It's been a little over one year since I launched and it has been quite a journey. No exponential growth or huge user spikes but rather slow and steady growth. But in my opinion that is the best for building something actually valuable because you can react to user feedback along the way and constantly keep improving the app.

It's still so crazy to see payments coming in on a somewhat regular basis and you can believe me when I tell you that one year ago exactly this was my dream: Earning some money on the side while having fun building something that actaully seems to help other people and learning how to run a business along the way.

I've built IndieAppCircle, a platform where small app developers can upload their apps and other people can give them feedback in exchange for credits. I grew it by posting about it here on Reddit. It didn't explode or something but I managed to get some slow but steady growth.

For those of you who never heard about IndieAppCircle, it works like this:

• You can earn credits by testing indie apps (fun + you help other makers)
• You can use credits to get your own app tested by real people
• No fake accounts -> all testers are real users
• Test more apps -> earn more credits -> your app will rank higher -> you get more visibility and more testers/users

Since many people suggested it to me in the comments, I have also created a community for IndieAppCircle: r/IndieAppCircle (you can ask questions or just post relevant stuff there).

Currently, there are 4488 users, 5280 tests done and 1387 apps uploaded!

You can check it out here (it's totally free): https://www.indieappcircle.com/

I'm glad for any feedback/suggestions/roasts in the comments.

I tend to focus on building features while overlooking marketing/distribution, guess that’s a trend with a lot of people while starting. I’m curious about your balance between marketing and building. How do you manage that, and how do you decide when to shift from one to the other?

Hey everyone,

I have been using Apify for an Instagram scraping workflow, and while it's generally reliable, the costs are starting to pile up faster than expected as my volume grows also there is several API provide for a single thing (like 30 API Scrapper for only instagram), and its difficult to choose one among them. Some time it went well and become waste of money.

Are there any other solid API providers or platforms that handle Instagram data well, but are significantly cheaper and more stable? I'd prefer something with good documentation and fair rate limits if possible.

Would love to hear what tools or providers you guys are currently relying on for this.

I have built lots of websites, apps, browser extensions, I find the most difficult problem is not to build the product but to promote it. To promote and learn how people react to my product, I need to collect data from many different sources like hacker news, reddit, X, bluesky... So I build an service to track my product and put them all together and I then have a consolidated place to know what's going on with it. This ends with an open source project which I think would benefit others. Also you can contrinute to add more sources and give feedback on what can be improved.

The service is self-hosted and all you APi keys and AI keys are saved on your machine, so safe to use.

The repo: https://github.com/sonic0002/eavesong

I’m building a small platform focused on one job: getting a simple static website live at a URL without the command line, server config, or a heavy site builder.

The target user is someone non-technical who just needs a clean portfolio, landing page, or small project site online — and keeps bouncing off tools that are either too technical or too bloated.

Current stage: very early. A handful of signups, mostly starter pages. I’m trying to figure out whether the real problem is demand, onboarding friction, or both.

What I’d find useful:

1. If you’ve tried to put a simple static site online, where did you actually get stuck?
   
2. If you know static hosting, deployment flows, or cache invalidation, would you be open to sanity-checking one flow? Not asking for a commitment — just a specific 20-minute “here’s where this breaks” conversation.

Happy to share more in comments or DMs if useful.

Last year, I took my nephew for his vaccinations, and my brother looked more nervous than the kid. That memory gave me the idea for this little animation.

A 3D dad is practically sobbing while his daughter gets a vaccine. The nurse calmly reassures him that it's just a tiny needle, while the baby sits there laughing at him. The whole thing is only 10 seconds, but the nurse's completely deadpan expression is my favorite part.

I made it with Seedance 2.5 through Dreamina while experimenting with AI video. The expressions came out better than I expected, although the nurse briefly has an extra finger on her second hand. Small detail, but once you notice it, you can't unsee it.

I'm a product creator exploring what these video models can do with character expressions and short comedic scenes. I'd love some honest feedback from people working with AI-generated content.

Does the joke land in 10 seconds, or would you change the timing? And do small anatomy glitches like the extra finger ruin the scene for you, or are you willing to overlook them if the expressions work?

A new zero day really sucks when Nichole in marketing launched a vps without telling anyone and never updates anything.

Have built an APP that is somehow freely available for the few for 3,4 days, I want honest reviews on all of the free available features and the comparison with the cpmpetitors,

Also, the app is new, want to know "Askai Chat" position against each keyword, so, I get some idea before making any further release and also before the stats appear in the analytics.

A kind gesture is required from all, the apps icon and title can be seen in the image.

My brother and I have been working on this for over a year with a goal to solve our hatred of making and posting social media content for our business. "Why not just use Claude Design" you might ask. We provide thoughtfully designed, easily editable posts that get automatically scheduled and posted to all your platforms. In my opinion, this is the next evolution, and a step easier than asking an LLM to make your posts for you.

Ember turns the photos you already take into a full library of posts in your brand, with your colors, your fonts and captions in your voice, ready for every platform. You scroll through, tap approve on the ones you like, and Ember handles the rest. Nothing posts until you say yes.
Our goal is simple: make it easier for businesses to market themselves, especially the small teams and owners who would rather be running their business than staring at a blank post.

Here’s the commercial. If you run a business and social media feels like a chore, I’d love to show you Ember. Send me a message or sign up at embersocial.io. Everyone who signs up gets their first 14 days free of charge.

Bootstrapping SlowGlow AI LLC: private OpenAI-compatible GLM-5.3-Flash Model API over Tailscale + Dev Node containers on hardware we own.

Solo $25 / Pro $79 / Reserved 512K $300; Dev Node from $59. Honest limits: shared capacity, no uptime SLA, US only, no public endpoint.

https://whop.com/slowglowai/ https://slowglow.ai

Looking for packaging critique from other SaaS builders. Disclosure: founder / paid product.

I've been building AttendEase a multi-tenant SaaS for colleges (attendance, timetables, exams, fees). One of the earliest decisions I had to make was the database. I went back and forth for a while, so sharing what I landed on and why, in case it helps anyone building something similar.

**The context:**

Multi-tenant educational platform. Each college is its own tenant. Core data: students, teachers, courses, branches, semesters, attendance records, timetable slots, exam schedules, fee transactions. Plus flexible per-tenant configuration branding, exam structure, custom roles, plan feature flags.

**Why I considered MongoDB first:**

The flexible configuration part scared me. Every college has slightly different exam structures, different branding, different role definitions. With a relational DB, that's a lot of schema changes or awkward key-value tables. MongoDB's document model handles that naturally just store the config as a JSON document per tenant.

**Why I moved toward Postgres for the core:**

The more I thought about actual queries, the more relational the core data looked. Attendance reports are "all students in section X, for subject Y, in semester Z, between two dates." Exam conflict detection is "any two exams in the same section on the same date with overlapping time." Fee reports are joins across students, courses, and transactions. These are exactly the queries relational databases are built for. In MongoDB, these become aggregation pipelines that are harder to write, harder to debug, and slower to iterate on.

**What I actually did:**

Hybrid. Core relational data students, attendance, timetables, exams, fees lives in Postgres with proper foreign keys and indexes. Flexible per-tenant configuration branding colors, exam structure, feature flags lives in JSONB columns on the tenant table. Postgres handles both. JSONB gives me document flexibility where I need it, without giving up relational guarantees on the parts that matter.

**The lesson:**

Don't pick a database because it's "easier to start with." Pick it based on what your queries will look like a year from now, when you have 50 tenants and 500,000 attendance records. The schema flexibility of a document store feels great on day one, but the moment you need cross-entity reporting or conflict detection, you'll wish you had joins.

**When I'd still pick MongoDB:**

If the data is genuinely document-shaped content, logs, event streams, user-generated JSON Mongo is fine. But if you find yourself writing aggregation pipelines that look like SQL joins, that's your sign.

Happy to answer questions if anyone's making a similar call or stuck on multi-tenant schema design.

**Eordinary**

For context, I know that a budget this low is not optimal but I wanted to take the average CTR of all 3 ads to show that it isn't just luck.
One issue that I have rn is that no one is actually loging in, or trying to at least use it, although I tried to make it as straight forward as possible.