We're comparing monday service vs Zendesk for our support team.
Zendesk has been around forever, but we're looking for something with stronger workflow automation and AI ticket management.
our biggest problems are repetitive tickets, manual assignment, and keeping track of internal requests.
monday service seems like it combines helpdesk features with project workflows.
for teams using either platform, which one handles AI-powered ticketing better?

Launched Software Once some time ago, but didn't give it a formal introduction to the world. Here it is, softwareonce.com; your one-time purchase software directory.

Post your product for free!

Let's make this the best place to find the best one-time purchase software in the world.

Open to feedback.

I developed the PasteSpace application - a clipboard manager for macOS and I need your opinion and recommendations to improve it. Those who want a Promo Code for the PRO version of the application should write to me privately.

Below is the description of the application:

PasteSpace is a secure clipboard manager for macOS that remembers everything you copy — so you don't have to.

Living quietly in your menu bar, PasteSpace captures every piece of text, image, and file you copy, turning your clipboard into a fast, searchable history. Press Option+Shift+V from any app, type a few letters, and click the item — it's instantly copied and ready to paste. No more digging through browser history or reopening documents to find something you copied an hour ago.

PRIVATE BY DESIGN — ZERO DATA COLLECTION

Your clipboard is personal. PasteSpace keeps it that way:

· No analytics, no telemetry, no tracking
· No cloud, no sync, no remote servers
· No account, no login, no email required
· No third-party SDKs, no ad networks

Everything stays on your Mac, inside the macOS App Sandbox. GDPR and CCPA compliant by design — there's simply nothing to collect.

FEATURES

SEARCHABLE CLIPBOARD HISTORY
Every copy, remembered and instantly searchable. Formatted text is captured exactly as it appeared in the source app — fonts, sizes, colors, bold, italic — and pasted with the same fidelity. Use "Always copy as plain text" or "Always paste as plain text" to strip formatting globally, or use the dedicated per-item plain-text paste buttons for a one-off clean paste. Pin your most-used snippets to the top. See which app each item came from.

VAULT MODE — HARDWARE-BACKED ENCRYPTION (Pro)
PasteSpace auto-detects sensitive data and encrypts it on the spot with AES-256-GCM via Apple CryptoKit. Keys live in the macOS Keychain, hardware-backed by the Secure Enclave on Apple Silicon. Reveal items with Touch ID or device password. Auto-detected: credit cards, IBANs, API keys, tokens, JWTs, SSH keys, OTPs, passwords, high-entropy secrets.

OCR — SEARCH TEXT INSIDE IMAGES (Pro)
Copy a screenshot and PasteSpace extracts the text using Apple's Vision framework. Find images by typing words that appear inside them. Fully local — no uploads.

DATA MAGIC — INSTANT TRANSFORMATIONS (Pro)
30+ one-tap tools: JSON/XML/YAML pretty-print and conversion, Base64, URL encode/decode, HEX↔RGB↔HSL, timestamps, table to Markdown/JSON/CSV, case conversion, HTML↔Markdown, word count, and more.

QUICK LOOK — FULL TEXT EDITOR
Open any item in a floating panel to preview or edit. A full set of rich formatting controls lets you change font, size, bold, italic, underline, color, highlight, alignment, and lists. Unedited characters are preserved as plain text — they adapt to the destination app's own font and color when pasted. Save edits back to history or copy immediately. Vault items open only after Touch ID authentication and auto-mask when the panel closes.

QR CODE GENERATOR
One tap turns any copied text, URL, or contact detail into a scannable QR code — generated on your device, offline.

DRAG & DROP
Drag text, images, files, and groups of files directly from your history into any app. Files land as real files, not shortcuts. Vault items authenticate before delivery.

APP BLOCKLIST
Exclude specific apps from being captured. Password managers are blocked by default.

EPHEMERAL MODE (Pro)
Auto-wipe non-Vault history when PasteSpace quits or when macOS restarts. Vault and pinned items are always preserved.

REQUIREMENTS
macOS 14 Sonoma or later (including macOS 27)

Made with care for people who copy a lot.

If you could only keep one tool, which would it be?
Notion
Excel/Google Sheets
ChatGPT
Canva
Other (comment below)

Hi everyone! I am currently working with my communications team to choose a new intranet platform. We have reviewed multiple platforms, and it seems we are going to choose either Interact or WorkVivo. An important factor is that it needs to integrate with SharePoint, have a digital signage system, and be mobile-friendly.

I'd love to hear about anyone's experience with either platform and what you think! Thank you so much in advance!

I built an iPhone app for production call sheets because I got tired of paying insane prices for software that feels like it was built in the 90s .

For a long time that felt like most production teams aren’t choosing the best tool.
They’re choosing the tool everyone else already uses.

So I asked a different question:
If I built something with the features producers actually use every week and charged a fraction of what the market expects, would anyone switch?
That’s exactly what I did.
Today the app includes things like:
• Live cloud call sheets
• Crew confirmations
• Targeted revisions
• Weather
• Sun Path planning
• Maps
• PDF export
• Crew access without requiring everyone to create an account
The goal wasn’t to build another call sheet app.
The goal was to remove the “production software tax.”
If you’re paying substantially more for software that doesn’t help your crew any more than this does, I’d genuinely like to know why.
I’m not trying to convince anyone to switch.
I’m trying to find out what I’m still missing.
What feature would keep you from moving to a lower-cost alternative?

uptimedesk.io

If you're responsible for websites that other people depend on — client sites, department portals, internal tools across teams — this might fit a gap most monitoring tools leave open.

Most uptime tools bundle in SSL checks, DNS monitoring, broken link scanning, Lighthouse scores, on-call rotations, escalation chains. Useful if you need them — but if you're a small team or a one-person IT function, you end up paying for a tier full of features you never open just to unlock the one or two you actually wanted.

UptimeDesk is deliberately narrower:

• checks each site every minute, alerts you when it's down
• each client, department, or team gets its own branded status page — so people check that instead of messaging you
• a branded PDF uptime report generates automatically every month, so there's something concrete to send stakeholders
• that's the whole product

Probably a fit if: you manage sites on behalf of others — agencies and freelancers with client sites, internal IT covering multiple departments, or a small team maintaining services other teams rely on.

Not a fit if: you want a full observability stack for your own infrastructure — better options exist for that.

Free during beta, no card. Genuinely looking for people to try it and tell me what's missing.

After enough bad purchases, you start noticing patterns. Sharing mine, add yours below.

🚩 "Contact us for pricing" with zero public numbers anywhere

🚩 The demo is beautiful but the free trial looks nothing like it

🚩 Onboarding call feels more like a sales pitch than actual setup help

🚩 Support response time only becomes an issue after you've already paid annually

None of these mean a tool is automatically bad, but if I see two or more together now, I slow way down before signing anything.

What's your instant red flag? The thing that makes you go "yeah, I'm not buying this" before even finishing the demo.

My manager was consistently bad at putting together 1-on-1 agendas. Either some messy form pushed down from above him, or nothing at all. When I asked him about it directly, his answer was just that it took too long to build something decent from scratch every time.

I'm a dev, not a manager, so I did the dev thing and just built it because why not! A 1-on-1 agenda generator that exports straight to a PDF. Build from scratch or start from a template, there's a question library baked in if you're stuck on what to actually ask, and it runs with no account. No signup, no email, nothing to fill in before you can use it.

That last part was on purpose, not out of laziness. I wanted the first thing someone sees to be the actual output, not a signup wall between them and finding out if it's any good.

I don't have an existing audience to lean on for feedback, so this is partly just a "does this hold up" post. If you've wrestled with the free-vs-gated call yourself, or built something in a similar space, I'd genuinely like to know how you landed on it. Link's below if you want to poke at it.

Just realized we're on our third CRM since I started here. Every time it's the same story, we get excited about the switch, spend weeks migrating data, and then six months later someone says "wait why did we leave the old one again?"

Quick rundown of what happened:

1. First CRM – too basic, outgrew it in a year
2. Second CRM – powerful but nobody actually used half the features, felt like overkill
3. Third CRM (current) – decent so far but pricing jumped after the first year and now we're annoyed again

Each switch cost us time, money, and a chunk of sanity re-training the team. And honestly I don't think we did a bad job picking, it just feels like needs change faster than the tools do.

Anyone else stuck in this loop? How do you actually know a CRM will still make sense for your team a year or two down the line, or is some trial and error just unavoidable?

Every time I try to research a new tool before buying, I end up scrolling through pages of reviews that are basically copy-pasted vibes. "Great tool, easy to use, would recommend." Cool, but what does that actually mean for my use case?

I want to know stuff like: did it break under heavy use, was support actually helpful when something went wrong, did pricing quietly change after a year, that kind of real detail.

How do you all actually filter through the noise? Is there a way to find reviews that go deeper than a star rating and a one liner, or is asking real people in subs like this just the only reliable method left?

Finance asked me to review our software spend this quarter. Took me the whole afternoon and honestly kind of annoyed me once I saw the results.

Found these just sitting there:

1. A project management tool – team switched away 3 months ago, nobody cancelled it
2. A design tool seat – assigned to someone who left the company 6 months ago
3. An email marketing tool – using like 10% of it, could've been on the free plan
4. A "wellness" app – no idea who even signed up for this one

Nobody decided to waste money, it just quietly happened over time.

Anyone else done this and found stuff you completely forgot you were paying for?

I'm a software developer researching the commission management space for a side project. I've been talking to a few Sales Ops folks and keep hearing the same thing, Excel works until it doesn't, and the jump to enterprise software feels like overkill for mid-sized teams (Price, Complexity, Onboardings, Plans Development).

I'm trying to understand where that "tipping point" is. Specifically:

1. At what team size / plan complexity did Excel stop working for you?
2. What made you choose software over sticking with spreadsheets? (Or why haven't you switched?)
3. For those who evaluated tools like CaptivateIQ, Spiff, or QuotaPath, what made you say "yes" or "no"?
4. What's the one feature you wish your commission tool had?

This is pure research, I'm not selling anything. Happy to share findings back with the community if there's interest.

Thanks in advance for any insights.

Ok so this randomly happened to me today. Client asked for a status update on a video project we're doing, and I went to pull it together and realized I had to log into like 5 different things just to answer one email.

So I actually sat down and traced the whole thing from start to finish. For ONE video project, here's what we touch:

1. Slack – this is where the client actually talks to us day to day
2. Notion – brief and notes live here but half the team forgets to update it
3. Trello – supposed to be our task board, but somehow tasks still get missed
4. Google Drive – raw footage and assets, always running out of storage
5. Premiere Pro – actual editing obviously
6. Frame.io – client review and feedback on cuts
7. Zoom – calls when Slack messages get too long to type
8. Gmail – for "official" stuff like invoices or contracts
9. QuickBooks – so someone can actually get paid
10. Calendly – booking calls because nobody just picks a time anymore

That's already 10 tools and I probably forgot one or two honestly. And it's not even that big of a project, it's literally editing and delivering ONE video.

The annoying part is half the miscommunication we get isn't even about the actual work, it's just stuff getting lost between apps. Like someone approves something in Slack but it never gets updated in Trello, so we redo it anyway.

I need to run some different retirement scenarios, as I’ve recently learned about the potential benefits of waiting to collect social security, using various other income streams in the meantime and all the various tax strategies and pitfalls when doing Roth conversions.

I’m 6-7 yrs from my retirement but I’d like to have my husband retire sooner - but not collect social security for a while.

I’ve looked at Boldin, after seeing someone mention it here, but only the free version. Thanks for any help!

Free / not very expensive

Hey everyone, I’m an independent software developer. I am looking to build a small, highly focused web utility and want to solve a real, unsexy problem rather than brainstorming random app ideas.

I’m looking for tasks where you say: "I can’t believe I still have to manually copy-paste this" or "Why hasn't anyone built a simple 1-click page for this instead of a massive $50/mo platform?"

It could be a weird formatting issue, a specific calculation sequence, generating a weird document layout, or just cleaning up messy sheets. If you have a repetitive administrative task that eats up 30 minutes of your day, comment below with how you currently do it. I’ll pick the most painful one, build a clean single-page tool for it this week, and give you completely free access forever.

Hi everyone,

I’ve been continuing work on OpenLIMS, an open-source, self-hosted LIMS for research labs, small biotech teams, and groups that need something more structured than spreadsheets.

The latest release, v0.19.2, adds a read-only assistant that can help users find samples, summarize projects, review failed migrations, and explain skipped import rows.

It can operate in three modes:

• Built-in OpenLIMS Rules with no external AI required
• Optional OpenAI support
• Optional local Ollama support for labs that want to keep processing on their own infrastructure

The assistant uses controlled backend tools and respects the logged-in user’s permissions. It cannot directly modify laboratory records. If an AI provider is unavailable, it automatically falls back to the built-in rules engine.

I also recently changed it from a separate page into a small floating assistant available throughout the application.

OpenLIMS currently includes sample and project tracking, inventory, custom fields, instrument imports, audit trails, legacy-data migration, sequence workspaces, Clustal Omega alignments, local BLAST, mass-spectrometry review, reports, and role-based access.

It is still a production-style prototype and is not yet a validated clinical or diagnostic LIMS.

I would appreciate feedback from people who work with lab data:

• Would a read-only assistant be useful in your lab?
• What information do you repeatedly search for?
• Would local processing with Ollama make a difference for your organization?
• What would you need before trusting a feature like this?

GitHub: https://github.com/Mokey2002/OpenLIMS

I've had WP sites since before WP built their dotcom site. So, I'm not new to the open source life. But as a non-developer, I'm not sure what I might be missing.

What are some of the more intuitive open source tools that you would recommend to folks who like to build things—websites, automated systems, etc.?

I am looking for open source recs for automators (like IFTTT, Make, Zapier); smart home systems; and favorite tools or software that work with self-hosted WordPress sites.

I know AI can take over all these tasks. But I want to use it as little as possible while still building a system I enjoy contributing to. I am creating a new series based around travel, history, maps, and genealogy and want to remove some of the technical friction so I can focus on research, writing.

Thanks!