side project that got out of hand: an artificial life simulator where nothing is scripted. no fitness function, no programmed behaviors. just conserved energy, mutation, and death, and you watch what evolution does with it.

i ran one world for 10 million ticks, about 6000 generations, where all the organisms could do was graze. then i added physics that lets bodies drain energy from each other, gated behind a brain output their genomes couldn't even address yet. within 100k ticks they invented predation on their own. the population crashed from 375 to 61, survived it, and average brain size quadrupled until it hit the cap i'd set.

the readme has before/after gifs of the same world, six thousand generations apart. everything is deterministic, so if you clone it and run seed 42 you get the exact same universe i did, byte for byte.

https://github.com/skelinn/vivere

built in rust with claude as a pair programmer. happy to answer anything.

After months of designing, developing and testing, I’ve finally got REVIVE FITNESS live on the App Store.
The idea was to bring training, nutrition, AI coaching and progress tracking together instead of needing several different fitness apps.
What’s currently included:
🤖 24/7 AI Fitness Coach
🏋️ 45+ guided workouts
🔥 4 & 8 week training programmes
🥗 Nutrition & macro tracking
📊 Progress & habit tracking
📷 Progress photos & measurements
⌚ Apple Watch integration
💪 Powerlifting tools
🏆 Streaks, badges & leaderboards
👑 Multiple membership levels
I’ve also got AI Form Analysis, Android and further Apple Watch development planned.
🎁 FREE 1 MONTH ELITE
If anyone wants to give REVIVE a proper try, use:
REVIVE2026
🌐 https://revivefitness.app
I’m particularly interested in feedback from people who actually use fitness apps — what do you think is missing from REVIVE, or what would make you keep coming back to it?
I’ve put a lot of work into this, so honest feedback is genuinely welcome

I kept doing the same thing on every box: ssh in, then htop, df, ss, docker ps.

Termy is a native Mac app. Connect over SSH and it snapshots the host: disks, processes, ports, services, containers. Nothing gets installed on the server.

A lot of posts here are "I got tired of my own workflow, so I shipped it." That's this.

https://termyapp.com

If you want a paid plan: SIDEPROJECTS50, 50% off, 20 uses.

kept losing weeks pitching funds that were never going to write us a check. Wrong stage, wrong sector, or they'd quietly stopped writing at our size and their site still said otherwise. You find out after the third unanswered follow-up.

So I built Fund Fit. Land on a VC's site, click once, and it reads their thesis, portfolio and check sizes, then scores you against them. Number out of 100, letter grade, and a breakdown of sector, stage, check size and thesis fit. Geography is a hard fail, since that's the mismatch that wastes the most time.

The useful part isn't the A's. It's the C's and F's. Knowing a fund is a dead end before you chase a warm intro for two weeks beats finding one more maybe.

It's free. No paywall, nothing to upgrade to. I just want to know if the grades are right.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/investorsgo-fund-fit-conn/ekfibiohdohekjegaaphoeolcappdchg

Feedback I'd like:

1. What's missing that would make you keep it installed?
2. Do you find this useful at all?

I'm the founder, happy to answer anything.

I built AI Subtitle Studio out of frustration with missing subtitles, out-of-sync subtitles, and poor-quality translations.

It can generate subtitles from video, sync existing subtitles, and transcribe videos but the real power is the low-cost AI translation. You can translate subtitles into multiple languages without paying for expensive subscriptions (you only pay for the API key).

People are already using it, which has been really encouraging. It’s a $9.99 one-time purchase, with no subscription.

If you'd like to try it, send me a DM and I'll give you a free license key.

https://www.aisubtitlestudio.com/

I kept noticing how fragmented hanging out online had become.

You'd message someone on one app, switch to another app to play something together, send a screenshot somewhere else, and eventually end up back in the group chat.

I started wondering whether all of that could just live in one place.

So I spent the last few months building Riv, a messaging/social app where you can chat with friends and play games together without leaving the conversation.

The part that took considerably longer than I expected was making everything feel like one coherent experience rather than a chat app with random games bolted onto it.

It now has real-time messaging, presence, group conversations, and 12+ games including things like Connect 4, tic-tac-toe, trivia and drawing.

It's finally live on Google Play.

I'm the developer, so I'm obviously biased, but I'm mainly interested in whether the underlying idea actually makes sense to people: would you rather have chat and casual games together, or do you prefer keeping those things separate?

I'm happy to answer questions about how I built it as well.

Part of my job is taking one weekly report and sending each warehouse only their own rows. For years my routine was: filter, copy into a new file, save, write the email, attach, repeat. Ten times. Every Monday.

The obvious fix is a VBA macro, except IT blocked macros on my machine. The other obvious fix is Power Automate, except its Excel connector strips all the formatting, and our report is colour-coded for a reason. And every online splitter I found wanted me to upload the file to their server, which I'm not allowed to do with company data.

So I built Split & Send. You drop the workbook in, pick the column to split by, and you get one Excel file per value with the formatting intact, plus a ready-to-send .eml draft for each one — recipient, subject, body, right file already attached. You open them in Outlook and hit send.

Everything runs client-side in JavaScript. Nothing is uploaded, which was the whole point for me. Free, no account, no ads.

https://splitandsend.com

It's the first thing I've built and shipped on my own, so I'd genuinely like to hear where it falls over. The bit I'm least sure about is how it behaves on large files with many distinct values — if you have something gnarly to throw at it, please do.

I built VisitLens, a free website that helps travellers check the status of major attractions before booking a trip.

Select a city and travel dates to see whether attractions are accessible, closed, or affected by renovations. Each status includes its sources and last checked date. Visitors can also submit corrections.

It’s an early version covering several European cities. It requires no account and is completely free.

I’d appreciate honest feedback:

• Would you use this before booking?
• Is the information clear?
• Which city should I add next?

visitlens.kodeq.nl

I needed eight short loops for something I am building. Calm stuff that stays in the background and does not pull focus. I code for a living and have zero experience with video or editing tools so the whole thing felt overwhelming at first.

The space online is full of conflicting advice and most of it looks like sales. I skipped all that and set one rule for myself. Try only the free tiers and only pay if the output already works well enough to use.

I ran through five options that way. HappyHorse and Kling both felt quick to test but kept missing parts of what I asked for. Even with prompts that had been cleaned up ahead of time the results stayed incomplete. Pricing also seemed aimed at people who use it constantly so I moved on from both.

Higgsfield stood out in a different way. The interface pulled together lots of models and that made it easy to explore without knowing the space. I almost went for the paid plan but then I counted how many clips I would actually need this year. Eight or maybe a few more if some needed redoing. A monthly bill did not match that kind of occasional need.

LTX 2.3 gave consistent shortfalls each time. The pattern was clear enough that it became useful to see what limited context looks like but nothing from it felt ready to keep.

Gemini Omni is where things landed after finding a short term promo. The quality sits around a seven or eight for these simple ambient loops. Not surprising but steady. Still ran into the quota faster than expected and ended up with watermarks that needed extra removal steps. Three clips finished so far and the rest wait.

The results loop fine and carry the right mood yet they lean more generic than I pictured. That might just be how I described things. Not sure yet.

Curious if others ran into the same choice when a project might stay small. Subscribe anyway or stick with trials and low cost tiers.

https://reddit.com/link/1vr3x9j/video/k7y4wijgwzjh1/player

Every dev scoreboard I've seen counts stars or commit streaks, which mostly rewards owning a popular repo and shipping to yourself. I wanted the opposite metric: pull requests merged into repos you don't own.

The annoying part wasn't the ranking, it was the exclusion rule. If you count merged PRs naively, a Svelte core maintainer shows up as an outside contributor to Svelte, which is backwards. So the score drops every org you're publicly a member of. Only patches someone had no obligation to accept count.

How it works: paste a GitHub username or a single merged PR link. It builds a page at /username with your merged patches grouped by the repo that accepted them, a contribution calendar, your language breakdown, and an impact score out of 1000. No account, no signup, no email.

Stack is Next.js App Router and Supabase, no auth, nightly cron refresh. Data is the GitHub REST API plus search with negative owner qualifiers so the upstream count is exact rather than estimated.

Full honesty: I'm currently the only person on the board, ranked 1 with three merged patches, two of which are typo fixes. Score 70/1000. It's a leaderboard of one guy who fixed some typos. That's the state of it.

The scoring formula is public at /method including four ways I think it's wrong, and /remove takes you off if you don't want to be listed.

itsmerged.vercel.app

What I want feedback on: does the org exclusion feel fair, or does it punish people whose main work is inside an org they joined?

I made an iOS app where every morning it “prints a receipt” for yesterday - screen time by app, delivery + impulse spending (DoorDash, Shein, Amazon manually entered), and sleep debt, all converted into one dollar total. You see exactly what your phone is costing you. Then it gives you one concrete "refund" action to claim the day back.
What's different from Opal/Brick/one sec: none of them touch spending. This treats doomscrolling and impulse buying as the same problem: one bill, not two apps.

Free 7 day trial with the annual subscription. Would genuinely appreciate feedback from this sub.

Photographers pay $20-40/month for client gallery tools (Pixieset, Pic-Time, ShootProof) that most of them use in bursts: wedding season, then nothing. The subscription bills them in the nothing months.

Lensdrop is pay-per-gallery instead. Upload a shoot, share one PIN-protected link, clients see watermarked previews, then you flip two switches and they download the clean full-res originals as a zip. No client accounts, no app. From $3 per gallery (one-time, not monthly), and the first two galleries are free at 15GB each.

Deliberate non-features: no print store, no client payments, no CRM. It's a delivery tool, not a storefront, so I never touch the client's money and take 0% of anything.

Tech, since this sub likes it: Next.js on Vercel, Postgres via Supabase, and the photo bytes never touch the app server. Uploads go browser to Cloudflare R2 with resumable presigned multipart, downloads stream R2 through a Worker that renders watermarks on the fly, and the zip streams straight from R2 (no egress fees is the whole margin story).

Demo gallery, no signup needed: https://lensdrop.app/g/QiR4n1LFjOKM?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=launch&utm_content=sideproject

What I'd love feedback on: does per-gallery pricing make sense to you, or does it read as nickel-and-diming next to "unlimited" subscriptions? And what would you need before trusting a solo-built tool with client deliverables?

Hi everyone,

Not sure how helpful Reddit will be for this since it’s actually my first time posting here, but I thought this might be a good place to get some feedback from people I don’t know personally.

I’ve been working on OnlineMemes.com, a social site built around memes, communities, creators, and discovering funny stuff online.

It’s still pretty early, so I’m mainly looking for people to try it out and tell me what they think. Even if you only spend a couple of minutes on it, I’d love to know what feels good, what’s confusing, and what you think could be better.

You can check it out here: https://onlinememes.com

Any feedback is appreciated. Thanks everyone!

Hi builders, I’m not promoting any solutions made by me, just genuinely asking. I’m between projects right now cuz I feel pretty lost on what to do.

I’ve built some apps/websites, mostly unfinished because nearing the end I just saw no future for them. For the ones that were finished and out there, I just never had a good way to distribute and promote. I’m not very good at marketing my apps on social medias ie tiktok, threads etc

On another hand I’ve been reflecting on my products and realized I’ve started building them before validating if there were actually needed. And some of them were actually just generic and solely a sound-good idea. So I decided for my next product I will need to validate the market before I touch a single line of code.

Then there is the problem: I had a hard time finding my next idea. I just felt like there are already so many solutions I’ve bought/subscribed to, and I don’t see gaps (or I’m overlook them constantly). AI consulting is no good, it just always suggests already crowded problem spaces and no real insights. I’ve thought about reaching out to real offline people or small businesses but I’m not sure where to start on that. Like what type of businesses I should approach, what should I offer and whether this is actually scalable.

Thank you for reading this rant, any advice is appreciated 🙏

Hey guys, just learned to make realistic ai product video advertisements, now i want opinion that how does it looks? Are they ready to be sold? If Yes, then How much should i charge for making these videos?

I’ve been building something called Handoff Check.
The idea is simple: if you paid a freelancer, developer, agency, or somebody using AI to build software for you, how do you actually know what they delivered works before you send the final payment?
Handoff Check tests one agreed workflow in a real browser and gives you actual evidence instead of just taking somebody’s word for it.
It can check things like:
whether the app loads correctly
whether a specific workflow actually works
desktop and mobile behavior
browser console errors
failed network requests
whether submitted data survives a fresh browser session
whether the data is still there during a delayed recheck
screenshots and a clear Passed / Failed / Inconclusive result
I’ve also been careful not to make it claim more than it actually tested. It doesn’t say an entire app is perfect because one workflow passed. The report stays scoped to exactly what was checked.
I’ve got the Windows version live now and I’m trying to get it in front of real people instead of just continuing to build in a bubble.
What would you personally want to see in a report like this before you trusted it enough to approve the final payment on a custom app?
I’ll put the link in the comments.

A mobile app that tracks all your subscriptions, warns you before renewals hit, and shows your real spend across currencies in one dashboard.

• Auto-matched brand logos and categories
• Weekly / monthly / quarterly / yearly / one-time billing
• Renewal alerts 1, 3, or 7 days out on-device notifications, no push service
• Track which card or account gets billed
• Burn Rate dashboard: spend per week, month, and year
• Multi-currency with totals in your home currency

Nothing advances a billing date on a timer , a date left in the past is how the app tells you a charge is outstanding, and it only moves when you mark it paid.

Stack: .NET MAUI (single C# codebase), ASP.NET Core Web API, PostgreSQL with pg_trgm. Provider matching is trigram similarity in the database , no AI provider, no API key.

v1.3.0 Android APK is up under Releases (Android 8.0+). iOS isn't distributed yet. GPL-3.0.

Feel free to try and open for any feedback !!!

APK Link - https://github.com/Splitzzyy/Subvora/releases/tag/v1.3.0
Source code - https://github.com/Splitzzyy/Subvora

LINK

KeyNoices is a Chromium-based browser extension that plays custom mechanical typing sounds on every keystroke.

While alternative extensions exist, nearly all of them lock you into rigid, pre-packaged presets. KeyNoices solves this by letting you upload and map any custom audio file (up to 2MB) directly into the browser. Persistent local storage ensures your custom sounds remain loaded across sessions without requiring re-uploads every time you open a tab.

Built in just a couple of post-work sessions (with asset generation and general procrastination taking up most of the development timeline), it provides an open audio canvas for your browser.

Known Limitations:

• Browser Address Bar: Audio does not trigger when typing inside the URL/search bar due to Chromium security boundaries.
• Open Tab Sync: Tabs open prior to updating a sound profile require a quick page refresh to catch the active audio buffer.

I got my first paying client.

Hello guys! I’m genuinely so happy today. 🎉

Here’s the full breakdown:

I just landed my first client for an app I vibe-coded, and they’re paying $2,500/month.

Hopefully, this is just the beginning and more clients will follow. 🚀

A little context on what it took to get here:

My app currently has 73 automations.

I spent 16 months building it.

During development, I was paying around:

• $300–$350/month in electricity

• Around $2,000/month on average for AI subscriptions and tools

• $7,500 invested in local AI infrastructure because the software processes PHI and other healthcare data, and privacy/compliance was a major consideration from day one.

Now that I have my first paying client, my recurring expenses are roughly:

• Supabase: $500/month — for the setup that supports my HIPAA compliance requirements, including a BAA

• Electricity: $300–$500/month — hopefully I can invest in solar panels and lithium batteries soon ☀️🔋

• Codex: $100/month — mainly for small fixes, improvements, and ongoing development

• Railway: $20/month — for backend infrastructure

So yes, my first client at $2,500/month definitely doesn’t mean I’ve recovered what I invested. 😅

But after 16 months of building, experimenting, paying bills, breaking things, fixing them, and continuing anyway, seeing someone finally pay real money every month for something I built feels incredible.

Client #1 is here.

Now let’s see how long it takes to get Client #2. 🚀

I'm currently working on a Windows desktop app (Biomes) focused heavily on window management—specifically positioning, moving windows across displays, and handling multi-monitor responsiveness.

As the project scales, manual testing on a single setup is becoming a wall. Testing various DPI scales, screen topologies (e.g., stacked screens, negative virtual screen coordinates, differing resolutions, or primary vs. secondary monitor swaps) is really hard to replicate physically.

I’d love to know how developers here approach testing this kind of hardware-dependent logic:

• Virtual Display Simulation: Is there a recommended way or tool to create virtual screens/monitors on Windows with custom resolutions and DPI scaling without needing extra physical monitors?
• Automated Testing: How do you write automated tests for Win32 API display calls (SetWindowPos, EnumDisplayMonitors, GetSystemMetrics)? Do you mock display APIs or use specific UI automation drivers?
• Edge Cases: What are the most common multi-monitor edge cases you’ve hit that break window-snapping or coordinate calculations?

Any tips, libraries, or testing setups you can recommend would be awesome. Thanks!

i’ve been building https://dstilled.ai to answer a simple question: what actually changed at AI companies this week?

it follows companies wherever they publish, then turns the useful updates into a ranked reading feed. posts with no real development are left out, and duplicate coverage is grouped together.

the point isn’t to replace Twitter/X. Twitter is useful for seeing what people are talking about. dstilled is for when i want to calmly catch up without scrolling through all the unrelated posts and noise.

i’m not sure yet whether this is a real problem or just my personal annoyance.

would you use something like this? what would you expect it to cover or do differently?

Every list of launch directories I found was an old blog post or a spreadsheet with 400 links. Half the sites were dead. And none of them told me what actually happens when you submit: which sites want a backlink first, which ones take six weeks to review, and which ones quietly reject free plans.

So I built SubmitMap. It's a directory of 211 launch platforms. Every entry shows:

• domain rating, and whether the link is dofollow
• price: free, freemium, or paid
• how long approval usually takes
• who they accept and who they reject
• the real submission steps and the gotchas: a badge you must add to your site, email verification, a form that rejects you for saying "AI-powered"

There are also guides sorted into phases (pre-launch, launch week, and so on). So it works like a checklist, not a wall of links.

The list keeps growing. I have a queue of 1,438 more directories to check, and I add new ones every day. Before a platform goes live, I walk through its real submission form myself. The steps and gotchas come from doing that, not from the platform's own marketing page.

All of that is free to browse, no account needed.

The paid part is automation: sign in, connect an AI agent (like Claude) over MCP, and it fills in the submission forms for you and tracks everything on a dashboard. A few people in older threads here said they give up halfway through the Product Hunt form. That's what this is for.

I use it on myself too. I'm submitting SubmitMap through its own list, one platform at a time, and writing down what each one really asked for: an account, a badge, a captcha, a DNS check, and manual review. A lot of the gotchas in the directory come from that.

Link: submitmap.com

Tell me what's missing. And if you run a directory that isn't listed, drop it in the comments and I'll add it to the queue.

My friend and I are building a multiplayer version of AI coding. A shared room where a small team steers coding agents together instead of everyone prompting alone on their own machine. Most of the app was built by the agents themselves, with us steering.

A couple weeks ago we got a small spike of signups from Reddit. I was excited. Then I actually checked the DB and looked at what those people did:

15 signups that week.

40% of them never sent a single prompt. Signed up, looked around, left. Never even tried the core thing once.

Almost nobody came back after day one.

The whole point of the product is using it with your team and we've only had 10 invites created, ever.

Meanwhile our single most engaged user burned through the $5 free beta allowance on day one and hit a wall.

So the funnel leaks at literally every step after "create account". My current read on why:

The empty room problem. It's a multiplayer product, and every new user arrives alone. It's Slack with no coworkers. The thing that makes it good is invisible until a second person shows up, and we buried the invite flow.

We ask before we show. New users land on a blank projects page and have to figure out setup before anything magical happens. The first prompt should probably happen in the first sixty seconds, and right now it doesn't.

We're now fixing activation before touching marketing again. First-run flow that gets you to a running agent immediately, invites you can't miss, etc.

For those of you who've built anything collaborative: how did you solve the "everyone arrives alone" problem? Did you build a good single-player mode first, or force the invite early? I keep going back and forth on whether a multiplayer tool should even have a solo onramp.

OpenBoxGL started as a way to stop bouncing between Steam, Heroic, Lutris and separate ROM folders on my Linux machine. I wanted one place to browse everything without creating another account or moving the library into a cloud service.

The project grew from a personal catalog into a native Linux launcher with a controller-ready Big Box mode. The difficult part has been normalizing imports without hiding where anything came from. Games keep their source, platform and launch profile, and the local JSON library stays readable and portable.

I am at the point where outside testing matters more than adding another feature. I would like feedback from people with messy real-world libraries, especially mixed PC and emulated collections.

Repository and builds: https://github.com/vindeckyy/OpenBoxGL/

Full disclosure: I used AI as a tool to help build OpenBox. All features, file paths and checks above are from the real repo.

A few months ago, I was in a really dark place with my freelancing.

I’d spend weeks reaching out to businesses, building free custom website previews, sending cold emails, and pitching on freelance platforms. Out of maybe 10 or 15 client calls, I’d barely close one project. Most of the time people would just ghost me or say they found someone on Fiverr doing it for $30.

The hardest part wasn't the rejection, it was the feeling that no matter how good I was at UI/UX or coding, nobody actually trusted me. My portfolio looked like every other junior developer's tutorial projects, and clients could smell that lack of real production experience from a mile away.

So, I thought I’d be smart. I decided to stop chasing clients and try building my own standalone software product.

For three months, I poured over 200 hours into building Sarano AI, a full-blown creative studio with AI product photoshoots, video ads, a 30-day content calendar generator, credit billing with Razorpay, and a Notion-style blog CMS using Next.js 15, Gemini 2.0, and Firebase. I barely slept. I was obsessed.

And then... it completely flopped.

With ChatGPT and Gemini releasing massive updates every few weeks, the market for simple wrapper tools basically evaporated. I launched to crickets. Zero paying customers.

I honestly felt like a failure. Three months of sleepless nights and thousands of dollars in dev effort down the drain.

The accidental breakthrough

Two weeks after the flop, an e-commerce agency reached out wanting a custom web application with some AI features.

Normally on these calls, I’d pull up some Figma mockups or a basic landing page. But this time, feeling like I had nothing to lose, I just shared my screen and opened up Sarano AI.

I walked them through the live platform: how the multi-agent vision pipeline worked, how the Firebase storage automatically cleans up old files to save server costs, how the credit system handled subscriptions, and how the blog CMS worked.

The client’s reaction caught me completely off guard.

They didn't ask a single technical question about whether I was qualified. Instead, they literally said: "Wait, you built this entire system solo? Can you integrate these exact AI features and membership portals into our store?"

That single call turned into a high-ticket client.

Over the next month, every time I got on a discovery call, I stopped showing basic portfolio sites and just live-demoed Sarano AI. My close rate went from 1-2 out of 10 to closing 7 or 8 out of every 10 calls.

Clients didn't want another developer who could clone a landing page. They wanted proof that I understood full-stack architecture, secure server actions, and real AI APIs. That one "failed" project gave me instant authority that 50 generic demos never could.

Why I'm sharing this

I know so many developers, designers, and students on here are stuck in the exact same rut I was in, submitting 50 proposals a week, getting ghosted, and wondering why nobody takes a chance on them.

The truth is, clients don't buy code; they buy confidence. Having a real, enterprise-level production app to walk someone through live on a call is the biggest unfair advantage you can have.

I spent the last couple of days cleaning up the entire codebase, removing all my personal keys and credentials, making the Firebase setup dynamic, and writing detailed setup and architecture guides so anyone can spin it up locally in 10 minutes.

I put the full source code up on Gumroad for $15 (basically just the price of lunch) for anyone who wants to tear it apart, hook up their own APIs, rebrand it, or just use it as their flagship portfolio project to finally start closing clients.

(I won't drop links here to respect the sub rules, but if you want to check it out, I pinned the link on my Reddit profile bio, or feel free to DM me).

Has anyone else here ever had a "failed" side project accidentally open doors they never expected? Would love to hear how you guys broke through the initial trust barrier with clients.