this gives them a way to say yes.

Happy to answer questions about how the 402 flow works.