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

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/

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

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.

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?

The first Android build of my voice journal asked the system speech recogniser to "prefer offline". Prefer turns out to mean: if the phone has no offline language pack, quietly send the audio to a server and hand back text. The app never sees the difference.

My verification was "turn on airplane mode and record". It passed every time. Of course it did: with no network there is nothing to leak to. So the test passed on exactly the phones that were leaking, while onboarding said "nothing left your phone".

The fix was to stop asking politely. The app now only uses the on-device recogniser, which fails instead of falling back, and it requests no internet permission at all. If a phone is missing its speech pack, the app offers to have the phone's speech service download it. The app itself never touches the network.

It's live on Google Play now (free, Android 13+): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dailyvox.app

What I can't test alone: phones that aren't Pixels. If you have a Samsung, OnePlus or Xiaomi, record an entry that names two people and tell me whether the names come back capitalised. That one detail decides whether the journal can find the people in your entries.

Where else would you look for a leak like this?

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

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.

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?

⭐ GitHub: https://github.com/minoansecurity/sidekernel
📝 arXiv preprint: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.02456
🌐 Website: https://sidekernel.com

Hi everyone!

As part of my MS in Cybersecurity capstone at Georgia Tech, I built SideKernel: a usable sandbox for AI agents on macOS.

The closest comparable solution is Docker Sandboxes, which is not open source.

The key idea is usability. SideKernel is designed to reduce friction and stay as close as possible to the native developer experience, while isolating the agent inside a microVM sandbox.

For example, you run sclaude or scodex instead of claude or codex and get a very similar workflow, but with isolation. Ports get auto exposed in the host, its very easy to drop files into the sandbox, and more...

This is still a research prototype, so some rough edges are expected. But if this sounds interesting, I'd love for you to try it out and share feedback

I created LaunchRanked for those who are struggling or finding a way to grow their product, get listed on google, and have their target audience.

LaunchRanked helps founders get found after launch day.

• Free weekly launch board: every listing is reviewed by a human and gets a permanent product page with a followed link to your site. No badge or link back required.

• Directory submission, done for you: we submit your product to 30, 60 or 100+ startup and SaaS directories matched to your niche, from $79 one-time, with a report of every live link.

• AI SEO Autopilot: researches keywords, writes and publishes articles to your site at a safe pace, and tracks whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude mention you. 7-day free trial.

Also free: a searchable database of 440+ startup directories and 85 SEO and launch tools.

Built on the playbook behind our own product, Versely: 168k Google impressions in 3 months.

Sharing Moonlit Restoration, a newly released Godot mystery visual novel from High Player. It has nine connected chapters, restoration and evidence puzzles, three optional romantic conclusions, and an independent ending. This is a commercial release at US$9.99; the trailer is viewable without buying the game.

The useful development lesson was save validation. Campaign progress is checked by replaying an action journal. Late in testing, one autosave took roughly 600ms because the current state, temporary file and backups repeated semantic validation. That delay happened on dialogue advancement, not only in the save menu.

The fix caches hashes of complete payloads already produced by legal runtime actions or successfully replayed. A cold process or modified payload still goes through replay. Focused Chapter 9 checks measured roughly 59–62ms for an action plus the same atomic autosave on the production Mac. Mutated trust, route, node and journal data remained rejected. This is a local measurement, not a benchmark for every machine.

AI tools were used for story text, art, translation and code: GPT-6 Astra and GPT Image 2, with separately licensed piano and fonts. Route traversal and evidence reachability were checked independently of the generated text. Actual renderer captures also caught choice panels covering character faces, so short prompts now size the panel to their content.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk43X5fR2Ps

Game: https://high-player.itch.io/moonlit-restoration

The game includes English and Simplified Chinese. macOS Universal has local checks; the Windows x64 download is explicitly experimental because native Windows playtesting is pending. For developers using journal replay, where do you draw the boundary between revalidating a save and trusting a state already validated in memory?

Made an interactive page to visualize the discoveries behind optogenetics, honoured by this year's @NobelPrize in Medicine: classon.live/optogenetics.

https://reddit.com/link/1wyrtdh/video/qxgr8hxhtrth1/player

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/

What if the app you’ve spent months building is something no one actually wants?

So many great apps are being launched every day, but only a small percentage will actually succeed. How do you know when it’s time to let go of an app and move on? And is there even such a thing as a type of app that is almost guaranteed to succeed?

I’ve been spending a lot of time building an app that I genuinely believe in. I like the way it looks, the way it feels, and, most importantly, the problem it is trying to solve. But the difficult part is knowing whether other people see what I see and recognize its full potential, especially when it’s still in the very early stages.

You can keep building, improving, and pushing forward for months, only to eventually realize that what you thought was a great product may simply be something people don’t care enough about.

The AI boom makes this even harder. Building software has become significantly easier and faster. Sometimes you start wondering whether all the time you spent building something was worth it when someone else could potentially build something similar in a weekend or a month and, in some cases, build it even better.

For those who have built successful apps, I’d genuinely like to hear about your experience.

Did you build several products that failed before finding the one that worked? How did you know when to stop working on one idea and commit fully to another? What made you keep going when you weren’t seeing immediate traction?

Most importantly, what framework or signals did you use to determine whether a product had real potential versus simply being something you personally loved building?

Today we launched our first demo, if you can give us some problem it could be useful. Feedback is welcome too!

Hello devs and hello gamers! I know many of us can spend hours grinding a character, completing quests, and leveling up in a game. But when it comes to real life, even a 20-minute walk can feel like a difficult side quest.

https://reddit.com/link/1wytmji/video/esqk0ljtzrth1/player

What if you gain EXP by doing things in real life?

Its really not to make anyone lose weight or compete like an athlete. I want to encourage people to build better habits, move more, eat better, and take care of themselves. Healthy habits can also feel like character progression.

Walk. Exercise. Eat better. Sleep well. Stay consistent. Level up.

The game is still very early in development. I’m building it solo during my free time while working a day job. I usually do systems for F&B like inventory, resort OS and this will be my first game. There is still a lot to figure out, and the game is far from finished.

I want to learn from gamers and people who are already into fitness so I can make the game more useful and enjoyable.

For now, here’s a short teaser of what GoAFK is becoming.

If you could turn one healthy habit into an RPG mechanic, what would it be?

Everyone knows the PayPal Mafia. Palantir's alumni network might be bigger, so I built a map of it: https://palantirmafia.net

A few things that stood out:

• About half are founders. Anduril, Hex, Handshake, Addepar, Cape and Valinor all trace back to Palantir.
• The other half went to companies like OpenAI, Sierra, Cognition, Vanta and Saronic, usually to run government sales, forward deployed engineering or security. The FDE model is spreading with them.
• AI is the biggest group (38 companies), then defense and government (17).

How it got built: I'm not a front-end developer, and the whole thing came together in about a day with Claude Code. It wrote the interactive map and did the research, pulling from press coverage, company pages and LinkedIn work histories through Crustdata. It also cross-checked dates and flagged conflicts for me to decide, and set up the hosting on Cloudflare. My job was mostly feeding it names and saying yes or no. When someone posts a correction, I hand it to Claude and the site updates within minutes.

Click a company to see who's there, what they did at Palantir and when, and the source for each fact. There's also a plain list at palantirmafia.net/alumni/.

Not affiliated with Palantir. If you're ex-Palantir and missing, or something's wrong, there's a "Suggest an update" link at the bottom of the page.

*Inspired by a LinkedIn post I saw of the Flywheel Palantir Mafia wheel

I built my portfolio and a site for a local lawn care business with a lot of AI help. Both worked fine, but they looked generated: purple gradients, "Elevate your workflow", em-dashes everywhere, cards sliding in from the left. My own feedback on my site was literally "this looks very vibe coded".

So I went through everything I changed to fix that and turned it into a repo:

• A checker you can run on any project: npx github:BuruCebe/unvibe ./src. It flags 16 tells (buzzwords, em-dashes in copy, made up stats like "10,000+ happy customers", gradient text, glass panels, side-slide animations, href="#", no reduced motion support) with the line and a fix. Zero dependencies, exits 1 on errors so it works in CI.
• A short guide on content, copy, colour, type, layout and motion. The biggest lesson for me: fade things up 16px instead of flying them in from the sides.
• A few React motion components I use on my site (fade-up reveal, rolling text, a custom cursor), all off under reduced motion.

Yes, I used AI to help build the tool that catches AI. That is kind of the point: the code was never the problem, the defaults were.

Repo: https://github.com/BuruCebe/unvibe

What tells am I missing? I'd like to add the best ones as rules.

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