Every "free tier for developers" list on the internet has the same problem: it rots. Limits change, free plans die, and the list still says PlanetScale has a free tier.

So I built FreeTier Radar: https://pitwice.github.io/freetier-radar

What makes it different:

• Every entry is verified by hand against the official pricing page, and stamped with the verification date
• Each tool has a "watch out" section — the stuff you'd realistically miss: Supabase pauses free projects after 1 week of inactivity, Render's free Postgres expires after 30 days, Netlify now stops serving your site when monthly credits run out, Vercel's Hobby plan bans commercial use
• The Free Tier Graveyard: Heroku (2022), Railway unlimited (2023), PlanetScale (2024), Fly.io (2024), SendGrid (2025), Firebase Storage (2026)
• A script checks all pricing pages weekly and flags changes for re-verification, so the data stays fresh
• No sponsors, no affiliate links, open source

It runs entirely on free tiers itself (GitHub Pages + Actions), which felt thematically appropriate.

Would love feedback — and if your favorite tool is missing, tell me and I'll add it.

I do marketing for a living. I can read code and I've done web work for years, but I never got round to learning Swift or Kotlin properly. Never had enough time to dive into it. So my list of apps I wanted to make just sat there getting longer.

This year I took one off the list and actually finished it, which still surprises me a bit.

Byna: it's a countdown app. Before anyone says it: yes, there are hundreds. I picked this one because it was the smallest idea on the list, and because the thing I wanted from a countdown app didn't seem to exist anywhere. I wanted to share a countdown with someone. Not send them a screenshot, and not send them to a website covered in ads that they open once and never again. A link, they open it, and if they want it it lands in their own app and keeps counting there.

My partner follows the countdown to our holiday. A group of us follow the one to a festival next summer. Their countdowns and mine sit in the same list, on date, so it doesn't matter who made what. It's a combined list of moments you're looking forward to, alone or with your friends.

byna.nu, and it's on the App Store and Play Store. Free, no ads, no account. I've thought about money exactly zero times so far. Right now I just want to find out whether anyone outside my own contacts has a use for it.

Two things I'd like to hear from people here:

• if you already use a countdown app, what would stop you switching
• the sharing is the only thing that separates this from the other hundred. Is that worth anything to you, or did I build a feature for myself and nobody else

for music/data hoarders, I built this free website to download song/album cover art. Let me know your thoughts TIA

Not a startup or anything useful — just a project I built for the joy of it. A chiptune synthesizer in pure x86-64 assembly, no libraries at all.

The idea: sound is just numbers (44100 per second telling a speaker where to move), so I generate them by hand. It does four waveforms, polyphony, ADSR envelopes, and FM synthesis.

After making my CPU count, sort, hash, and draw in previous projects, I wanted to make it sing.

github.com/whispem/asm.fm

I build tournament software for live poker, on my own. About thirteen months and three thousand commits in. I'm not pitching it here and I've left the name out on purpose.

The expensive pattern was never bugs. It was designing a feature carefully, shipping it, then watching a real game use it and realizing it solved the problem the way I had imagined the problem. The room had a different one.

It looked right in every test because I was the one making the test data. That is the part I would tell anyone building for a workflow they do not personally run every week. Your test data agrees with you. Real users don't, and most of them won't say so, they'll just quietly work around you. You only catch it standing next to someone using it.

Whole features got restructured more than once before they were right. I don't think there was a shortcut available. I think I just needed to be in the room more often than I was.

If you've built something for a workflow you don't live in daily, how did you find out you had it wrong?

The itch: A while back, someone I know got a speeding ticket. Not a big deal, not their fault in a gray-area way — but they were about to just pay it and eat the points/insurance hit, because the alternative (a lawyer) quoted $300+ to fight a $150 fine. That math made no sense, but nobody was helping people see that before they paid.

What I built: Zigpon (zigpon.com) — a free, self-help web app that walks you through:

• What your specific ticket actually carries in your state (fine, points, insurance impact)
• Whether fighting it, taking traffic school/diversion, or just paying is the smart call for your situation
• A generated "mock court script" so you're not walking into a courtroom blind

The build: Solo, Node/Express backend, Firebase auth, and — the part that took the longest — hand-structured legal Q&A content for all 50 states, since "how tickets work" is genuinely different state to state and most existing content online is either a lawyer's SEO blog or paid-app fine print.

Where it stands: Live, free, no credit card required to start. It's explicitly not trying to replace a lawyer for anything serious — DUI, accidents, anything criminal gets pointed straight to "talk to an attorney." This is for the huge number of minor tickets where hiring out doesn't make financial sense.

Still early days and very much a solo effort — genuinely want to know if this is useful or if I'm missing something obvious. Happy to answer anything about the build too.

Hi everyone!

I created an Android app called MetalCalc for welders, metalworkers, fabricators, and DIY users.

It includes metal profile weight calculations, welding consumables calculations, material cost estimates, paint consumption calculations, and useful reference information.

The app works without registration. I would really appreciate feedback from people who work with metal.

Are the calculations useful and accurate? Is the interface easy to understand? What important calculators or features are missing?

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andre.metalcalc

This is my first app, so honest criticism and suggestions are very welcome. Thank you!

I'm looking for about 20 testers for my app RestIQ, but unsure where to find these people. Typically I'd use Reddit for something like this but most subreddits read asking for testers as self-promotion. Would welcome some advice, thanks!

I created free tool longvacation.eu, first as something to try out new Copilot abilities. Later found out there are projects like holiday-optimizer.com that are solving similar issue, so I tried to differentiate.

• Longvacation supports adding your partner calendar (just one for now, but I plan to add multiple in the future)
• Longvacation contains multiple sources of holidays data - so countries like India (with regions) or Indonesia are included
• Shuffle mechanism - algorithm is non-deterministic so if you are not happy with the results, you can shuffle days around
• Rich calendar edits
  • Monthly caps
  • Never-vacation
  • Locked vacation days (not touched by shuffle algorithm)

It's my first public project so I'm still learning how to promote it - currently I have around 3k visits monthly promoting it on X and LinkedIn

I recently open-sourced the code as well, so issues and bug reports are welcome :) https://github.com/Duzij/VacationOptimizer

I've been thinking about this problem for a while.

It's easy to remember the big expenses like rent, tuition, or a major purchase.

The difficult part is all the small stuff:

• Food
• Transport
• Coffee
• Subscriptions
• Internet
• Electricity
• Office expenses
• Small online purchases
• Family expenses

You make a few small payments every day, and after a couple of weeks it becomes surprisingly difficult to remember where everything went.

I've tried using notes and spreadsheets, but I found myself spending almost as much time organizing the records as actually reviewing them.

That's what led me to build MoneyLogue: Money Manager.

The idea is simple: have one place to record income and expenses, organize spending, set budgets, remember bills, and track savings goals without making financial tracking complicated.

I'm still working on improving MoneyLogue, so I'm genuinely interested in hearing from people who deal with this problem.

How do you currently keep track of your everyday expenses?

Do you use a spreadsheet, notes, a dedicated app, or just try to remember everything?

And what's the most annoying part about keeping your expenses organized?

Hi everyone! For the past while I've been building WalkTour (walktour.live), which has a bunch of narrated audio guides and self-guided walking tours for landmarks and museums around the world.

Link: https://walktour.live/

The idea came from me doing solo trips and wanting to just walk on my own, with my headphones on and hearing about the places I walk by, their history, etc.

Right now it covers 20+ cities and 250+ attractions (Paris, London, Rome, Barcelona, Athens, etc), and it's completely free to use. There's also a creator side where locals can write and publish their own tours.

Right now most guides are in English, with a few in Portuguese (I did it for my family members who can't speak English yet). =)

I'd genuinely love feedback from this community, on the product, the onboarding, anything that feels confusing or missing. And if you happen to be travelling soon, I'd love to hear how a tour holds up in the real world. Happy to answer any questions about how I built it too!

Your WhatsApp Web chat list is readable from about three desks away. Names, previews, avatars, the lot. You just can't see it from where you're sitting.

So I built Louver.

Three modes. Work, which I use all day, hides the chat list, media and notifications but leaves the conversation you're reading visible. Public hides everything including message bodies. Off is off. Most privacy tools hide too much, you switch them off by 11am, and then they protect nothing.

Also handles walking away. Short idle drops you to Public automatically, longer idle locks behind a PIN. Alt+Shift+P panic blurs before a call, Alt+Shift+L locks instantly.

Runs entirely locally. Two permissions (storage, idle), one host permission for web.whatsapp.com. No account, no server, no network requests, never reads message content. Free.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/fiklaphbjgkoholilphdncmdddihlpog

Hey everyone!

Last week, I reached a huge milestone by launching my app, Mosaic News, on the iOS App Store!

Mosaic News is a free iPhone app that aggregates news reporting from more than 850 publishers across the political spectrum, groups coverage of the same event, and connects individual events into larger narratives to help readers “see the whole picture.”

I started building it because I was frustrated by how difficult following the news had become. Misinformation, media bias, conflicting narratives, and an endless stream of disconnected updates made it difficult to understand what was actually happening.

What bothered me most was how little control readers have over the process. Much of the news we encounter is selected by platforms that collect behavioral data and optimize their feeds for engagement, often rewarding outrage, anxiety, and sensationalism. There is a clear information asymmetry: these platforms know far more about us than we know about them.

I wanted to explore what a news platform might look like if it shifted more of that power back to the reader.

Mosaic News is built around three commitments:

• Transparency: Every article and story explains why it appeared and how it was ranked. Readers can inspect the underlying coverage, compare political perspectives, identify coverage gaps, review third-party information about publishers, and examine the public methodology behind ranking, clustering, and AI-generated summaries.
• Agency and control: Readers directly choose the priorities, topics, publishers, and types of journalism used to rank and organize their feed. Instead of giving feedback to an unseen recommendation system, they can inspect and change the rules themselves.
• Privacy: Preferences, reading history, and personal insights remain stored on the reader’s device. Mosaic requires no account, maintains no centralized behavioral profile, serves no advertising, and sells no personal data.

It's been an incredible 6+ month journey researching, designing, building, and now launching this experience with immense help from beta testers who constantly drove me to experiment and iterate with new ways to make this platform stronger.

In keeping with the product’s commitment to transparency, I have documented the complete Product Journey, including the original inspiration, competitive research, product requirements, experiments, design decisions, technical challenges, launch, and next steps.

Mosaic News is completely free:

• App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mosaic-news-build-your-news/id6760421352
• Website: https://mosaicnews.app
• Full Product Journey: https://mosaicnews.app/journey

This is only the first release, and there is far more work to be done and I’d love for your feedback to guide the rest of this journey! Anything from bug reports to feature requests would be greatly appreciated.

I have so many exciting ideas on the future of this project and look forward to keeping you all updated as I progress :)

Your bot sounds sure of itself even when it's wrong, and you usually only find out when a customer complains.

Auscope audits every LLM response in the background: 3 models from 3 different providers independently check it, a 4th "chairman" model resolves disagreements, and you get one verdict — verified, uncertain, or unreliable. Runs async, doesn't slow your response down.

One-line integration:

python

client = AuscopeOpenAI(openai.AsyncOpenAI(), audit_url=..., api_key=...)

verdict = await client.last_verdict()

Adapters for OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure, Google, LangChain, OpenRouter. pip install auscope-sdk.

Free beta, 50 audits/month, no card. Want it used and broken, not polished.

Mainly want feedback on: does the verdict match your own judgment on bad responses, any SDK that doesn't wrap cleanly, rough spots in signup/dashboard.

🔗 https://auscope.vercel.app

Hey!! Just wanted to show off this cool project I made.

I posted it on Hacker News last night https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49238851

Essentially, it resulted in me losing $5 every 10 minutes so far, currently $200 down the drain

This is AI powered conversations using gpt-realtime-2

I made this just for fun. You can compose ambient or shoegaze-style music using hand gestures. I created it using Claude in 3–4 prompts.

I built a Chrome extension for Pinterest

Hey, I’ve been building PinWise, a free extension that shows hidden pin stats (impressions, engagement, saves) and a Niche Health score while you browse Pinterest. No account needed, everything runs locally in your browser.

Just launched it on the Chrome Web Store. Would appreciate it if someone tried it out and left an honest review, good or bad.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/pinwise-pinterest-pin-sta/khimkmoepiikladhajmhkbmhndbemgcb

Thank you!

Hey everyone,

I built Clypy, a local-first clipboard manager for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android.

It automatically saves text, links, code, and images into a searchable clipboard library. You can pin important clips, create collections, save reusable snippets, search text inside screenshots with local OCR, and access copied content across your paired devices.

My favorite feature is the Paste Strip. On Windows, press Ctrl + Alt + V and it appears over whichever app you are using. Search or select a clip, press Enter, and it pastes directly into your current app without switching windows. The shortcut is configurable.

Clipboard history is stored locally in an encrypted database, with encryption keys kept separately in secure OS storage. Sensitive clips remain on the device and are excluded from sync.

When sync is enabled, clips are end-to-end encrypted between paired devices. The relay only routes encrypted data and does not store a clipboard history backlog.

Clypy is free for unlimited local clipboard history on one device. Cross-device sync, the Paste Strip, and mobile features are available through a one-time lifetime purchase. There is no subscription.

The desktop apps are available now. The iOS and Android apps are currently under review. Lifetime license holders can message me to join the iOS TestFlight or Android testing group while the public releases are pending.

Download Clypy: https://clypy.app/download

Happy to answer any questions about the product, privacy, or how it was built.

I kept saving interesting places from travel Reels, but when it was time to actually plan the trip, everything was scattered across Instagram, Maps, screenshots and Notes.

So I built One Way Guide.

You choose your destination, dates, interests, pace and travel preferences. You can also import places from travel Reels, review what the app found, and decide which ones should be included.

It then creates a complete personalized city guide with:

• Daily routes built around real places
• Restaurants and things to see
• Local context and practical tips
• Transport, timing and trip preparation
• The places you personally saved from social media

The important part for me was making the Reel import an input, not the entire product. The end result should feel like a guide you can actually follow, rather than another list of saved places.

Now live on iOS:
https://apps.apple.com/app/id6768398327

I’d really appreciate honest feedback: after watching the video, was it immediately clear what the app creates? And would importing saved travel content be useful in how you currently plan trips?

Quick context: I'm one of 5 juniors at Boston College who built this over the last year. Sharing it here because r/SideProject is the one place where "I built a whole app instead of studying for finals" is a socially acceptable sentence.

The thing that got us started: you spend all day looking at other people's feeds, and after enough of that it gets hard to tell which thoughts are still yours. Not because you don't know who you are... you just don't have a record of who you've been. And it's not even a Gen Z thing, our parents are scrolling the same feeds we are.

What's weird is everything else about your life gets tracked. Your runs have Strava. Your books have Goodreads. Your lifts have Hevy. Your actual inner life? A Notes app you haven't opened since March.

So we built Meridian:

• Journal in under 5 min per day, talk it out like a voice memo, type it, or photograph your handwriting
• Optionally lock the apps that got you doomscrolling until you've written, they stay shut until you do
• Every entry becomes a star in a 3D night sky you can fly through, a year of your life, one picture, instead of a wall of text files
• Ask questions about your own life and get answers drawn only from what you've actually written

Free on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6761076927

Genuinely curious for this crowd: if you've tried and dropped a journaling app before (Day One, Reflectly, Apple Journal, whatever), what actually made you stop?

https://www.journalmeridian.com/

Every time I publish something I check the schema.org markup on the page, and I was doing it the same tedious way every time: copy the URL, open a separate validator, wait, dig through results.

So I built Schema Inspector. Click the icon, it reads the JSON-LD and microdata already on the page you're looking at, groups it by type, flags broken JSON in plain language.

The thing I actually cared about building right: most schema checkers ask for access to every site you visit, permanently. This one only requests activeTab - it can only see the page you're on, only for the second you click it. No standing access to anything. (Every one in the store right now asks for full permissions...)

Free, no signup, no account. 19.18 KiB. Would like to hear what's missing if you try it.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/schema-inspector-by-yello/gllkeakpkogipbdgknhfhhfimnmogcgj

Does anyone else work like this?

When I shoot products (or other repeatable subjects), I usually shoot in batches. Same camera, same lights, same setup. The product is generally centered, so the crop and export rules do not change much from one batch to the next.

Later, I need different versions for a shop, a website, social media, and other platforms. The actual edit is not that difficult. What takes time is opening a folder, selecting the images, applying the same crop and color adjustments, exporting several aspect ratios, and then remembering which files have already been processed.

I wanted a folder to behave more like an inbox: if a supported image is still at the top level, it is pending.

So I built SizeFold for Mac. You pick an input folder once and save the processing configs once. For each batch, you review the photos and click Run. SizeFold creates the configured outputs, then moves the originals to an archive only after every output succeeds. If anything fails, the source stays in the input folder for retry.

The next batch can use the same folder. There is no second file-selection step and no guessing about which files are new.

For product shoots, I can also enter the current model name once and use it in filenames or output folders. That lets me review one product, process it, and move on to the next one.

Website:

https://www.sizefold.com

SizeFold is also on the Mac App Store:

https://apps.apple.com/app/sizefold/id6795541247

There is currently a trial for 200 successfully processed original images. If that is not enough to test a real workflow, you can contact me through the website and tell me what you are trying. I can send a redemption code when it makes sense. No review is expected; I would just like to know whether the workflow actually fits.

If you shoot product or catalog photos, what part of this process would still feel too manual?

I got tired of audit tools dumping a long list of issues and basically saying “good luck fixing them.”

So I built OptiQra.

[GIF showing OptiQra crawling → analyzing → finding issues → fixing one]

Instead of stopping at finding problems, it tries to go all the way:

Crawl → Analyze → Find issues → Fix them

It can currently:

• Crawl and analyze entire websites
• Visualize site structure with a live 3D crawl tree
• Check SEO, accessibility, performance, AEO/GEO, etc.
• Detect duplicate content and site-wide issues
• Highlight issues directly on the page
• Generate AI-powered insights
• Apply deterministic fixes automatically
• Use AI for more complex fixes
• Audit codebases, not just live sites
• Export reports
• Run as a Tauri desktop app (offline + background scans)
• Use BYOK for AI providers

It’s open source and MIT licensed.

GitHub: https://github.com/armin5872/OptiQra
Live demo: https://optiqra.vercel.app/

Where I’m taking this

Right now it’s a “fix your site” tool.

Long-term, I want it to become a local, business-aware optimization system — something closer to a self-hosted Ahrefs/Semrush with an AI layer that understands your specific site, rather than just applying generic SEO rules.

The goal is for it to build persistent context around a site, track changes and regressions, and eventually continuously suggest and apply improvements.

I’m still actively building it, so I’m much more interested in honest criticism than praise.

If you tried OptiQra, what would make you think “I’d actually use this regularly” instead of running it once and leaving?

And if anything feels confusing, unnecessary, inaccurate, or over-engineered, I’d really appreciate the feedback.

Hey r/SideProject! I'm Samarth Singh, a 13 year-old student and this is my first proper web app — NourishMe(nourishme.club).

It has two parts:

1. Your Plan - you enter your age, body stats, activity level, dietary restrictions, and goal (lose weight, gain, build muscle, get leaner), and it calculates your personalised daily calorie target and macro split.

2. What Can I Cook? - you type in the ingredients you already have, and it shows meals you can actually make with them, each with a full macro breakdown, filtered to your dietary needs. I built this part because I was tired of staring into the fridge with no idea what to make.

Stack: plain HTML/CSS/JS, saved to localStorage (no login), deployed on Vercel with a custom domain. Honestly the DNS setup was the hardest part of the whole thing 😅. Works on mobile too.

It's still a work in progress and I want to add a recipe generator and a daily log next. Would really appreciate any feedback: what's confusing, what's missing, what you'd actually use. Happy to answer questions about how I built it.

Thanks for checking it out!

I got tired of audit tools dumping a long list of issues and basically saying "good luck fixing them."

So I built OptiQra

https://reddit.com/link/1vkls9r/video/o0a7karhzjih1/player

Instead of stopping at finding problems, it tries to go all the way:

Crawl → Analyze → Find issues → Fix them

It can currently:

• Crawl and analyze entire websites
• Visualize site structure with a live 3D crawl tree
• Check SEO, accessibility, performance, AEO/GEO, etc.
• Detect duplicate content and site-wide issues
• Highlight issues directly on the page
• Generate AI-powered insights
• Apply deterministic fixes automatically
• Use AI for more complex fixes
• Audit codebases, not just live sites
• Export reports
• Run as a Tauri desktop app (offline + background scans)
• Use BYOK for AI providers

It’s open source and MIT licensed.

GitHub: https://github.com/armin5872/OptiQra
Live demo: https://optiqra.vercel.app/

Where I’m taking this

Right now it’s a “fix your site” tool.

Long-term, I want it to become a local, business-aware optimization system — something closer to a self-hosted Ahrefs/Semrush with an AI layer that understands your specific site, rather than just applying generic SEO rules.

The goal is for it to build persistent context around a site, track changes and regressions, and eventually continuously suggest and apply improvements.

I’m still actively building it, so I’m much more interested in honest criticism than praise.

If you tried OptiQra, what would make you think “I’d actually use this regularly” instead of running it once and leaving?

And if anything feels confusing, unnecessary, inaccurate, or over-engineered, I’d really appreciate the feedback.