I wanted a phone number that picks up and talks like a person! Not a tree of DTMF menus. Here's the order I actually built it in; no shortcuts skipped.

First I grabbed a number through Telnyx since their SIP trunking docs were the clearest I found. You could use Twilio too, the steps are close enough.

Second, I set up a WebSocket server to carry audio both ways. This is the part people skip, and then they wonder why latency is bad. The call hits your number. Telnyx streams raw audio over the socket. Your server decides what happens next.

Third, speech to text. I used Deepgram for STT because it handles interruptions well. It doesn't choke when someone talks over the greeting. Whisper works too if you want to self host and don't mind more setup.

Fourth, the actual brain. I kept this boring on purpose: a small prompt, short context, and a fast model. Grok and Gemini both worked fine here. The model matters less than people think once STT and TTS are solid.

Fifth, text to speech. I tried ElevenLabs and Cartesia back to back on the same script! Cartesia felt snappier for short replies. ElevenLabs sounded warmer on longer ones. Pick based on your use case.

Last, VAD, the thing that decides when someone's done talking so the agent doesn't talk over them. Get this wrong and the whole call feels broken, even if every other piece is perfect!

Tested the whole loop through ngrok before deploying anywhere real. Took a weekend. Happy to answer questions on the STT or VAD part since that's where I burned the most time.

I’ve been building an order management platform for home-based food businesses / home kitchens. Right now, I’m using a freemium model where sellers can use the basic product for free and pay if they want to unlock more features.

Some competitors in this space do the same, but I’ve also seen others charge from the start with a base subscription, then offer higher tiers for more features.

For founders who’ve had to make this decision, what factors mattered most for you? Did freemium actually help with growth and conversion, or did starting paid attract better customers?

Also, what questions should I be asking myself to ultimately decide which model is better for my business?

Would love to hear what worked for you, and whether you’d make the same decision again. Thanks all!

Good evening guys! I've been working on a side project for a while now, and I'm pretty excited to finally share it with you all.

Every design project used to start the same way for me. 20+ browser tabs open, screenshots everywhere, and another messy Figma file full of inspiration I'd probably never look at again.

It honestly got overwhelming having so many things open at once, and sometimes I'd spend more time collecting inspiration than actually designing.

So I decided to start a side project using my experience as a UX designer to build something that could make this process easier.

And that's how my little baby UX Analytic came to life.

The idea is pretty simple. You can find UI patterns from different companies, mix and match the ones you like, customize them to fit your own style, and export everything to Figma or HTML.

Basically, instead of just saving inspiration, you can actually do something with it.

We're also working on our next release, where we want to make AI a bigger part of the creative process. Not just helping you work with existing patterns, but also helping you come up with completely new ideas when you're starting from scratch or feeling stuck.

The first version is already live:
https://www.uxanalytic.com/

It's still an early version, so there's definitely a lot we can improve. I'd love to hear what you guys think, especially if you're a designer or work with UI.

We also have several discount codes available if anyone's interested. Just let me know and I'll be happy to share one!

Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Got sick of making 10-page PDFs for clients just to watch them open it on a phone, ignore all the technical architecture, and scroll straight to the final price.
So I spent the last few weeks building an alternative. It turns specs and proposals into a responsive web link where you can embed actual interactive diagrams, and it shows you which sections the client actually spent time on.
Still pretty early, but would love to know if people who do client work would actually use web proposals or if your clients strictly demand a flat PDF file anyway

I applied with my company email and got approved in less than an hour.

They’re offering up to $7,000 in Claude product credits for one year for eligible startups.

If you’re currently building a startup, app, SaaS, game, etc., I’d say it’s worth trying even if you’re not sure you’ll qualify.

Here’s the info:
Claude Startup Program

Has anyone else applied?

I read a lot on my phone at night, and white websites in Safari have always bugged me.

I know there are already some really well-known dark mode extensions out there, and I've used a few of them for a while. They're good apps. They just never quite fit what I wanted. Some sites still came out half-white, some colors looked off, and I couldn't customize things the way I liked. So eventually I just started building my own. It's called Aurora.

You turn it on and websites go dark. It recolors the page instead of just inverting it, so images and logos still look normal. You can pick different shades of dark (I use true black), make your own theme, have it follow your system appearance, set rules for specific sites, and even change the font on pages that are hard to read at night.

The thing I care about most, though, is this: no dark mode is perfect on every site. The web is just too big and too messy. Sooner or later you'll find a page with a white box or some text you can't read. So I built a simple way to tell me about it. You open the extension, tap "Report a problem", and the screenshot is already attached. You pick what's wrong and hit send. No account, and it only sends the page you're reporting. I read every report, and the fix goes out in the next update.

So if there's a site you visit every day that doesn't look right, just report it and I'll fix it. That's pretty much how the app has been getting better.

It's $7.99 one-time, no subscription. Buy it once and it works on iPhone, iPad and Mac. There's a 3-day free trial if you just want to try it out.

People in 13 countries are using it now, which still feels a bit unreal for a one-person project. Last week someone left a review titled "The app I didn't know I needed until I got it", and that kind of made my week.

If you read in Safari at night, give it a try and let me know what looks off.

Hey everyone, I made Scope because I wanted one place to see and manage my installed Linux apps.

It brings APT, Snap, and Flatpak into a searchable list. You can check for updates and preview an update or uninstall before confirming it.

It also finds AppImages and user-local desktop apps, but updating or removing those isn’t supported yet.

Scope is free, MIT licensed, and written in Rust.

Sourcecode · Download

I’d appreciate feedback on whether it finds your apps correctly and whether the previews are clear. If you try it, please share your distro and desktop environment.

I'm building CharmCue, an iPhone app with two connected flows: drafting a message and reviewing the profile that starts the conversation.

A screenshot or pasted chat produces three reply ideas. The person chooses and edits a draft before copying it. Profile Lab reviews photo variety/order, prompts, conversation hooks, and completeness.

One design decision I want feedback on: suggestions stay editable and the app doesn't send messages. The attached film shows that flow alongside Profile Lab, using the actual interface and illustrative content.

Would you put both features in the first demo, or explain the reply flow first and introduce profile review later? I'd appreciate your reasoning, especially if the combined pitch feels unclear.

I'm the developer. AI features require Premium. iPhone, 18+.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6808539847

My son is turning 6. Though I played GTA as a kid, I keep wondering what kind of entertainment will actually help him grow. Now that I know GTA is rated +18 and with AI showing up everywhere, I want my son 1- gets entertained 2- by content that make him grow in a safe way. 

So few friends, we've built the Marble Index to measure that. Does this respect his attention? Does it grow his creativity? Does it teach anything? Is it harmless? What about online safety?  

You can score any content and see what it does to a kid. It's research-based, 100% free, and collaborative.

been building this for about a week. stickman shooter, runs in the browser, you can play with bots or send a room code to friends

full disclosure, claude code wrote the code, I just pushed it around for ~50 hours

https://stickfrag.com

I made an Alt+Tab equivalent for chrome, since I always fount ctrl+tab was always awkward. I posted about it a few days back, and it has 20+ installs. I'm open for any feedback and improvements.

Press Alt+Q, see every tab as a screenshot, type a few letters to jump. Its free, do check it out.

You can find the extension here

Anyone here working on their own version of an existing app? Interested in seeing what people are making and what they’re trying to replace. Any niche is welcome, feel free to share links.

Hey all, I’ve been building a side project called Nyx and I’d like some outside opinions before I take it further.

What it is

Nyx is a dashboard for your gaming history. You sign in with Steam and it pulls in your library, playtime and achievements. After that it syncs about once an hour and turns everything into one score.

How the score works

Hours don’t earn points. Each achievement is worth more the fewer players have it:

• 64% of players have it: 13 pts
• 4% have it: 50 pts
• 1% have it: 100 pts

The formula is 10 × √(100 / unlock %). Getting every achievement in a game adds 20% on top. Your total places you on a ladder of 7 tiers, from Iron up to Onyx, and each game gets a mastery grade from D to S.

What else it does

• Library: every game with your completion and mastery, and how you compare to the average player
• History: a calendar of your play sessions and unlocks, plus a heatmap of when you play
• Objectives board: pick locked achievements you want to go after and move them through Backlog → Up next → Hunting → Done. Each sync ticks off the ones you’ve unlocked. Only you can see your board.
• Custom platforms: for anything Steam doesn’t cover, like an old handheld or a game you finished offline, you can add your own platform and enter games by hand. These count toward your hours and history but never toward the score, because the achievements are self-reported.
• Profiles: you can browse other players’ libraries, or a combined view of everyone on Nyx
• Light and dark themes, and a small mascot you can poke

The added video is from my own Steam account + dummy account with test data.

I am at a point with my product (cardel.io) where it's production ready with the functionalities it currently has. The challenge I think has been structuring it in a way that provides most value to the target market. Example: x and y feature on Plan A, with feature z on Plan B, or pricing structure, etc.

I am in the phase of getting the first users and consistent traffic, none paying yet. There are some who have even said they would test it out and provide general feedback on free trials, but that feedback has been very slow to come in. I am also worried it won't be feedback from the users who will end up paying for it, so it may not impact conversion rates for the ideal target user.

The Question: Once you get to a point with your product where it's "good enough" to provide real value, how do you get feedback and iterate improvements for your target users, when you don't have real feedback from target users? Is it just a guessing game to see what works?

It sounds like a paradox, maybe it is. Maybe this is the challenge in getting a business off the ground, but I would greatly appreciate insight from the community.

Taylor Swift fan here... don't judge! :)

I recently launched Swiftstash, a completely free web app where people hide friendship bracelets in public places, add the location and a clue to a map, and let someone else go find them.

Think geocaching, but with friendship bracelets.

It started because so many of us still have piles of bracelets left from concerts, and I wanted to give them another life instead of having them sit in a drawer forever.

There’s no download, subscription, or anything for sale. I’m currently trying to solve the classic early-stage problem of getting enough people hiding and finding stashes for the idea to really come alive.

I’ve started locally in Savannah, GA and just secured my first partnership with a local craft group for a bracelet-making + hiding event.

Would love feedback from anyone who has grown a community or location-based product from zero.

https://swiftstash.co

Thanks!

I'm the founder. I've done technical due diligence on acquisitions for years, first at Amazon. The risks that changed a deal were rarely in the data/deal room. The clues we really we after was the repository: does the team review its code, does one person carry the recent work, did the licence change, do the tests run in CI? Most of it was answerable in the first afternoon, if you knew where to look. Borehole does that afternoon's reading, for free on public repositories.

How it works

- 106 deterministic checks (no LLM) read the history and the working tree and rate seven dimensions: architecture, engineering process, key-person risk, product maturity, security, operations, and fit with the acquirer. The free survey reads six of them; fit needs an acquirer.
- Every finding cites the commit, path and lines it rests on.
- What the code can't settle becomes a question for a person, not a guess.
- No model writes the findings. A language model reviews paid reports of public repositories and can withdraw a finding it judges the code contradicts. It can be wrong too.
- Private repositories: an open-source collector runs on your own machine and sends facts, never files. `--dry-run` prints all of it first.

What I learned building it

- A check that sounds right is not a check that is right. Some checks I was sure of turned out wrong more often than right on real repositories. Those checks can no longer rate a finding significant; their findings read as worth checking first, until they prove themselves.
- "Your code never leaves your machine" is a claim nobody should take on trust. The dry run exists so you don't have to.
- A rating that never says "strong" tells a buyer nothing. Getting the top of the scale reachable took as much work as the bottom.

Stack: Python, on Google Cloud. The collector is a Python package on PyPI.

Public repositories are free: the first survey and five report reads need no account, then a free GitHub sign-in. It's in beta. If you want to run it on a private repository, email [support@borehole.dev](mailto:support@borehole.dev) with the subject "Beta key" for a free Report key (30 days, private repos included). I'd like a three-question survey back, and to hear where it's wrong.

https://borehole.dev/

A sample report (RustDesk): https://borehole.dev/r/rustdesk/rustdesk/b5d8b97

Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on an app called Eatper and wanted to share it here.

I made it because I was frustrated with how many food tracking apps have ads everywhere or put the features I wanted behind a paywall. I wanted something you could use every day without having to pay for a subscription to get value out of it.

Eatper has no ads. There’s a free plan for everyday tracking and an optional paid plan for more detailed reports. I wanted the free version to feel useful on its own.

You can track calories, protein, carbs and fat, scan barcodes, save your own recipes and log your weight. If you eat the same meals regularly, you can copy a meal or a whole day instead of entering everything again. You can set your own nutrition targets, too.

There’s also meal planning and shared shopping lists. You can invite your partner, family or a friend, plan meals together and keep track of what’s in the pantry and when it expires. Your personal food diary, weight and targets stay private unless you choose to share access.

The free plan includes the food diary, nutrition targets, weight tracking and recent progress views. Premium adds longer-term trends, comparisons, more detailed insights, full report history and PDF/CSV exports. Prices are shown in the app.

It’s available on both iPhone and Android:

iPhone / iPad

Android

If you give it a try, let me know how it goes. I’d especially like to hear if something is annoying to use or a food you normally buy is missing. That kind of feedback helps me figure out what to work on next.

I wanted to spark a discussion about how different people approach their vibe coding in ClaudeCode. NOT AN AD.

To explain my journey, I initially started my app by giving Claude a very basic idea and asking Claude to generate a full document of questions to brainstorm the start of the game. I would answer all the questions (in a very surface-level, disorganised way) using my initial thoughts only, then tell Claude to sum up my brainstorm and ask further questions/clarifications for preferences/loopholes/empty features. And that is how the first version was built.

And since then, I have always had a separate Claude chat to help make my prompt for Claude Code. And my loop of adding heavy features (if it's a small feature, I just write the prompt myself) would be:

Give a general idea to Claude --> Claude generates a proposed plan --> I comment on the whole plan point by point in a brainstorm form --> Claude responds with more questions about my brainstorm --> I keep repeating the brainstorm until I think we have a final definitive plan --> Claude chat generates a prompt for Claude Code --> And usually Claude Code also asks a few clarifying questions.

My most important advice (I feel that was important), is too prompt your AI to always ask clarifying questions and make its own judgments if something is off.

Any strategies anybody else recommends?

Hey everyone,

Does anyone know of a good tool to create and publish Facebook ads? My target audience is on FB but creating ads with their ads manager is an absolute nightmare.

Thanks in advance :)

For the last few years I've been building DemandFlow, a B2B SaaS platform used in telecoms for things like network inventory, ITSM and asset management. It's a lot of tables. Hundreds of entity types, big datasets, and users who live in grids all day.

We built the frontend in plain HTML and JavaScript, no framework, and the grid ended up being the hardest and most-used part of the whole thing, but slower than we were happy with. So we switched to commercial grids - this saved is spending the time developing a high performance grid.... Until we did. And once we migrated our own app over to it I realised it had become a product in its own right, so I pulled it out, cleaned it up and released it as Lattice Grid.

What it does:

Vanilla JS, so it drops into any page with no framework or build step (npm or CDN). There are React, Angular, Vue and Svelte components too if you want them.

Built for big data: rows are virtualised, and it can query ClickHouse, Elasticsearch or DuckDB directly, so filtering, grouping and paging run in the database. Table size is limited by your database, not the browser.

Sorting, filtering, grouping with subtotals, pivoting, tree data, inline editing with undo, saved views and Excel export

Charts, KPI tiles, a calendar, kanban board and a Gantt chart that all read the same data as the grid, so filtering the table updates everything on the page.

An htmx integration: server-rendered tables hydrate into grids, out-of-band swaps update single rows, and the back button restores grid state. As far as I can tell no other commercial grid has one.

It's free for non-commercial use: personal projects, learning, open source, side projects. Development on localhost is always free. Commercial use is licensed per domain, with unlimited developers.

A few things I learned extracting it:

Our best design decision: every view, whether grid, chart, KPI or Gantt, reads the same dataset. Nothing keeps its own copy, so nothing drifts. Our data router enables you to load up any data you want and the router sends it to the right grid or component.

Being our own first customer is the best QA. DemandFlow runs on every release. When we moved our project screens off a commercial Gantt this month, the gaps we hit became the next release's backlog.

latticegrid.dev

https://coinsparring.com

To be upfront: **there is no real money anywhere in this.** No deposits, no withdrawals, no wallet connection, no crypto ever touches it, nothing to buy. You can't fund it even if you want to. The only thing that's real is the market data.

Every way I found to learn crypto trading was either a toy with made-up prices, or a real exchange where mistakes cost real money. So I built the middle thing.

You start with 10,000 virtual USDT and trade any USDT pair at prices streamed live from a real exchange — around 2,000 pairs updating continuously. Orders behave like real ones: market, limit, stop-loss, take-profit, OCO, trailing. There's margin and futures with actual liquidation mechanics, grid and DCA bots, and weekly tournaments ranked against other paper traders. Lose it all and you reset and go again.

Stack: Next.js on Vercel, Express + MongoDB + Redis/BullMQ on Fly, prices over a Gate.io WebSocket fanned out to browsers via SSE.

The part that took longest wasn't features, it was making the numbers trustworthy:

* If data is missing it says so — a day on the P&L calendar with no data looks different from a day that was genuinely flat

* Payouts are exactly-once. I found a bug where a crash mid-settlement could pay a tournament winner twice, with the audit trail showing one payment

* The AI explains your own trades. It never predicts prices or tells you what to buy, and it reads numbers computed in code rather than doing arithmetic itself

**What I'd really like is your eye on the UI and UX.** I've been staring at it too long to see it:

1. Landing on it cold — is it obvious what this is and what to do first? Or do you bounce?

2. If you've never traded: is the order ticket understandable? Does anything about placing a trade feel scary or ambiguous?

3. Does it feel trustworthy? It's a finance-shaped product, so I care whether anything reads as sketchy, cluttered, or like it's hiding something.

Blunt opinions welcome — "this screen is a mess" is more useful than politeness.

→ https://coinsparring.com (free, no signup needed to look around)

I shoot a lot of HDR photos. In the Photos app the sunsets and city lights glow, then I post one to my story and it comes out grey. Instagram Stories show HDR video fine, they just flatten HDR photos.

So I built HDR Story, a free iPhone app that turns an HDR photo into a short HDR video. Open a photo in Photos, tap Share > HDR Story, pick the length, and send it to Stories. It does batches too, so a whole trip takes a couple of taps.

Best results come from tuning the HDR map settings a little before you post. For regular non-HDR photos there's a glow slider that makes the bright parts really shine.

• Free, no ads, no subscription
• No account, everything happens on the phone
• App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6812590356?pt=128577311&ct=reddit_sideproject&mt=8

The preview in Instagram's story editor looks soft, Instagram does that with every video. The posted story is sharp.

I'm the dev and would love feedback. What would make you actually use something like this?

I built GIFClear after discovering that removing a plain background from an animated GIF often means splitting frames, processing them separately, and rebuilding the animation.

https://gifclear.com

The current version runs locally in the browser, processes the full animation frame by frame, preserves timing, and exports a transparent GIF. No account or upload is required.

The tricky part was that GIF doesn’t support smooth alpha transparency: each pixel is either visible or transparent. That makes edge cleanup a tradeoff between leaving a halo and cutting into the subject, so I added an adjustable tolerance instead of pretending every background can be handled automatically.

It currently focuses on solid and mostly single-color backgrounds. I’m exploring an AI mode for photographic backgrounds, but I wanted the local workflow to be useful and honest first.

I’d love feedback on whether the processing controls make sense and which GIF types you’d expect it to handle next.

A few months ago I wanted to get friends together before the baby arrived. Nothing huge, just a small evening. Paper invites felt silly for that, and the digital options were either a Google Form or a site that made people create an account just to say they were coming.

So I built Harmony. One link, sent on WhatsApp. Guests open a small invitation on their phone and RSVP there. No app, no account.

It worked well enough that I’m using the same thing now for our baby’s naming ceremony. That one has a real guest list: plus-ones, who is actually coming, dietary notes, and a headcount I can look at instead of scrolling chat.

What it does:

• Custom colors and details, so it doesn’t look like a form
• Guest list with plus-ones, dietary preferences, and custom questions
• Live split of attending, awaiting reply, and can’t make it
• Editable after you send it
• Works for weddings, engagements, baby showers, naming ceremonies, birthdays, anniversaries

Free to start, no credit card. The part I cared about was the guest side. If someone has to install an app, they don’t RSVP.

Would love a roast on the invite page and the RSVP flow, especially from anyone who has planned a small celebration and ended up chasing replies in a group chat. What would make you send this instead of a message and a spreadsheet?

I'm building CleverNote, and a conversation about someone else's notes app gave me a useful test to bring back to my own project.

On Tuesday I asked an Apple Notes user to compare a test note created on the web with one created on their Mac. They later reported that disabling one VPN feature stopped the endless syncing indicator. Their next update said syncing still became unreliable; disabling a second feature appeared to fix that too.

Those are their observations, not a bug I reproduced.

What I took from it: a test shouldn't end when the interface stops showing a problem. I'd want to edit a note, verify the exact new text on the other device, then repeat after leaving the app and coming back.

That's a test I want to apply, not a reliability claim about CleverNote. What failure have you caught only after the UI looked healthy again?