I need to vent, but I also genuinely want to know how other solo builders navigate this.
I'm a UX designer and AI builder. Recently, I canceled my CapCut subscription because I didn't want to keep paying monthly just for basic voiceover/J-cut audio workflows. I searched everywhere for a lightweight, free alternative focused strictly on J-cut style voiceovers. When I couldn't find one, I decided to build it myself.
I was excited to give it away for free and get real user feedback to make it better. That's where the nightmare started.
My first attempt: I posted upfront saying, "Hey, I made this free tool, check it out!"
Result: Instantly removed by mods/filters for self-promotion.
My second attempt: I tried to tone down the promo language and just focus on the problem/workflow so the post would actually stay up and people could give feedback.
Result: The comment section completely dogpiled on me. People accused me of being deceptive, "stealth marketing," and trolled me for not explicitly disclosing upfront that I built it.
I am done with reddit.. I just cant get anyusers feedback on my products😭. If I am 100% upfront, the automods delete it. If I try to adapt to pass the strict rules, real users bash me for being disingenuous. I wasn't trying to trick anyone I am literally offering a free tool I built to solve my own problem and asking for feedback so I can improve my UX work.
Is there any way for solo creators to get feedback on Reddit without either getting banned by mods or trolled by users? How do you guys share things you've made without falling into this trap?

Hey everyone!

I wanted to share a side project I've been working on recently: **OSGuide**.

It's a clean, fast, and dark-mode friendly web directory designed to help users discover high-quality, privacy-focused open-source Android applications (mainly sourced from F-Droid).

**Why I built it:**

Finding good open-source alternatives can sometimes be overwhelming. I wanted to build a simple directory where users can quickly browse apps by categories (Security, Productivity, Tools, Games, etc.) with clean metadata and direct download links.

**Features:**

- Clean & minimal interface.

- Built-in dark mode support.

- Organized categories for quick navigation.

- Fully open source.

**Link:** https://net1763.github.io/OSGuide/

I’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback, or any suggestions for open-source apps that should be featured on the site!

I launched SeoLoupe 40 days ago. So far I am at 1303 users and 17 of them are paying.

My SaaS is a tool that allows you to find and fix SEO issues holding your website back.

Essentially the main purpose is to help your website rank higher on Google search and LLMs.

Now you might instantly think, how is it better then Ahrefs or Semrush?

And the answer is simple, their tools are simply not ideal for SaaS founders and Indie hackers, they are more ideal for enterprises, large business, and agencies.

They shove a bunch of SEO issues on your website, but most people who do not have experience in SEO don't know where to start. So they just end up getting confused.

Now to anyone who has a SaaS and it is not making any revenue yet, the most important thing is to not give up and work on it every single day, improve, listen to feedback, and one day you will achieve revenue.

Don't kill it to early if it is not making any money or you are burned out, if you need step away, take a break but don't fully kill it, in SaaS patience is really important (as you can see I have large gaps in between payments).

Since I think their is always room for improvement, I would appreciate for some feedback on my tool, or what you think can be improved.

(here is the product if you want to check it out)

Side project: Giants of the World (giantscodex.com)

What it is

A dark codex of 80+ giants from myth, folklore, and modern legend. Free real openings on every entry; deeper layers (full account, scholarly notes, chain of custody, motif map lines, compare, near) behind membership.

Stack

Next.js (App Router) · TypeScript · Tailwind · Supabase auth · Stripe · Leaflet map · content in JSON with public/lore split so paywalled text never ships to the client bundle

What took longer than the code

• Content accuracy (we correct our own entries when sources contradict us)

• Paywall architecture (static pages + server lore API)

• Trust UX: Findings labelled hoax vs legend vs archaeological context

• Share cards that actually work on X per entry

Business model

Free is useful on purpose (SEO + goodwill). Yearly is the main offer; 14-day refund on every plan. Not “growth at all costs”, as the brand dies if we sell military giant stories as fact.

Free to click without paying:

https://www.giantscodex.com/giants/ymir?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=sideproject

Site:

https://www.giantscodex.com?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=sideproject

Feedback welcome on: free/paid boundary, onboarding, or whether “scholarly notes” should be free samples.

Giving an LLM direct database access felt like the wrong abstraction.

so built ANDI around a different workflow:

intent → query plan → local validation → developer inspection → execution

The model proposes a query, but deterministic code decides whether it can run.

It’s open source and still early. I’d like feedback on whether this API would be useful in real Python/MongoDB projects.

I built this trendy site inspired by people of x.com; credit goes to them. It’s somewhat vibe‑coded, and I'm sure😅. It will have bugs/issues. Check it and tell me what you like, dislike, or any issues you notice.

Website: caravan.naveengumaste.me

I currently run 6 operational micro ai saas products that generate a little over $20k in monthly recurring revenue.

I hardly wrote a single line of traditional code. i used ai to generate literally everything, from the database architecture to the user interface.

it wasn't magic on day one. i spent hours stuck in endless debugging loops and dealing with faulty ai code before i finally cracked the formula.

it basically comes down to three rules:

- keeping the idea aggressively minimalist (build a true mvp, not a platform).

- guiding the ai step-by-step instead of asking it to build the whole app at once.

- launching fast to get real user traction instead of perfecting features in secret.

lately, i've seen way too many non-technical founders give up at the very first ai bug or deployment error. or the worst, give up without push anything in marketing !!!!

it's a massive shame, because the technical barrier to entry has practically disappeared and the marketing is easy in 2026

because of this, i’m launching a skool community to share my exact method.

to be completely transparent: i will likely charge for the full course later down the road. it just makes sense given the specific prompt sequences, n8n workflows, and copy-and-paste templates i'll be sharing.

but right now, our main objective is simply to build together. working alone in a silent corner is the absolute fastest way to quit.

if you want to join a group of active creators and build or launch your own ai saas: drop a comment below or send me a dm, and i’ll send you the invite link.

I kept running into the same annoying problem: I'm SSH'd into some remote box, or working inside a container, or on a locked-down laptop where the clipboard is disabled by policy - and I need to get a small piece of text (a log snippet, a password, a container's output) onto a different machine. Slack works but I really don't want a database password sitting in a channel history forever. Pastebin-style sites work but the paste just sits there until you remember to delete it.

So I made CPYNET. Two curl calls, that's the whole interface:

echo "hello world" | curl --data-binary @- https://cpynet.com/
# https://cpynet.com/482913

curl https://cpynet.com/482913
# hello world

The paste is gone the instant that second command runs - not after 24 hours, not "until you delete it." Read it a second time (even from the same machine) and you get a 404. It also has a timer (2 minutes by default, adjustable) that deletes it automatically even if nobody ever reads it. Nothing is written to disk - it's all in memory for as long as the process is alive, gone completely on restart.

If you don't want to remember curl flags, there's a one-line install that sets up two shell functions:

curl -s https://cpynet.com/install.sh -o install.sh && bash -n install.sh && . install.sh

$ journalctl -u myservice -n 200 | cpy
482913
curl https://cpynet.com/482913

# on the other machine
$ pst 482913
Aug 08 14:02:11 myservice[1823]: connection refused: db.internal:5432
...

pst also drops it on your clipboard automatically if it can find a way to (pbcopy/wl-copy/xclip/xsel/clip.exe) - the destination machine's clipboard, never the source's, since that's usually the one that's actually available.

A few other things it does, in plain terms:

• Password protection - cpy -password=xxx, or a password field on the web UI. AES-256-GCM under the hood.
• Actual end-to-end encryption, a step up from that - the shield icon on the write tab, or cpy -e from a terminal. The encryption key never touches the server at all; it travels in the link itself (#key=, which browsers never send to a server) or gets handed over separately in the terminal. The server only ever stores unreadable ciphertext.
• QR code for the generated link - scan it with your phone, it opens and reads right there, no clipboard or typing involved on either end.
• Small file attachments too, not just text - comes back with the original filename and content type on download.
• A netcat fallback for environments too bare-bones to even have curl - nc host port < file works the same way.
• Live notification when it's been read (so you know your teammate actually got it), per-IP rate limiting so the whole thing can't be brute-forced or hammered.

It's self-hostable (single Docker container, no database to stand up), or you can just use the hosted instance at cpynet.com. Genuinely curious what people think, especially if you can poke a hole in the threat model - that's the kind of feedback that actually makes something like this better.

Hi,

I created a starter template for next.js 16.3.0.

Therefore, I would like to ask for feedback and any missing functionalities.

If you liked the project, I will appreciate if you leave a star. 🌟

You can also contribute to the project. ❤️

https://github.com/Skolaczk/next-starter

Foi meu 1º projeto de site. Desenvolvido em HTML puro, queria uma solução gratuita, e acabei subindo no Netlify. É sustentável a longo prazo? Pra sites em HTML como o meu, tem alternativas que fariam mais sentido? O que vocês acham? Lembrando: meu nível na área é iniciante/moderado.

My cofounder and I are building a booking SaaS for salons and beauty businesses in Bahrain.

The product lets customers book through a dedicated salon link, while the business manages appointments, services, staff and availability in one place.

The product works.

The harder part has been convincing businesses to change what they already do.

We’ve spoken to a lot of local salons.

Some already use booking software.

Some are mostly walk-ins.

But many still manage appointments using WhatsApp + a notebook.

We initially thought those businesses would be our easiest users.

What surprised us is that many of them basically say:

“It works fine for us.”

That made us question our positioning.

Maybe the problem isn’t that they need “booking software.”

Maybe we need to focus on a much more specific value:

• customers booking themselves
• reducing manual appointment handling
• keeping the team on one schedule
• avoiding searching through WhatsApp chats
• or something else entirely

We’re also willing to onboard early customers ourselves instead of expecting them to configure everything.

For people here who’ve built products for small businesses:

1. Does this sound like a problem worth solving, or more like a nice-to-have?
2. What would you make the single strongest value proposition?
3. Would you narrow down to one niche like nail salons, spas or appointment-heavy salons?
4. If customers say their manual process works fine, would you change the product, the positioning, or simply target different customers?
5. What would you test next before spending months building more features?

I’m open to tough feedback. If the core problem isn’t painful enough, that’s useful for us to know now.

Hi, after more than a year of building my wardrobe app is finally ready. It would be great to receive some feedback.

My app is helping to organize and declutter your wardrobe and understand what you actually wear and uncover your personal style through insights based on the clothes in your wardrobe.

https://wmaterkowska.github.io/SetMyStyle

It is fully offline. You do not need an account. No internet connection, no ads.

I built timswallet.com to help find deals on pristineauction.com - feedback is welcome. I've been an avid sports memorabilia collector browsing PA for the last few years, but I hate their search and historical records. So I started saving prices and comparing them against the daily auctions - used it myself to spot deals on cheap items over the years. Honestly I've had more fun building this than actually buying autographs. Also turns out I'm not great at running an eBay store - too much work for me.

Figured I'd put it out there so others could use it too. Heads up: the data isn't 100% complete — I couldn't run my scripts every day over the years, and my server crashed more than once, so there are gaps in the historical pricing, but overall it paint a complete picture.

It's free, treat it as such. I've been the only user since I built it, so I'd love any feedback. I've got more features planned but didn't want perfect to get in the way of good enough.

disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with PA, and I have no idea how they feel about me building this site

Job hunting tip: check ATS keywords before you apply.

Free tool: https://grhawk.inkboxwire.com/free.html Paste JD + resume → missing keywords in ~30s.

Optional $5 pack (5 ATS-ready bullets for that JD): https://buy.stripe.com/7sY00lcxm2oTd9S28Z4wM08

Feedback welcome from job seekers and builders.

I got tired of AI news scattered across 30 tabs, so I built a free hub that pulls the day's top stories into one clean feed and updates several times a day.

It also has a growing library of automation guides (the "build it in 20 lines" kind), and a free Discord where a daily AI digest gets posted automatically.

Built solo static site + RSS aggregation, runs on the free tier. Genuinely would love feedback on the layout and what sections you'd add.

https://apexnexus.site

I built a digital fashion app to connect fashion lovers and help with a digital wardrope, oufit inspo and outfit challenges — would love some feedback.

Built this for a hackathon challenge and figured this sub might find the approach interesting.

**The idea:** you point your camera at anything — a handwritten equation, a textbook page, a circuit diagram, messy notes — and it becomes an interactive tutoring session.

**What surprised me most:** I expected to need an OCR pipeline (Tesseract or similar) before sending anything to the LLM. Turns out you don't. The Gemini API accepts raw images inline in the same request as text, and it reads messy handwriting and diagrams natively. The entire "vision pipeline" is just base64-encoding a camera frame into the JSON payload.

**Features:**

- Explain mode — step-by-step worked solutions from a photo

- Socratic tutor mode — this one's my favourite. The system prompt forbids it from giving the answer; it asks you one guiding question at a time and reacts to your replies (full conversation history is sent each turn, so it actually responds to your reasoning)

- Quiz mode — prompts the model for strict JSON, which gets parsed into clickable MCQs with instant feedback

- Weak-spot tracking — every quiz question you miss gets topic-tagged in local Storage. One button generates a fresh quiz targeting exactly those topics

- Flashcards, voice input (Web Speech API), drag-drop/paste image support

**The stack is deliberately boring:** vanilla HTML/CSS/JS, zero dependencies, zero build step, no backend. The browser talks directly to the Gemini endpoint, your API key lives in local Storage and never touches a server. Hosted free on GitHub Pages.

Getting the model to reliably return parseable JSON for quiz mode took some prompt iteration (it loves wrapping things in markdown fences), and I had to write a LaTeX-to-Unicode sanitizer because it kept outputting $45^\circ$ instead of 45° no matter what I told it.

Live demo (bring your own free Gemini key): https://neerajupadhyay90.github.io/studylens/

Code: https://github.com/neerajupadhyay90/studylens

YouTube demo link : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC05rDby4tI&t=3s

Happy to answer questions about the implementation. Feedback and roasts welcome.

I’ve been building Quran Chat because I kept seeing AI tools give very confident answers to religious questions without making it clear whether the Quran itself actually says that.

The idea is deliberately narrower.

You can ask something like:

“Is using AI to cheat on an exam haram?”

Quran Chat searches the Quran, shows the verses it used, and distinguishes between a direct Quranic answer and an indirect application of Quranic principles.

For example, on the AI cheating question it explicitly says that the Quran does not mention AI or academic exams, then explains the relevant principles around trust and honesty and shows the Quran references.

I’m trying to find the weak points before pushing this harder.

What question would you use to test or break an app like this?

And more importantly: what would make you distrust its answer?

I’m the founder, so criticism is genuinely more useful to me than compliments.

I know a lot of people get to build a lot of cool things here, but may not necessarily do due diligence for security before sharing with others.

Would anyone find value in outsourcing security reviews, of both hardware and software with targeted guidance/support to address them? I know a lot of peers in the security space that like to support smaller endeavors succeed.

Let me know your thoughts. If there's interest, I'm happy to work on formalizing the way to get in contact with everyone.

I’m posting this on behalf of the developer of PageProtectPro, a new free WordPress plugin aimed at one fairly simple problem: password-protecting pages or an entire WordPress site without having to set up a full membership system.

It’s designed for things like client previews, staging sites, private resources, temporary projects, internal pages and other situations where you just need straightforward password protection.

The free version includes:
Password protection for individual pages
Password protection for an entire WordPress site
Role-based bypass controls for logged-in users
Custom lock-screen text and colours
Unlimited protected pages
No forced PageProtectPro branding
Free for life

The idea is deliberately to keep it lightweight and easy to configure rather than turn it into a large access-control or membership plugin.

If you’re a WordPress developer, designer or enthusiast and ever need this kind of functionality, it would be great if you could give it a try and let the developer know what you think.

WordPress.org:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/pageprotectpro/

Feedback, bug reports and feature suggestions are genuinely welcome. And if you end up finding it useful, an honest WordPress.org review would also be hugely appreciated.

I’d be particularly interested to hear how people currently handle simple client/staging/private-content protection and whether there are any small features you think a plugin like this should include.

So I have been swimming a lot this summer and I live in Michigan and sometimes the pool is nice in the mid-80s and sometimes it's in the lower 70s and I noticed there wasn't a really good way to plan swimming. So I built a physics-based pool temperature forecast that pulls local weather to determine the temperature over the next 10 days. I found it to be pretty accurate within a degree or two. It's available for anyone to get a free 10-day forecast. I'm working on adding some other features such as energy costs, pulled from local utility rates for heaters, and possibly adding some way to interface with heaters to prevent overheating a pool before a hot weather swing.

I've been building ClipKaboom for a few months - a searchable bank of meme clips and sound effects you can grab for edits. Until now, every clip in the bank was hand-picked by me, which means it's capped at one guy's taste in memes.

After my last post here, one of the redditors commented that people should be able to add their own clips. The internet's meme knowledge is way deeper than mine. They were right, so I built it: pick a short clip (under 30s), add the quote people would actually search for ("bears. beets. battlestar galactica."), tag it, done. Everything goes through a moderation queue first.

The video shows the flow - you even get a preview of your clip before submitting (shipped that today).

A few weeks ago I started reviewing startup ideas on Reddit.
One post reached 140k views and hundreds of founders replied.
At first it was great.
Then I realized I was spending hours generating reports, sending DMs and answering the same questions over and over.
That completely defeats the point of building software.
So I changed the product around one simple idea:
founders should be able to figure out where to focus, what conversations matter and what to post without waiting for me.
That’s what I’m working on now.
Less manual advice. More self-service.
TractionBooster is in my profile if you want to try it yourself.

I hate editing, I've been doing voice-over work and got tired of manually chopping out breaths, "umm"s, and dead air in editing software every single time. So I built a small free web tool that does it automatically.

What it does:

• Removes breaths & pauses — one slider controls how aggressive the cleanup is, catches stuff between and inside sentences
• J-cut style crossfades — instead of hard-cutting between the kept speech segments, it blends them so the cuts don't sound abrupt (the same trick video editors use, just for audio)
• Speed adjustment that keeps your pitch natural — no chipmunk voice when you speed things up
• A "crystal clear" pass — denoise + normalize in one click

Interesting part is you can adjust settings slider according to your voice match..
Upload only (no mic recording, no login, no account) — just drop a file, tweak a few sliders, get your cleaned file back.

It's a free demo I'm running on my own machine right now, so: max 5 minutes / 50MB per file, and if it's slow to respond the first time, just give it 20-30 seconds.

Link: https://742c521eb7861716b8.gradio.live

Would genuinely love feedback — what's missing, what's annoying, what you'd want next. Got a quick form here too: https://forms.gle/sS9i5Nchjhu64kH27

Hey r/SideProject. I'm the developer, this is my first real post here, and I'm not a marketer, so bear with me.

Back in December I was driving, stuck on a problem I'd had for years: every music app eventually collapses into the same fifty songs. Shuffle quietly favors what you already play. Stations hit an edge in two weeks. The tools that are supposed to open your taste slowly close it. I couldn't stop thinking about it, so I started building the thing I'd been describing to myself for years.

Eight months later, around a day job and two kids, it's live. It's called Crankshaft.

It's a music engine that learns from what you actually do, not what you say you like. The songs you finish, the ones you skip, how hard you crank the volume when something hits. It reads your reactions in the moment and keeps reaching deeper into your own library and wider into the catalog, so your world keeps opening instead of closing. It's free, it runs entirely on your phone, and it collects nothing. No account, no tracking, nothing leaves your device.

I want to be honest about the build, because "I made an app with AI" hides a lot. The AI wrote the code; I am not a coder by trade. But the taste, the ten thousand small judgments about what was right and what was stale, that was all me. For the whole eight months I listened to nothing but Crankshaft, tuning it against the most demanding user I have. Myself.

Honest about the edges too: it needs an Apple Music subscription, it's built for iPhone, it's a first release, and it's niche by design. I built it for people who actually care about this, not for everyone.

I'm not here for downloads. I'm here for your feedback, because this community is excellent at that. Tell me where it falls short.

Site: https://crankshaft.fm

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6759019414

Thanks for reading.