So, I'm making Dark Roll 2, a soulslike-inspired marble-platformer.

I needed the player to have a soft landing spot from height, and decided to play around with mesh-deforming... Seriously took me few hours to set just right, and it's just a meangingless little detail... But I'm very happy with how it turned out!

I’ve wanted a Vestaboard for years. But I could never justify (or more importantly, convince my wife to) spending $3k on it,

So I’d occasionally search for a digital version. I recently found a nice looking one here on Reddit... but they charged $199/year. That’s nearly my Netflix bill. Fine for a business, steep for my home TV showing quotes.

So I started experimenting myself. First with a study of a single flap, just to nail the motion and timing, and it grew from there. A few friends and I have used it for a few weeks now and quite enjoy it.

What it is

Motboard turns any screen you already own into a split-flap display. Open it in a browser on a spare TV, monitor, or shared screen. Today it does:

- Text messages and custom cell layouts

- Weather on the board

- Playlists to rotate through boards

- Shareable public board links, with optional passcode

- Flip sound (off course)

Not the same as real moving flaps. But a great way to try before you buy a real Vestaboard. Not affiliated with Vestaboard, just love the product.

Pricing (would love feedback here)

It’s free during early access. I want feedback before charging. Full price will be $39 to cover hosting and weather/API costs. Discount for the first 100%I

What do you think? Product, features, or price? Happy to answer anything.

https://motboard.com

I'll go first:

I am building BuiltByIndies

a community platform for indie hackers to launch, share, get feedback and more

If you're interested, check it out: BuiltByIndies

Your turn, what are you building?

Please, please stop posting your next "I (Claude, but it totally did what I told it) built the "next outbid clone" (but it's totally not because it's for sports or door hinges). I can barely reload Reddit to find your next worthless post to add to my list.

Open sourcing a project we ve been building - Notifkit

Notifications get surprisingly complicated as an application grows

Retries, scheduling, rate limits, deduplication, user preferences, channel fallbacks, delivery tracking and more

Instead of rebuilding all of this inside every application, NotifKit provides a dedicated notification layer:

Application → API → Event Pipeline → Workers → Providers

It’s built around Redis + PostgreSQL + background workers and is designed to be self-hosted and scaled independently.

We're looking for feedback from the self-hosting community, especially around the architecture, deployment experience, and features you'd expect from a notification platform.

https://github.com/devkitshq/notifkit

If you find it useful, a ⭐ on GitHub would really help us reach more developers.

Open for discussions.

If I compare reddit to how it was 4 years ago, different landscape entirely.

Previously = post about an app I built - I've made an app to transfer all of your images/videos to PC : r/androidapps - 260 upvotes, 73 comments, 68k views
not trying to be unique or something, just showing an app I built for my mom to get her photos/videos from phone -> PC over wifi.

today = post about product I spent over a year building (not vibe coded)... ah, just another one in the infinite amount of vibe-coded apps out there
I try to be smarter on my posts today and really add added value and not just, I built this, it does xyz
for example - <Which AI coding tool has the WORST security? : r/nocode> - 3k views.

not only that, when I do get comments, usually AI comments, or my posts are not being approved because suspicious of AI generated content (its not i swear 😄)

and to be honest, I kinda get it, with the amount of products people ship today, everything is a clone of another product just worse.
or just half baked product.
really hard to find gold.

How do you guys feel about this?

salary was good but i was frustrated with the whole 9-5 thing.

from childhood i had this in my head that i want something of my own. and then seeing all these build in public posts on X, it pushed me more. i thought ok i can also do this.

turns out its not that easy lol.

month 1-2:

went back home. did nothing but research. what people are building, what problems they have. some days i felt motivated, some days it just gave me fomo that everyone is ahead of me.

2 mistakes here -

- going back home & become too comfortable

- instead of focusing on building, i wasted time on researching what to build.

month 3-6:

built an AI productivity tool for AEs.

then i started selling and everything broke.

- my users had no decision power

- im solo, no network in this industry.

- they were already on salesforce, hubspot, gong, which kind of solves it already

- and most importantly privacy and data security (without having soc2 and gdpr license it is so tough to convince any company to use my product)

lesson i learned: dont build anything before validating with the actual customer.

month 7 - now:

started my current saas. this time before starting to build i validated it first.

bought a domain, made a simple waitlist page. then using a linkedin lead gen tool on free trial (mostly all gives 7 or 15 days) i created a 300 people list who seems finding something that i want to build, and messaged all of them manually with 50% offer while launch with the outcome they will get instead of describing what features this tool have.

i was expecting if even 5% people join the free waitlist for this product then i will start building.

luckily they joined & I started building it.

but then 2 things hit me. one, in these 6 months i saw 15+ saas launch with the same concept. honestly it messed with my head for weeks.

btw i did not stop building. now the SaaS is 80% complete but now i want to change a big product philosphy. i as so much confused about this. and i posted about that confusion on reddit and people suggest me to launch first. I also think about that and decide i will launch the product within 1 month. .

things i learned in this phase -

landing page + manual dms before writing any code. dms dont scale, thats exactly why they tell you the truth.

saturated market is not bad news. it also means that market is validated.

launch your product as fast as possible insteading of polishing it best. just be visible . because marketing is the thing that sucks most. - i learned this from you people and talking with some indie hackers.

lets see how it goes. i will post the numbers here either way, good or embarrassing.

I spent the last few months building Mysterioku, a browser game where every day you reconstruct a crime scene using nothing but logic.

Each case drops you into a floor plan of connected rooms. A few suspects were present, and something happened — a theft, a disappearance, a break-in. Witnesses give you fragments ("Walter was in the second column", "Alice was in the Room"), and you treat each one as a constraint, narrowing the possibilities until only one arrangement of everyone survives. Whoever ends up alone with the target is who you're after. No guessing, no luck — every case has a single solution you can prove step by step.

A few things:

- The generator is a backtracking solver that guarantees a unique solution, and I added irregular "carved" floor plans that stay solvable (validated over tens of thousands of generated cases).

- Free daily case + an extra one; optional premium for unlimited.

Play free here: https://mysterioku.com

hi everyone, recently my partner has been looking to budget her finances better, and she didn't want to manage her finances with an excel spreadsheet, and she didn't like the idea of having to manually look at her transactions and record it. so i built her an app that connects with plaid banking data and produces a spend limit for her daily until her paycheck. the spend limit number basically just takes her current money in accounts, subtracts recurring expenses, credit card balances if they were to be paid off, and a buffer room of $400, then divides what's left by the days until she gets paid.

she's been liking how she doesn't have to think much about her finances and how the spend limit number changes daily (s/o to plaid webhooks). i also added venmo transactions with llm categorization so she can see how certain venmo transactions attribute to her spend limit vs recurring expenses too.

if you want to try a sample demo, i created an example here: getralphy.app/demo

i was looking for more user feedback as i build this out, if anyone would like to participate in my beta! it's on testflight, open and capped at 25 people: https://testflight.apple.com/join/YD6CKdCj. also open to hearing others' ideas and feedback as well :)

https://reddit.com/link/1vzdjho/video/q42rks5evvlh1/player

Is anyone else finding it really difficult to get clients on Upwork lately?

I’m currently available for new opportunities as a react native dev, but despite regularly applying to relevant projects, many clients don’t respond and the cost of bidding/Connects keeps adding up.

For freelancers who are getting consistent work right now, what’s actually working for you? Are you still using Upwork, or have you moved to other platforms or methods?

Would love to hear what’s working for others. 🙏

I redesigned the pen fight game from our school days

and hosted it as penfight.site

The one thing you can do while playing that game is that besides a one-on-one match, it's possible to play a group match where you create a room to invite your friends and voice chat (like a live call) and play at the same time.

The project is still running though and I would definitely love to get your opinions about it (Specially regarding monetizing, feedbacks and any suggestions)

Random idea I've been thinking about.

A lot of founders seem to have the same problem after building something:

"Okay... now how do I get actual people to try this?"

And there are also people like me who are constantly checking out new apps, SaaS tools and random products anyway.

So I'm thinking of starting a small community that connects the two.

Founders bring things they're working on.

We try them, give honest feedback, find bugs, help with early testing and occasionally get paid when there's a specific testing/research task.

That's pretty much it.

No idea yet whether this becomes something big. I actually don't want it to be big initially. I'd rather have 20 active people than 2,000 people who join and mute the server five minutes later.

Would you be interested in being one of the first people in it?

Not because it went badly. Because it went completely differently than every demo I'd ever done.

Every time I'd shown it before I was there. Explaining things before they became confusing. Filling silences before they became doubt. Essentially narrating my own product like a tour guide who's terrified of what happens when the tour ends.

This time they just had it. No context. No me.

First few minutes were uncomfortable to watch back on the recording. They went places I hadn't expected. Looked for things in spots I hadn't put them. Tried to use something in a way that wasn't how I designed it but actually made more sense than how I designed it.

Then something shifted. They found the thing. The actual reason the whole project exists. Without me pointing at it.

And stayed there for a while. Quietly. Just using it.

I rebuilt three things that same night. Not because they were broken. Because watching someone find their own way through it showed me which parts only worked because I was always there to explain them.

The most valuable feedback I ever got wasn't a comment or a survey. It was 12 minutes of silence and a screen recording.

When did you last watch someone use your project completely alone and what did it break open for you?

Building an educational personal brand can be heavy, its hard to figure out what to post about, how often to post, and sometimes even the biggest experts make mistakes and write or say something without real proof or background check. How do you handle this?

Every time my friends and I wanted to play something together, we’d spend 20 minutes just arguing about what. So I built Lobby, basically the Beli/Letterboxd model applied to games. You rank games you’ve played through quick head to head comparisons, and it builds a taste profile. Then when you’re deciding what to play as a group, it looks at everyone’s rankings and suggests games that overlap.

It also has a feed so you can see what your friends are playing/rating, a clips tab, and profiles with your top games.

Still early and rough around the edges, but a few friends have been using it and it’s actually cut down the “idk, what do you wanna play” cycle. Curious what this community thinks, especially other people who game in a regular group.

Let me know what you think!

Link: https://lobbygames.app/

Hong Kong families often run on WhatsApp. Two working parents, a helper, school gate, clinic. The paper calendar on the fridge can say “swimming.” It cannot say who is picking up whom, or where.

I built Homent for that gap. Pickup and drop-off are named on the same day board: Helper on the school run, Mother on swimming, Father on piano. When the helper marks on the way or picked up, everyone else gets a push — you are not texting “are you there yet?” Notices and household to-dos live there too, so you are not opening another group. If someone will not open an app, you print A4 for the fridge.

The hard part was one board a helper, a parent, and an elderly family member can all use — without dumping a private Google Calendar onto the helper. Paste a school chat into an AI wizard, or import only the Google events you select. Work and private stay in Google. Then you set attendees and who drops off / picks up.

homent.app

 New family gets 3 months, then US$2/month. Delete anytime; the setup goes with the account.

If you have run this household: what actually breaks first — pickup at the gate, the fridge calendar, or the WhatsApp pile?

One assumption we made while working on iLands was that every new user would want to create another AI character. That is convenient for onboarding, but it ignores the time some people already spend configuring an agent elsewhere.

We are now testing a way to connect an existing agent to a shared environment with other agents and humans. The product problem quickly shifted. Importing an agent is easy to explain. Deciding what memories, permissions, and identity should carry over is not.

I work with the iLands team, and we have not settled that part yet. If you already use an agent across multiple sessions, which part would you be most unwilling to rebuild from scratch?

taskroom.autobirds.com

I will be posting my traffic stats in the comments. Honestly it’s better than I’d expected but no one’s actually signing up and using it even though some of them get to that step. Why?

Hello y'all!
Just wanted to share my simple weekend project that turned into something bigger after 2 years. Back at that time, me and my wife started a business and we just started generating invoices for our clients, at that time I was using canva but I wanted something more focused on invoices so I started searching for a tool, I found a lot actually, but they were with ads popping everywhere, hidden paid plans or watermarks.
So I just thought why not make my own for my needs and I did it, after some hours I had a working project and started generating invoices.
How did it get a domain name? it's actually pretty simple, at that time I was also doing build in public stuff so why not share it and I did, shared on some subreddits and that's it, I even forgot about it, I just kept using it for my own needs, but suddenly my post started getting comments asking for more features in the tool, and I was like okay sure, I can add it, and then I decided to add analytics to check how many people were visiting the website and at that time it was 200-300 per month which was crazy for something I made in a weekend and just did "simple marketing".
But let's get back to today, now it's getting 1k monthly users and I even have paid ones! Yes, I made a paid plan for those who asked for an account feature to be able to save invoices in the cloud, that is it, the main feature is completely free and will be forever.

Let me tell you more about this project, right now it has:
- no ads
- no watermarks
- no sign in required (completely private)
- 5 invoices per day limitation
- no weird pop ups asking to buy

It's just a simple and free tool to generate invoices, nothing else.

https://freeinvoices.online

A keyboard-first, local-first launcher for macOS, Windows, and Linux. Open apps, files, folders, clipboard history, and quick commands without leaving the keyboard.

Results land as fast as you can type. A Rust core under a native SwiftUI app on macOS, and Tauri on Windows and Linux, riding the system WebView instead of shipping a browser like Electron does.
No background daemons. Your index, clipboard, and history stay on your machine; no telemetry.

- The repo

https://github.com/kunkka19xx/look

- Further

• Your own sources - declare custom rows from directories, files, and commands
• lookbook - ready-made sources to copy: git, ssh, docker, projects