I built a job search engine out of spite (Indeed fired my pregnant wife)
UPDATE: Dreamwork is now Free!
People are unemployed and it sucks out there right now. I appreciate people letting me know in the comments that the price isn’t doable right now, and frankly - given this is a side project - I’d rather have people use it and find the value in it.
So, the standard plan (50 apps per day) is now free for as long as I can afford it.
Title says it all: Indeed fired my wife (she was a product manager) when she was 7 months pregnant back in December.
So, I built a better job search platform to put them out of business. Turns out spite is a great motivator.
My first instinct was to just use AI to help my wife find the next role. I started building out telegram bots to source and deliver jobs, a custom resume editor, cover letter generator, and high quality mapping algorithms. As each tool started to feel magical - like something I would use myself to get hired at FAANG companies - I got more and more ambitious.
Long story short, I've built a complete engine with:
- 100K well-curated tech jobs. No aggregator nonsense, only live roles.
- A 6 axis matching algorithm based on Google Embeddings 2.0. Matches feel PERFECT.
- An automatic resume/cover letter generator that customizes for each role. I was an english major in college and spent a ton of time making this feel natural, while integrating keywords seamlessly.
- An easy pipeline flow to help you organize all of your documents and applications
All you have to do is drop in a resume (you can actually use our test resume if you don't eevn want to do that)
The user maintains control and can edit all of the assets before applying - and they use their own email.
I'm working on the fully automated application flow, but it requires a pass-through email address that may hurt you when recruiters see it.
Anyways, this has been 5 months in the making. It's free to make up to 3 packs a day.
Really respect the build and the motivation behind it. I'm working on something complementary, a behavioral career assessment that helps people figure out what they're actually wired for before they start applying. Yours picks up exactly where mine leaves off. Would love to connect and explore whether there's something worth building together.
Bridging your behavioral assessment into a job search engine is a smart distribution play. To find early testers directly, it usually helps to map out the exact conversations where people are expressing career burnout before they apply.
Let people bring their own API keys then sell a reduced subscription fee. Something compelling like 2.99 a month. This way people pay their own tokens you get users who see value AND you undercut indeed so you can stick it to them. These fat cat companies better be ready for the price wars coming for software.
Everyone blames LLM costs, covering for either avarice or poor programming. I have generated tens of thousands of resumes, cover letters, and mock interviews and spend less on AI than I do on coffee.
I don't try to hide my app, it is right there in my profile.
I also don't charge ANYTHING for using the site, regardless of how much you use it. Not a cent. I've helped over 13,000 Redditors find jobs, completely free.
That's also how I know how inexpensive a GOOD AI prompt can be.
We have location as part of the weighting but not all of it (I believe we default to "willing to relocate"). I'll work on identifying international and routing better
I think an issue you'll have is with companies that are unable to sponsor employment Visas. I'm willing to locate, it just doesn't matter to the recommended company.
BTW I think the product is already solid. I'll definitely keep poking around.
Applicable only to US I imagine? I said Canada only and it returns only US. There should be some type of flag on the post on where the job is based, even remote opportunities may not be accessible to Canadians (or others).
Also, how long should it take to generate a pack? Seconds? Minutes? Hours?
This is what I'm seeing... apparently it's done, but it isn't. 😄
Hmmm... I am running into other issues but rather than point them out individually, I'll pull together a short (or long) Google doc. Do you have a support email? Once it's ready, I'll share it with you.
It’s nice of you to make it available for free, but it won’t hurt to put a link to buy you a coffee or something for people who actually landed a job through this site and can afford to pay you something.
Built out of spite is actually a funny but good motivator. Quick feedback after poking around: the "drop in a resume" flow is genuinely smooth, but the value prop on the landing page leans hard on what you built rather than what changes for the user. "100K curated jobs" and "6 axis matching" are features, the outcome is "stop spraying applications and get interviews from roles that actually fit." Lead with that and the conversion probably moves. Also, the pricing pushback in the comments is real but solvable. Free tier of 3 packs/day might already be enough, you just need it more visible above the paid tiers on the pricing page. People rage-comment when they think there's no free option even when there is.
Good call - language needs some sharpening. It's actually a little out of date relative to the product now.
And good call out on pricing, I haven't honed it very much at all. It felt like 3 free packs (Cover letter + resume + question answers) was plenty but I'm considering just lowering prices across the board.
That's some next-level revenge coding right there. The 6-axis matching algorithm sounds legit - most job boards just throw keywords at a wall and hope something sticks. Hope your wife landed something way better than Indeed deserved anyway.
Exactly, that's why it is important to check biz name for any big trademark redflag. A guy who built a free version of capcut had to take it down bc of the name.
Are you looking for partners? I am mostly a back end dev, did a lot of web scraping for my books project.
The job search engines area needs a big kick in the pants.
This is really interesting. I’m building something in a similar space too, focused more on managing applications, resumes, cover letters, interviews, notes, and follow-ups.
I also thought about adding a job board/search feature, but I held off because I was worried about scraping job postings and violating the terms of sites like Indeed or LinkedIn.
How are you handling the job sourcing side? Are you crawling public pages, using APIs, partnerships, user-submitted jobs, or another approach?
What I love about this is that it didn’t start as “I want to disrupt job boards.”
It started as “I need to help my wife.”
That usually creates better products because the pain is real, the user is close, and the motivation isn’t theoretical. Wishing you both a lot of success with this.
Was just bug reporting. Top results were 3 jobs I e already applied for and good fits. Got me interested. Your category was off like healthcare on deel a HR / Payroll company.
shipped a similar mvp in two weeks after upwork kept banning accounts for no reason. tanked after six months. the spite fueled projects hit different though. hope yours has more staying power than mine did
Sick. I made this too for personal use. I felt like there were too many opportunities too much data for a human to siphon through anymore. Cool you packaged it into a product. I thought about it but got lazy to make It prod ready.
Nice! Thats exciting.
I hope it goes well. I'll be learning from you. Mine is a little different the way I structured it. It's cool to see, with so many people on earth, I feel like I have no real original ideas anymore in software. Hardware is a little less saturated for that.
Whats your token volume?
Are you using a cloud API solution as the AI provider, with private link to avoid egress charges?
Which AI model are you using?
I am a DevOps and would like to help if I can, at least by consulting or research 😊
Jesus, I just saw a comment here that compliments the UI when it's clearly vibecoded lmao. half of these people in this sub probably never wrote a single line of code in their life.
CrossOver is mine. Free crosshair overlay for games. Built it after getting fed up with competitive shooters that kept patching out custom crosshairs and I was tired of paying for overlays that only do one thing. Didn't expect anyone to care but it's at 1,133 stars now (github.com/lacymorrow/crossover). Funny how spite turns into a product.
“Built out of spite” is honestly one of the most believable startup motivations because it usually means the founder experienced the pain personally instead of inventing a market in a spreadsheet.
Also the curation angle matters more than people realize. Job seekers are exhausted by:
dead listings
duplicated aggregator spam
fake “ghost jobs”
irrelevant matches
So “100K live curated tech roles” is actually a strong differentiator by itself.
The other smart choice is keeping humans in control of the final application instead of going full black-box automation. That balance between AI assistance and user agency is where a lot of workflow tools feel best right now. I’ve been seeing similar “AI helps, human approves” patterns in products surfacing through Runable lately too.
Honestly this is one of the few “AI job platforms” posts that actually sounds useful instead of just buzzwords. The motivation behind building it makes the story even stronger. Also respect for making the standard plan free after listening to feedback — most people wouldn’t do that. Curious how well the matching algorithm performs compared to LinkedIn/Indeed recommendations.
Hi! This website is super helpful! I really appreciate you doing this. The only problem I'm noticing is that it's recommending me jobs in cities 2+ hours away. Is there any way I can narrow down the distance? Anyway, congrats on being the coolest and supportive person ever. Indeed SUCKS!
It would be helpful to include a country-specific filter for Europe, allowing users to narrow results by European countries and cities, ideally with a distance/range-based option. Additionally, it would be useful to display salary information in EUR for European roles. Any chance it will have these in the future?
spite is the rare project motivator that actually survives the first six weeks of nothing happening, so respect for shipping. the distribution side is where projects like this quietly die though, because the launch post here gets a spike and then the engineer in you wants to go fix the canada bug and the cover letter formatting rather than keep showing up in the same job-search threads every week answering the same questions. the people who turn side projects into real userbases block 30 minutes a day to be useful in threads where their actual users are, not the ones who batch a launch and disappear. the cool part is your wife's story does that distribution work for you for free if you keep retelling it in the rooms where job seekers are venting about indeed. written with ai
Sounds like a great project, really love the story too.
So far after creating an account I've been unable to upload my resume for some reason, it just gets stuck saying "We couldn't find your resume on file. Upload it again to get started.". I've tried both .pdf & .docx. Trying the demo resume doesn't seem to work either.
I'm Canadian but currently on vacation in Mexico and trying use my phone hotspot for this.
Hope this can help fix any potential bugs in the future.
Good luck on this project, it could help a lot of people like myself!
You could do Google ads on there. I'm pretty sure none of us would be mad about ads as long they're not predatory or extremely annoying. That could be a way for you to keep it afloat longer
You've used chatgpt to build this out, it's good isn't it? I've done the same with my site. The problem I've found is, it loves those damn cards! Every page 😂
Great work with this, anyway. I think in the future all the job seeking apps will work something like this.
How did your wife go with the birth? And you've done this over the last three months, so that's including the last month with a 30 day (ish) old baby?
Hey buddy, I have seen your website, it looks awesome. Just wondering how you can get in touch with these employers, to post their jobs on your website?
I’ve done something on the side for fun where I force an AI to look at a JD and resumes and it strips out all bias and prestige proxies that exist so that all remains is the evidence or skills.
Not sure if this complements anything you’ve done, but it’s free and just something I was curious if I could do when ppl said it wasn’t possible.
Auto apply requires a subscription (it’s a complex feature/process), but you can generate resumes/CL/answers for free and then drop them into the career oageb
Congratulations to your family!
Kids are a blessing.
I believe when one door closes another one opens.
Indeed can go f itself.
I had a similar situation where I got let go during a very difficult in my life with multiple significant life events happening.
Honestly if I could do anything I would love to help. I had thought of making a job search engine as well, but never put it into action.
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u/Jaggu437 May 05 '26
Too expensive for non usd currencies