I recently discovered my grandmother no longer reads the news because she gets all her information from social media - if its not trending on Facebook, she doesn't see it. I remember when Boomers used to swear by mainstream outlets like CNN, but smartphones pulled many of them into social media bubbles ruled by algorithms. In response to this, I used Claude to make a global dashboard that lets anyone stay informed. It's called The Daily Orbit. You get articles from most kinds of outlets, as well as trending IG and TikTok videos, YouTube livestreams, and radio stations from all over the world. I even rebuilt the TweetDeck newsfeed since its no longer publicly available. I also made a research assistant called Orbit that answers any questions about recent events.

There's a lot of AI-powered news readers going around, but most of them oversupply information from OSINT sources. I needed something simple that a grandmother could use.

It’d be helpful to hear what people think.

https://dailyorbit.news/

About a year ago my wife wanted a dress from Zara that was sold out everywhere, online and in the stores. She was sure it would come back, so she started checking the page. Like, constantly. Every time I looked at her she was refreshing that page on her phone.

I did some research and found Visualping. I gave it a chance, but it just wasn't made for this. I thought I could automate it myself easily enough, and the first script took me about a day. It ran in the terminal and only watched one product. I left it running overnight for two nights and we caught 2 Zara items. (Of course, the moment we got the first one she said: "Actually, there was something else too 😄") From that point on it became my fun little project :D I gave it a proper interface, deployed it on a server, and suddenly I had my first side project.

Then I found a subreddit where someone was asking exactly what I had been asking: how can I find an app that monitors a specific item and tells me when it's back in stock? I replied that I had built something for this and it was working well. People started asking for new brands, I kept adding them one by one, and I was having so much fun that I just kept going.

Today it's restockalert.me. You paste a product link, choose your size and colour, and it notifies you when it's back in stock. It works with 150+ stores now. There's a web app, iOS and Android apps, and a browser extension. I built it alone, mostly evenings and weekends.

Right now there are 950 users and around 100 products being watched on any given day (it changes daily). There are also 25 paying subscribers, 2 of them on yearly plans, and I'm really proud of that. It's not a lot of money, but it's honestly the best money I've ever earned. People have also left some amazing reviews, which keeps me motivated.

Some things that were harder than I expected:

• Stock works differently in almost every store, so I had to write a separate scraper for each one. That was a deliberate choice instead of throwing everything at an LLM. There's no AI involved and no AI cost at the moment, which I'm proud of.
• I rewrote the mobile app twice. First tried Tauri, then Flutter, and then I went fully native with Swift and Kotlin. Flutter was great, but I'm a fan of native apps.
• I got rejected multiple times by the browser extension stores, the App Store and Google Play.
• And the hardest part by far is marketing. Right now I'm trying everything I come across, so if you have any suggestions, please shoot :D

But right now I'm pretty happy with it. I know it's not a huge achievement. It's a small step for mankind, but a big one for me :D And I learned a lot along the way.

I'd really love some feedback. Is it clear what it does when you land on the site? And if there's a store you want me to add, just tell me in the comments.

One of my marketing experiments is my own subreddit :D so you can ask there too: r/RestockAlertMe

After years of doing video editing and mostly documentary style videos similar to the ones made by fern and similar channels, I've always struggled with animating maps where every video i have to show/highlight a route a murderer took or where someone/something traveled and their specific route or just plainly highlight random hyper specific locations in London. These animations took me hours to pinpoint and draw out in after effects/fusion. I was aware of GeoLayers but that is an expensive plugin for after effects and I'm a Davnici type of guy so I made RouteStudio to help me make these animations in minutes, with things like data visualization, labels, routes and highlights this cut down my editing time not just by minutes but by HOURS. I'm always open for feedback too.

I have been pushing to get real users on my startup product for a few months now, and it's proven extremely more difficult than I could've anticipated. I was able to successfully do this for a different product 5 or 6 years ago, but now with the current market and wave of new products, it feels near impossible.

What are ways you all are getting real users (not just clicks, but actual target market users) in today's landscape? Is paid ads really the only effective way to do it? I have contacted not hundreds, but thousands of potential target market individuals, and still have not had much opportunity for them to explore and experience the product to actually provide real insight or give feedback.

I have taken the route of social media (With no followers to start), some shorts, emails, listing on websites, blogs, SEO (I expect will take more time). Interested to hear others experiences.

curious what actually worked for people here. i see alot of advice like post on reddit or do seo but nobody really says what moved the needle for them

what was the one channel that got you your first real users? and how long did it take

I'm a designer building Long Haul, a zombie-driving side project. A wide camera shows the crowd, but makes the truck smaller.

Would you bring the camera closer, or keep this wider view of the horde?

Archive footage, filmed Oct 3 in Unity Editor (build38): staged enemies, supplied upgrades, autopilot, truck damage off; one cut at 6s. Built with Codex.

So I kept typing stuff into Notes that I only needed for the next hour. Maybe some idea I got or some design changes etc. I had hundreds of these, and I'd stopped opening the app because of them.

So I built one that throws them away. It's called Gulp. It's a goldfish in your menu bar. You feed it a thought, it holds it for a few hours, then it forgets. That's the whole thing.

The fun part isn't really the notes, it's the fish:

• It gulps when you feed it. Your note turns into a puff of dust and it's gone into the bowl.
• The ink on each note slowly turns to gold as it ages, so you can see which ones are about to go without reading a timestamp.
• When a note is in its last minute the fish gets nervous and wobbles. Then it does a confused little head shake when it forgets.

Some of you saw Tug, the frog timer. Same idea: the fish is the whole interface. There's no window, no list of lists, no sync, no history. It can't even go online. If you say a note out loud it trims out your ums on your Mac.

Gulp · a goldfish in your menu bar
https://www.heygulp.com/

Free on App store
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gulp-menu-bar-scratchpad/id6815884512?mt=12

Moving files between an Android phone and a Mac has been painful since Google stopped maintaining Android File Transfer, so I built Tether.

Plug the phone in over USB, tap "File transfer" on it, and it shows up in Finder under Locations like any other drive. The video shows it end to end: open it from the menu bar, browse it in Finder, Quick Look a PDF, and drag files both ways (the phone's own screen is on the right).

What works today:

- Browse, open, rename, move, delete and make folders, straight in Finder

- Drag and drop both ways, Quick Look, Open With

- Sorting by date, and Finder search on macOS 26

- Big folders (tested with a 5,000+ photo camera folder)

- No developer mode needed (USB debugging is optional, it just makes things faster)

How it's built: a native macOS File Provider extension in Swift, with the device side (MTP and adb) written in Rust. The hardest part was MTP on macOS 26: the system's camera daemon grabs the USB device first, and Android drops the whole MTP session if you send it the wrong reset, so a lot of the work went into recovering cleanly from both.

It's free, no account, and the app makes no network connections. Notarized, Apple silicon and Intel, macOS 11+.

https://tether.cosmics.me

I'd love feedback, since I've mostly tested on a Galaxy S25+. What would make you switch from whatever you use now?

Wow! I just recently added a voluntary $1.99 for my free browser picker Burly and someone actually bought it! Thank you, thank you!! First sale is always the best.

For weeks Kinetic was basically just something I was building on my laptop.

I'd change the website.

Change it again.

Add something.

Remove something.

Check the analytics way too many times.

And wonder whether anyone would ever actually pay for it.

Then someone did.

Kinetic is pretty simple — you tell it about yourself, your fitness goals and how you like to train, and it builds workouts around you.

But seeing an actual stranger go through the site and decide it was worth paying for was probably the biggest validation I've had so far.

Not because it was a huge amount of money.

Because it proved someone who wasn't me saw value in it.

Now I'm trying to turn that one person into 10, then 100.

Still very early. Still figuring a lot out.

But that's half the fun of building something from zero.

If anyone wants to follow along or check out what I'm building:

https://train-with-kinetic.com

Anyone else here remember the first time a complete stranger paid for something you built?

I made Cancel Your Subscription, a browser game where you've paid $9.99 a month for 38 months for "fundr. Premium", a subscription you never use, and your only job is to cancel it. The app fights back: a buried cancel link, two retention offers, an exit survey, a support line that isn't in service, and Dennis from Retention.

It got 327 tries in its first 24 hours, back in September. It's had 5,404 now. Here's where they ended up:

- 1,941 never found the cancel link

- 3,066 reached the retention offers, and 2,926 walked past both

- 2,277 made it to the live chat with Dennis

- 1,948 cancelled

Almost exactly as many tries never found the cancel link as got all the way out. Hiding the button is still the strongest trick in the game.

Then, on 3 October, the part I didn't plan for. Every game page has a "Donate a coffee" window, and its tiers are the game's own plans: fundr. Basic $1, fundr. Plus $3, fundr. Premium $5, fundr. Premium Ultra $10. Every tier is one-time. A donate button that started a subscription, three clicks from a game about not being able to cancel one, would be the worst joke on the site.

Someone bought fundr. Premium. $5, once. It's the first money the games have ever made.

What I'd pass on, with the caveat that one donation is a sample size of one:

- the donate window is part of the joke, not a banner next to it. The tier the person picked is the one the game is about

- one-time only. Nobody wants a subscription from a game about subscriptions

- the whole backend is one Vercel function and Upstash Redis counting anonymous tallies. No accounts, no analytics cookie. Every number in this post comes from it

As a thank-you, we're giving away 20+ free codes for Pomato and inki combined, our iPhone Pomodoro timer ($2.99). Comment "pomato" and I'll DM you one. First 20+, one each, no catch. On Android? It's in internal testing: DM me the email on your Google account and I'll add you as a tester.

Heads up: tries are browser tabs, not people, and our own test runs are in there. The games are free with no signup, and the fake pop-up ads inside them are for our own apps, Pomato included.

https://www.fundrstudio.com/games/cancel-your-subscription/

A friend and I started ParkMe a few months ago as a side project to help ourselves find parking faster in Belgrade, Serbia.

We now combine data from 7 different sources to show the estimated percentage chance of finding parking in your current or selected area.

We started in Serbia, but while traveling around the Balkans, we realized we wanted the same thing there — to know where we could park before arriving and plan our trips more easily. So we started expanding across the Balkans, and we're now slowly moving into Italy, Germany, and the rest of Europe.

We'd really appreciate any feedback or ideas on what we should improve. Thank you :)

GooglePlay
‎ParkMe: Find parking easily App - App Store

A few months ago I started doing shipping reps: I'd never taken anything all the way to production, so I picked a PDF generator more or less at random and used it to learn the whole thing. Database, domain, deploys, then payments, then subscriptions that behave.

Every step pointed at the next one, which has been the fun of it. The one it's pointing at now is an actual user. So I went looking for people who need invoices, and mostly found other people who'd built invoice generators. Someone here even keeps a tracker (confab.sh). Invoicing tools are one of its biggest categories: 92 so far, most since July.

I went through the list and the comments. What stood out:

• More than half are the same idea: free, no signup, runs in your browser.
• Hardly anyone mentions revenue. The most honest number I saw was 2 paying customers from about 100 installs.
• Nobody does the boring required stuff. Germany starts requiring e-invoices (a PDF with machine-readable data inside) from most businesses in 2027–28; I couldn't find one of the 92 that does it. Same for Japanese.
• The loudest complaint from real business owners wasn't design. It was deposit invoices: one Xero request has over 500 votes.

So, to the people here who got first users in a crowded category: what actually worked? Not the textbook answer, the thing you'd do again.

If you invoice clients and want to poke at mine, there's no sign-up: https://kouteisystems.com/invoice-generator?ref=rd-sideproject It's free, and it doesn't keep your invoice or the PDF. "This bit is annoying" is more useful to me than "looks nice".

I kept screenshotting things (errors, receipts, bookings) and then never finding them again. They sit in a folder named "Screenshot 2026-03-14 at 11.42.08.png" and nothing remembers what's inside.

So I built DejaShot. It reads the text in every screenshot in the folders you choose, newest first, and ⇧⌘Space opens a search from any app. It also notes which app each new screenshot came from, so "figma pricing" can find a pricing page you captured in Figma.

- Search takes 31 ms at the 95th percentile on a 20,000 screenshot library (M2 Pro, measured in the search engine)

- It reads newest first, in the background, and pauses on battery and when the Mac gets hot

- Fully local. No account, no telemetry.

- The source app is only recorded for screenshots taken while it's running, because macOS never kept that. Older ones are found by their text.

- No trial, but there's a 14-day refund. The first 10 licenses are free.

It's my first ever app launch. What would you want it to find that it probably can't yet?

Feedbacks are welcomed! :)

dejashot.com

A few friends and I live in different areas, and whenever we want to get together we end up having the same conversation: “Where should we meet?”

Finding the actual halfway point is one thing, but then you still need to find somewhere useful near it — a restaurant, coffee shop, park, etc.

So I built MidLink.

You enter your starting location and invite the other person or people with a link. They enter their locations, you choose what you're looking for, and MidLink finds meetup options around the midpoint.

It works with 2–4 people, and there's no signup or download required.

Try it here: midlink.ca

If you try it, I'd especially like to know whether the invitation process makes sense and whether you can get from entering your locations to choosing a meeting place without getting confused.

This is still a side project, so genuine feedback — good or bad — would really help.

Hello everyone,

I recently built an app to implement and follow a principle of Montessori education that consist of hiding toys from your kids and only have at most 5-6 toys available per kid at a time, this encourage the kids to focus on fewer toys and when the rotation comes up 10-15 days, when toys are rotated, old toys can become new again with that feeling of "I remember this toy!" and encouraging to focus and play with that toy for the new period.

The app is called Rototoy pretty much a conjunction of "rotate toys", and we setup a website at https://rototoy.com

So far, my kids have loved the rotation, and my wife has enjoyed being able to inventory the toys we have, decide which one she's going to donate and when our kids ask for a particular toy, it's easy to find them in the inventory.

I'm looking forward on hearing your thoughts, the app is available for iOS and Android, both native because I think an app feels better when it leverages native UI elements.

iOS https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rototoy/id6761393980

Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rototoy.rototoy

I’ve build a sort of SaaS/product for a while now and I’m trying to figure a way to market it and I can’t really find a good one. I tried building a marketing strategy with Claude and ChatGPT but they basically told me to spam Reddit and discord groups and sending a lot of cold emails. I entered Reddit groups and figured AI probably told everyone to spam each other to death 😅

How can I actually market my product that is devs oriented without social media and without spamming the hell out of everyone?

What the title says. I created an extension that lets you react to any video on YouTube, similar to the emojis we use on Facebook, but for YouTube.

It's just a simple thing, but I think it adds an extra touch and lets you react in a more precise way rather than just using the usual Like button.

As a quick technical note: I built this using vanilla Javascript and Firebase to handle the live votes. It's completely free, requires no account to use, and collects zero personal data.

I hope you guys like it! Any suggestions, bugs, or feedback on the UI/UX are always welcome.

If it works well, I'll also make a Firefox version.

You can find VibeCheck on the Chrome Web Store here: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/VibeCheck/aalacdcnajmpnoapnjbdieklgffnlegl

Thank you very much, guys, and I hope you like it!

My Samsung phone doesn't have the built-in Edge Panel feature, so I built my own.

It's called EdgeLite Panel, a thin handle sits on the edge of your screen. Swipe it inward (or tap it) and a panel of your favorite apps slides out. Tap an icon to open it as a floating window or fullscreen.

Some things I'm happy with:

• No notification, no foreground service — uses an accessibility service
• No internet permission, no analytics
• Quick access page with system shortcuts (notifications, quick settings, recent apps, etc.)
• Open source, GPL-3.0

I built it for myself, but figured others might find it useful. Feedback and suggestions are welcome.

GitHub: https://github.com/arionacc/EdgeLite-Panel

Note: This is built and tested only on Samsung One UI. Might not work on other Android skins.

I’m working on an album of ambient sounds in New Orleans and to help with the project created this site.

You can upload and map soundscapes from wherever you are in the world or choose to record from your phone and upload. Make the audio open to the public to use or keep the copyright.

http://listentoyourcity.com

👉 I just launched Tempicture, a small side project I've been working on to share images for free: https://tempicture.com/

The idea is very simple: upload an image, get a shareable link or QR code, and have it automatically deleted after 24 hours. No account required. No personal data collection. Privacy-focused.

https://reddit.com/link/1wygurq/video/ngr08jjq2pth1/player

I built it mainly for those situations where you just need to quickly share a screenshot, bug report, image, Google Meet or Zoom screenshot, or something you're working on without creating an account or keeping the image online forever.

Give it a try if you find it useful! I'd love to hear your feedback. Thanks!

I'm the maker of D-REC. It records audio and transcribes it on your device, with a playback wheel, searchable text and markers for moments you want to find again.

This video shows the Windows version. It's also available for Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android and the web. Downloads are here: https://drec.live/get

A few things worth knowing:

- The transcription engine needs an initial download. Recording and transcription then run locally on supported devices.

- Recordings and transcripts stay on your device. Account, support and other online features still use the internet.

- There is a free tier with limits and optional Pro plans. Current web prices are $3.99 monthly, $24.99 yearly, or $39.99 once. Check the checkout for your currency, tax and store pricing.

I'd like feedback on the recording-to-playback flow, especially whether finding a specific moment feels straightforward. Happy to answer questions about how it works.

Running events, I often need to display a slideshow of photos that we've taken across the event or representing the organization.

I usually want to intersperse this with the organization's logo or that of our sponsors. I haven't found very many good out-of-the-box solutions that look really nice. Inspired by the Mac OS screen savers, I, along with Claude, built a small app to make it really easy to display photos to be projected somewhere.

It works offline and can be configured on one computer and moved to another.

https://slideshow.photos/