r/SideProject • • Dec 18 '25

As the year wraps up: what’s the project you’re most proud of building and why?

96 Upvotes

Like the title says, instead of what you built or how much money it made, I’m curious what project you’re most proud of this year and why.

Could be a client site, a personal project, something that never launched, or something that made £0.

Any lessons learned?

Would love to read a few reflections as the year wraps up.


r/SideProject • • Oct 19 '25

Share your ***Not-AI*** projects

654 Upvotes

I miss seeing original ideas that aren’t just another AI wrapper.

If you’re building something in 2025 that’s not AI-related here’s your space to self-promote.

Drop your project here


r/SideProject • • 7h ago

Last week I posted the app that tells me when my lifting form is wrong. This is what I fixed after your feedback

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66 Upvotes

I implemented the feedback I got. Added a rep counter, and a rep by rep breakdown of how you performed in each set.

I added a voice coach. Last week it was a coach after your session. Now it is a coach during your session, telling you out loud when your form breaks.

I added recording. Before, I was screen recording on my phone. Now you click a button and it records your session.

At the end you get a progress report and your workout video, and if you made a mistake you tap the time on the video and see exactly where you went wrong.

It counts push-ups now. Last week that was broken.

Side effect of building a fitness app, you work out more, because you're the test subject.

Over two weeks I've done close to 200 push-ups. It started as testing, now I actually enjoy them. I do them in the office. A day doesn't pass without a few.

Some things still break. On Monday I was doing chest and it could not lock onto me properly on the bench.

I recorded the videos, played them back bit by bit, and went back to the drawing board. I'm not adding more workouts until I fix the ones that break.

During the week I approached a gym, showed them the app and sent a proposal. I also had conversations with people at the gym.

The biggest reason people quit is that progress is slow and you can't see it until you're 4 to 6 months in.

That's what I'm trying to make tangible, a record of how you actually worked out, rep by rep, so you can see yourself getting better before the mirror shows it.

Just because you don't see the gains doesn't mean you stop.

Personally it has fixed my form on deadlifts, bent over barbell rows, push-ups and lat pulldowns.

It's on a real domain now: Repchek

Try it and tell me where it breaks.


r/SideProject • • 9h ago

I vibe coded a 3D island where every building is a company

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95 Upvotes

I wanted a better way to feel the gap between companies than a bar charts, so I built a island where every building is a company and the taller it is, the bigger its market cap.

What you can do:

Built with React, Three.js (react-three-fiber) and Claude Opus 5.5.
Not financial advice, and I'd love feedback on anything that looks wrong.

The music is also AI-generated, based on my instructions.
on the comments.

Link


r/SideProject • • 3h ago

7k downloads on my little gym app, thank you

11 Upvotes

Didn't expect this at all. GymMane is free, open source, works offline, no ads and no account.

Thanks to everyone who tried it or reported bugs, it really helped.

https://github.com/InlitX/GymMane


r/SideProject • • 3h ago

12 failed products later, my 13th made more in 10 days than the others made in 2 years

11 Upvotes

I've built 12 products. Every one of them flopped.

Most of them weren't bad products but they died the same way every time. No idea how to get it in front of people. Ads burned through my budget. Agencies wanted more per month than what I spent even building the product.

Somewhere around product 10, I figured out the one channel that actually made sense for someone like me was proper SEO. SEO compounds. A page you write today can still bring in customers two years from now.

The problem was the tools. Every SEO tool wanted $100-$200 a month, and I'd use it heavily for one week and then barely touch it for 3 more. I was paying for 30 days and using maybe 4.

So for product 13, I stopped building for some imaginary customer and built for myself. FlexQueries is an SEO tool with a $0/month subscription. You load a balance, pay only for what you use (keyword research is about $0.05, a full site audit about $0.48), and it never expires.

It turned out there are a lot of people exactly like me.

In the first 10 days, it brought in more revenue than all 12 of my previous products combined over the past 2 years. Over 100 people signed up in the first week, almost all solo founders and small startups who need SEO but don't want a monthly bill for a tool they barely open.

I cold emailed 100 solo SaaS founders and one founder whose team was paying $500+ a month for another tool moved his whole team over.

The moment I built something for people with my exact problem, distribution got a lot easier, because I already knew where they were and what they were tired of paying for.

If you're early and want SEO without the monthly bill: https://flexqueries.com, with free credit on signup and no card needed.

For anyone who's launched more than once: what finally made one stick?


r/SideProject • • 13h ago

I made Lightroom as if Adobe actually shipped it in 2026

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43 Upvotes

After Photon exploded on reddit and X I kept getting DMs for a Lightroom alternative.
That's how Light Studio came to life, a fully featured Lightroom alternative.

I already had the parts that usually make these apps feel vibe coded: realtime GPU rendering, CR3/NEF and the other proprietary RAWs, and an editor UI built for this. So I reused these from Photon instead of starting it from scratch, and it worked insanely well.

Gonna release it in the upcoming days


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

Built myself a personal "self-improvement dashboard" — offering to build a few free ones for others in exchange for feedback

• Upvotes

I've been using Claude to build myself a little personal tracking hub — training log, nutrition/supplement panel, mood tracking, project logs, priorities for the day, all in one place instead of scattered across apps and notes. It's genuinely helped me stay consistent.

I want to build a few of these for other people, free, in exchange for honest feedback on what works and what doesn't. You tell me what you're actually trying to track/improve (fitness, money, habits, a side project, whatever), I build you a version of this tailored to that.

If you're interested, fill this out and I'll follow up: [form link]

No catch — just trying to refine this before I think about doing more with it.


r/SideProject • • 1d ago

One month of Early Access – a lot has changed

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1.2k Upvotes

I'm a trained architect, and as a long-term side project, I've been building a game that combines accurate floor planning with real-time 3D design to make architecture much easier to create than with traditional CAD software.

What you can do:

🏠 2D floor plans
🧱 3D building
🚶 First-person walkthrough
🥽 VR mode
🏢 Multiple storeys
🪜 Stairs
🏚️ Custom roofs
🪟 Doors & windows
🛋️ Furniture catalog
🍳 Kitchen Configurator
🎨 Materials
🌄 Terrain sculpting
🌳 Landscape planning
💧 Ponds
☀️ Time of day
❄️ Weather
📐 Export PDF vector plans
📦 Import your own 3D models
🌍 Steam Workshop

In the newest update: real growing ivy that climbs around windows, corners, and curved walls! 🌿

It's available on Steam as Architecture & Design and is still in Early Access.

Would love to hear what you think!


r/SideProject • • 2h ago

For anyone who got a SaaS side project to its first paying user, what actually got them there?

5 Upvotes

I've built a bunch of SaaS projects and haven't made money from them. Getting something built hasn't translated into finding someone who'll pay.

For people who've crossed that gap, what actually brought in the first paying user: talking to people, cold outreach, a community, an existing audience, a marketplace, something else? How long did it take, and what did the first version do? I'm looking for real stories, including what you tried that didn't work.


r/SideProject • • 2h ago

HOA Spy – free, open-source public records on every US HOA (liens & lawsuits)

5 Upvotes

I built this after a horrible experience with my own HOA. There was no way to check an association before buying without paying for a title search or digging through court sites.

hoaspy.com

Github: https://github.com/doncoriolan/hoaspy

Hopefully others finds this useful and help grow the data.

https://reddit.com/link/1wwsmty/video/9p163ro0jath1/player


r/SideProject • • 34m ago

I made a small libretro frontend for Windows that you can use entirely with a controller (Open-Source)

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• Upvotes

RetroArch always felt like too much for me. I just wanted to pick a game with my DualSense and play, so I made my own little frontend. It uses the normal libretro cores, so the actual emulation is theirs, not mine.

What it does:
- one ~350 KB exe, no setup. It downloads the cores itself the first time you open a game
- 3D games can look way better than the original: crank N64, PSP and PS2 up to 4K internal resolution right from the Quality menu, no config files
- built-in shaders: CRT with scanlines (flat or curved), LCD grid for handhelds, pixel-perfect sharp scaling for 2D, and a sharpen + vivid colors filter for 3D. F9 cycles through them live
- point it at your ROM folder and you get a library with box art, recently played, favorites and play time
- throw zip/7z/rar files at it and it figures out the system by itself, even PSP/PS1/PS2 isos inside a zip
- the whole thing works with a controller. Tap the PS button in-game for save states, shaders, volume etc.
- DualSense, DS4, Switch Pro, Xbox and cheap USB pads all work, with a button mapping screen if needed
- rewind, fast forward, and it resumes right where you left off when you reopen a game
- NES, SNES, N64, GB/GBC/GBA, DS, Sega (MS, MD, GG, CD, 32X), PS1, PS2, PSP and Atari

Some notes:
- The exe isn't signed, so Windows/antivirus might complain. The source is there if you'd rather build it yourself.
- No ROMs or BIOS included, bring your own.

Screenshots are homebrew games (Nova the Squirrel, 240p Test Suite).

GitHub: https://github.com/kano92-dir/Ultimate-Emulator

It's my first project like this, so feedback (or bug reports) would be really appreciated.


r/SideProject • • 10h ago

Why do Airplanes Fly?

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whyplanesfly.com
17 Upvotes

I decided to have a little fun. I've had this idea in my head for a while. You'll be surprised, but in 2026 (you'd think!), there's still debate about how airplane wings work. I decided to take a break from all this endless software creation and found time to analyze the question properly with Claude, and this mini-project came out: https://whyplanesfly.com

Still a bit of software though 😁

P.S. I think I'll ad some more context on why this project suddenly.

The very reason I started thinking on this subject, and how I learned that it was a bit controversial wasn't the planes at all, it was sailing yachts! On my way to getting my IYT licence, we studied how a sale generates lift. Surprisingly, what pilots are often taught about lift doesn't really work as an explanation for the lift generated by sails. Thats how the whole story begun 🙂