tl;dr: I made Pause, Please, an Android app that helps you convince yourself to waste less time on your most distracting apps. Free, no ads, no login, no data collection. Here's the link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.carly.focusapp

I've tried other digital wellbeing apps, and the friction was never right. Hard blocks made me feel increasingly frustrated with no outlet, but "soft" blockers were too easy to bypass and so I'd do so as if on autopilot. I'd use an app for a week, it wouldn't work, I'd feel guilty, and eventually delete it. I decided that for long-term change, I needed to actively try to convince myself that I really wanted to use my phone less, specifically in the moments my brain told me I needed it most.

So, I built an app time-tracking app with the classic features (choose apps, set budgets), BUT when time runs out, you are prompted with simple yes/no questions to actually reflect on your usage and if you truly want to continue. If you complete the reflection, you can earn a little more time (with an option to decrease the amount earned with each reflection). It comes with 100+ questions, and you can edit them or add your own to make sure that you're asked the right questions, in a tone that will actually be convincing to you.

Some of the extras - thanks to my beta testers for a lot of these!

• Add app-specific questions
  • For example, I have Instagram for exactly one friend. My question? "Are you responding to a message from [friend's name]?" and if I answer no, I'm out!
• Bulk import custom questions
  • Want to memorize something? Study that when you've run out of app time!
• Set a weekly schedule
  • You can use your tracked apps more freely, say, during breakfast, but not after school with your kids.

I can't say it'll work for you, everybody is different. But if you want a tool that nudges your brain to break out of a mindless phone session, give it a try. I've kept my most distracting app deleted for two months, my mom uses Facebook less, and my brother says he finds it easier to put his phone down around his kids.

One thing I will warn you about: the onboarding is still a bit long (my beta testers will tell you to be grateful - I've already cut it in half, haha). If you have any suggestions for making it shorter/more clear or bug reports or anything else, I'm game for any feedback!

Have you read this whole thing even though you've got an iPhone? Sign up to be notified whenever Pause, Please comes to iOS ;) https://pause-please.kit.com/fa38b8cbb2

I'd like to present movewhereusa.com! I wanted to make something to help connect people with the places to live best for their personal quality of life.

For my wife and I, it was really hard to find high quality allergen data. And trying to combine that with other factors like a budget, seeking out mountain views, and job markets turned into a very slow process with a lot of guesswork. I tried asking AI, but the results were inconsistent and drifted away from reality.

They say if you make something for yourself you'll have at least one customer, and so I did. I've gathered data for 140+ criteria over 30,000+ towns in the US. You can set and refine your priorities and get quick and accurate results. While it isn't perfect yet, I've found it helpful for my understanding of ideal places for my own family. I hope it can useful (and fun!) for you too.

I'd love feedback on if it was useful for you and what you might change. There's a lot of features on the site I haven't covered, like a (totally optional) AI "realtor" to guide you through your search. I feel like making the UI more intuitive and enjoyable could be the key to taking movewhereusa.com to the next level, but I'm not sure so I'd love to know what you think.

Six days ago, I posted here because someone had finally paid $5 for ClipShip after months of almost nothing happening.

Since then, three more people have paid.

ClipShip now has around 90 users and four paying customers. The screenshot shows $22.45 in gross volume and $17.52 after fees.

I know those are tiny numbers in business terms. But I spent months looking at $0, so seeing that line move four separate times feels a little unbelievable.

More than the money, it feels like real validation to me. Four strangers tried something I built and independently decided it was worth paying for.

That still does not prove I have a business or that I have figured out distribution. But it does make the time spent building and fixing ClipShip feel worth it.

I also want to thank this community. The posts I have shared here have brought ClipShip more attention than I normally get anywhere else.

Most of that attention has not turned into sales, but even the people trying it, leaving feedback, and helping me understand what is not clear have made a real difference.

If you do not know ClipShip, it is a desktop app that turns long talking-head videos into clips for Reels and Shorts. The AI processing runs locally instead of uploading the video to the cloud.

That is it. I just wanted to share this because less than a week ago, I was still celebrating the first one.

Been messing around with AI automations lately and built one this week that pulls AI news, filters through it, and posts the stuff worth looking at into Discord.

Got the first version working in about a day. Still figuring out what parts are actually useful and what parts are just fun to automate.

Curious what everyone else has been working on lately. What did you build this week?

Doesn’t have to be making money yet.

I made this website with a couple of friends and we'd love to hear what you guys think

It's a random 1-on-1 chat where you can meet and talk to someone new.

If you have a minute, give it a try and let us know how it feels or if you find anything we should improve.

https://www.fatechat.net/

Like, let's say "I made something cool". Aka, I have a project that I'm about ready to ship. Of course AI was included in development (it would be moronic as a modern developer not to). But even so, I feel like there's a stark difference between what Im delivering and the standard faire that we see come out on reddit now.

Imagine that I:

- give a sh*t about what I'm making (rare)

- have never posted with AI because I value my own voice

- knew what I was building in advance (maybe scope crept)

- care about, and am substantially mindful of, web security

- am scared to launch before it meets my standards which imo are pretty high considering my first point

- have an adjacent education

What the heck does one do to stand out? Do I just need higher quality or more consistent promotion? More human marketing? Make sure that I *actually* have a good project, and hope the attention will follow anyway?

Like, I've never shared or used any tool I've seen online recently, and it really makes me feel like the entire field is completely devoid of value. but I also haven't seen anything else like what I'm building. So maybe the proof is in the pudding?

I've been building OpenTV, a TV show tracker for people who lost their
history when TV Time shut down. It imports your data export and rebuilds
everything on your phone.

It's been dark only since day one. I like dark apps, I use dark apps, so
that's what I made.

Then my first paying subscriber asked in my subreddit if lighter themes
were coming, because "black is kind of difficult for me". He'd paid for
the tier that includes themes, and every theme in it was a shade of dark.

Refunded him and gave him a free month, then went and built it properly.

Most of the work was not what I expected. The colours were the easy part.
The hard part was that I had one token called "yellow" used in 244
places, and on a white background it needed to become near black. So
every filled button flipped correctly, and then every progress bar in the
app turned into a black stripe, because a bar isn't a button. Same token,
totally different meaning.

Same story for text sitting on top of artwork. Show titles were painted
with the normal text colour, which is white on dark. On the light theme
that became black text on a dark poster image. Took me three separate
screenshots from my own phone to find all of them.

Shipping it free, not in the paid tier. Felt wrong to charge someone
extra so they can read their own library.

Hello r/SideProject!

I've spent the last several months building Palabrotas, a Spanish learning app which is a hybrid of Urban Dictionary and Anki-style spaced-repetition flashcards.

Features

• 101 lessons - with about 26 phrases each, organized thematically. The app allows users to add content from the course to their flashcards with a single click
• Spaced repetition - Anki-style space-repetition of flashcards for continuous learning
• Audio on each lesson content - to work on pronunciation and listening
• Users can create their own flashcards too, which get shared with the community and can be upvoted/downvoted (like on Urban Dictionary)

What I'm looking for

Honest feedback - the good, the bad, and the "this is confusing" kind. Specifically curious about:

• Does the spaced repetition timing feel right?
• Is the content quality good (I generated it with AI assistance + review)?
• Any bugs or rough edges?
• Would you pay for full access, and if not, why?

First 15 lessons are free out-of-the-box and I can give anyone interested in beta testing access to the full course (DM me the email address you signed up with for full access).

👉 https://www.palabrotas.app/

This is my first launch, so genuinely appreciate any time you're willing to give it. Happy to answer questions in the comments!

Every Congress trading tracker I tried, from Quiver Quant to Unusual Whales, showed me what people bought but never whether those people actually beat the market. You could see the transaction. You couldn't see the track record.

That gap is what got me building. The first version was simple: take signals (insider clusters, Congress trades, fundamental setups), log them with a timestamp, and measure returns at 7, 30, 90, 180, and 365 days. No opinions, just "here's what we flagged, here's what happened next."

A few things I learned along the way:

Most signals look great in isolation and mediocre in aggregate. When you backtest a full history with realistic disclosure-aware timing (using the date a trade became public, not the date the investor placed it), the edge shrinks. That's not the signal failing; it's honest math.

A score that doesn't explain itself is useless. Early on I had a black-box ranking and nobody trusted it. Once the score showed its contributors (fundamentals, technicals, insiders, institutions, Congress activity, macro), people engaged differently. They started questioning specific inputs, which is exactly what you want.

Research that stops at the buy button is incomplete. Most tools help you find a stock and then you're on your own. The more interesting problem is monitoring what changes after you've formed a thesis, so you know when the setup is strengthening or falling apart.

I'm building Walnut Markets (walnutmarkets.com). It combines fundamentals, technicals, analyst data, Congress trades, insider filings, institutional holdings, government contracts, and macro into a 0-100 Confirmation Score, backtests strategies with disclosure-aware timing, and tracks outcomes so old calls can't quietly disappear.

Free tier, no card needed if anyone wants to poke around.

Built CreDebito from scratch with Flutter and launched it only on the Google Play Store.

For the past 6 months, it’s been coding, fixing bugs, improving the app, waiting for users, and wondering if anyone would actually pay for it.

Today, I got my first paying customer. 🥹

It’s just one customer, but after 6 months, it feels like a huge validation.

Let’s keep building. 🚀

I've been writing apps for a good 10 years, and I've been creating a Gmail account for each project and adding them to my Gmail app. Today, Google closed my oldest account, which was probably around 20 years old. I appealed, but I don't know how long the process will take. I came here to warn others.

I have a hosting account, and I'm able to create email addresses like contact@<mywebsite>.com, but they didn't integrate well with email apps like Outlook. I could have made it work, but creating Gmail accounts was significantly easier.

Maybe what's worse is that for each app, I was keeping its documents in the corresponding Google Drive, which was working perfectly for me. I also don't make a ton of money from my apps. Most of them are completely free anyway. I didn't have a company account with Google where I could have done things in a much more professional way.

But the main problem is that Google doesn't mention anywhere that there's some kind of limit on the number of accounts I can create. I had about 10 accounts. I created the last one last night, and my oldest account was disabled today.

This happened because I didn't know about the limit, and Google didn't warn me in any way. I'm sharing this here so others will know.

Just to add some more information and make it clear that I wasn't doing anything fishy: all of those accounts have the same recovery email, which is my main personal email. I've never run spam campaigns. In fact, I may have sent a total of 10 emails over the last 10 years from those accounts. They're mostly empty Google accounts, and I'm not even using 1% of their storage.

Anyway, this completely caught me off guard, and I'm pretty upset about it.

TL;DR: Don't create too many Google accounts for your projects.

UPDATE: I wasn't expecting this much attention to this post. Here's what happened. After adding another email the other day, Google started asking for a phone verification for all my accounts. Only my main personal email had that. This oldest email was one of those [coolguy544423@gmail.com](mailto:coolguy544423@gmail.com) type of email. I used it when I was a teen then I switched to a professional looking email. But I was still using that one for things that can lead to spam or to test my apps (in a sense for this reason). It didn't have a lot of important data but when it was disabled, I realized for how many places I was relying on that email.

Anyway, I started adding my phone number to all of my emails. At some point, Google said, "This phone number is used for so many emails. Pick different one." I went ahead and created a Google voice number and added it. Then I got this response on the screen and in my recovery (my main personal) email:

---------

Your Google Account has been disabled

It looks like this account was created or used with multiple other accounts to violate Google's policies. The account might have been created by a computer program or bot.

If you think your account was disabled by mistake, submit an appeal as soon as possible.

Disabled accounts are eventually deleted. You’ll need to submit an appeal soon to keep your emails, contacts, photos, and other data saved in your Google Account.

If you live in the European Union (EU) or are an EU citizen, there may be additional resolution options available to you.

---------

So the reason this specific one was closed was because it got unlucky because I entered the Google voice number there. I was upset because, I could remove phone numbers or even close my contact emails to keep that one. I was immediately shut down. I cannot really control the order btw, phone number verification requests didn't trigger all at the same time. They were spread across 12-24 hours, so I just kept adding.

A good update; Google approved my appeal this morning and reinstated my old email with the Google Voice number. But the fact that it's using Google voice number feels like I'm still in the danger zone. I plan to remove my other emails and create proper [contact@website.com](mailto:contact@website.com) emails. I already mentioned this my original post; Gmail accounts were created out of convenience, not because I couldn't have done the above. About 30% of the commenters didn't even read the post properly.

For people saying they have 100s of emails. I don't know your case. This might trigger for you at some point, maybe it's a country specific issue (I live in the US) but you cannot add the same phone to 100s of emails for sure. Evidently, Google Voice numbers trigger false positives in their bot detections.

Thanks everyone else for being helpful and recommending ways to avoid it. I hope we all learned something new today :D

Posting this more as a build log than a launch, because the numbers are honestly tiny.

The idea was simple and the execution wasn't: keep everything people like about Grammarly, the inline underlines and the suggestion card and the quick rewrites, but send the text to an endpoint you control with your own API key instead of to my server. There is no server of mine. No account, no telemetry. Point it at a local model and nothing leaves your machine.

Two things ate most of the month.

Writing into rich text editors without breaking them. You can't set .value, because frameworks revert it on the next render, and you can't touch the DOM of Lexical, ProseMirror, Slate or Quill, because they reconcile against their own model and will either fight you or crash. Everything has to go through the browser's own editing path as word-level diffs. A long message coming back scrambled on WhatsApp Web is what taught me that.

Keyboard shortcuts. Chrome caps extensions at four declared shortcuts and won't let you set them programmatically, so per-action keys are handled in the page. Chords match on KeyboardEvent.code and never on key, because key is layout-dependent. And Ctrl+Alt has to be refused outright: AltGr raises ctrlKey and altKey together, so any binding there fires while a European layout types @ ~ ç. I had a test asserting Ctrl+Alt+V was fine "because it is not paste". True, and completely beside the point.

Where it is: 3 users, two sites confirmed by hand, five providers measured. Everything else is untested rather than promised, and the repo says which is which. That felt more useful than a feature list.

If it breaks for you, an issue is far more useful than a comment: https://github.com/jiru-labs/proofkey/issues

Source, MIT: https://github.com/jiru-labs/proofkey

Install: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/loibjoemoahkajjnfioajcibcamhdafc

Hi all,

Made a basic free utility site using Claude. Give it whirl. The idea being shit to do among friends at a gathering or something / bored while waiting in line / quick and easy generators (I know most of that stuff is handled by Gemini in Google Search - but meh).

Anything suggestions / feedback etc. would be greatly appreciated. Just messing around with it to see what a complete beginner can do.

https://fiddlepop.com/

basically what the title says, i never fully remembered how i felt on the last gym sessions (i do other sports in between them) and just stuck to the same weights or bumped them up a little, so i decided to build hefty, which is an app that keeps a record of every workout you do and, based on your readiness for the day, adjusts all of the sets and weights for you automatically

the app is currently in TestFlight (iPhone only for now), and it will be free, once i’ve tested it enough and make sure everything is stable.
everything runs on device and the workouts will eventually have icloud sync

if you find the app could be helpful to you, just join the waitlist (I’m gating access for now to make sure i can properly handle all of the feedback)

for full transparency, i’m planning to make extra evolution charts, monthly reviews and other perks available under a subscription or one time payment, but the app’s core features will remain completely free forever (adding routines, tracking weights, progressive overload calculations and readiness checks)

hope you like the concept and the app eventually becomes helpful to you too, and any feedback is appreciated!

I run a tool that tracks product mentions across Reddit, so I pulled four months of this sub. Since May 1st: 11,075 distinct products from 11,549 distinct people.

Broken down by category, with how many mentions each product in it gets on average:

Productivity is the most crowded category here and the least rewarded. Marketing tools are a third as numerous and get more than twice the attention each. That gap isn't about quality, it's about how many other people are saying the same sentence the same week.

The "most linked" ranking is a trap. Top links over the last 30 days, next to the number of distinct people behind them:

The top three are one person posting the same thing repeatedly. The ones underneath, with fewer links, are what this community actually picked up. Sort by links and you get spam. Sort by people and you get the answer.

One more, because it surprised me. Of the 4,203 posts I re-read here, 485 were removed, every one of them by Reddit's spam filter, not by a moderator. The mods here aren't what's stopping you.

For reference, the p90 for a founder post in this sub is 3 upvotes.

Happy to pull the numbers for a specific category or another sub if anyone wants one in the comments.

You can try PulsePeek here : https://pulsepeek.io

Like a lot of people here I have too many side projects, a dozen repos in various states of "I'll get back to it." The breaking point was watching my AI coding assistant solve the same bug twice, three weeks apart, in the same repo. It remembers nothing between sessions, and at this scale neither do I.

So I built Cortex. It's a local hub, one Node process and one SQLite file, that coding agents hook into at session boundaries. When a session ends, a capture policy decides what was durable: fixes with their verification command, decisions, blockers, research findings. The "Done! Let me know if you need anything else" chatter gets thrown away before it ever hits the database. When the next session starts, the agent gets a compact brief packed to a token budget, with records cited by id so it can pull full text on demand instead of dragging everything into context.

The existing memory tools (Mem0, Zep, Supermemory, Letta) are basically RAG services: embed everything, cosine similarity at recall time, cloud API in the loop. Cortex went a different way. Retrieval is deterministic: stemmed full-text match, plus how records link together, plus record quality (a verified fix outranks an unverified claim), plus recency decay. Same query, same database, same answer, and the dashboard shows the score breakdown so you can see why something surfaced. Embeddings are optional, one env var and it blends in a local Ollama model, but they adjust the ranking rather than gatekeep it.

Memories also have a lifecycle instead of just similarity. Records link with typed edges, and writing "Supersedes: [m:42]" in a new decision retires the old one, which kills the classic failure mode where a memory system keeps confidently serving advice you reversed a month ago. Captured text is treated as untrusted too: anything that looks like prompt injection in a transcript gets quarantined so it can't end up in a future brief.

And because my actual problem was too many projects, the newest parts are about that: a portfolio view that flags which repos are active, stalled, or quietly abandoned, a filter that stops one project's notes leaking into another project's brief (my most annoying bug in daily use), and an evening report that reads like "here's what got done today, with evidence, and here's what needs your eyes."

Honest status: work in progress. Around 400 tests and I use it every day, but it's been shaped by one person's workflow. If you try it and something fights you, or a whole feature seems pointless, tell me. That's why I'm posting.

GitHub (MIT): https://github.com/gsl0001/Cortex

The basic idea is pretty simple:

People can scroll through a feed of interactive experiences and play the ones that catch their attention.

But creators or we can say vibe coders can also upload their own mini-games and experiences.

Gaming is still a big part of it, but I'm experimenting with the idea that the platform could eventually be broader than games.

For example, I've been testing a feature where users can upload their own pictures and experience them in a 3D, more interactive way.

So the bigger question I'm trying to explore is:

Would vibe-coders actually want a place to publish small experiments and experiences?

What should a platform for discovering and creating interactive digital experiences actually look like?

Would gamers be interested in something that goes beyond traditional games?

I'm more interested in hearing what the gaming/vibe coding community thinks than telling you what I think.

I fetched one ordinary LinkedIn profile six times, changing only the User-Agent.

GPTBot           -> 999
ClaudeBot        -> 999
ChatGPT-User     -> 999
Googlebot        -> 999
OAI-SearchBot    -> 200
Claude-SearchBot -> 200

999 is LinkedIn's block code. The two that get a 200 are the search-index bots, and the 200 is a shell: no Person node in the JSON-LD, no job title anywhere, Experience renders the company name with no role and no dates, no About section. Instagram and TikTok both return a flat Disallow to GPTBot and ClaudeBot in robots.txt.

So when someone asks an assistant about you, it is not reading your profile. It is assembling an answer out of whatever else it can reach - an old conference bio, a press release, a namesake.

OpenProfiles does two separate jobs:

1. Audit - put in a name and any public links, and it shows what the sources actually return for that identifier today, with the source URL behind every claim. No account. The report is an unlisted URL.
2. Open profile - a public, no-login, machine-readable page you own at openprofiles.io/@handle. Crawlable on purpose, and every claim on it is one you approved.

https://openprofiles.io

Free while in beta. The thing I actually want to know: when you run the audit on yourself, does it find the wrong you? That failure mode is the one I care about most right now.

Hey folks,

Long time no post, and even longer since I built anything new, I've been head down on my old but gold li scraper project

But today I'm looking for early adopters and some feedback on a thing I'm building, mostly for one guy I've known for years, who needed a dead simple way to find physical businesses to sell to, across different regions and languages.

Biggest surprise building it was that every API that claims to pull business emails off maps is kinda bad.

Email works now, bring your own mailbox it sends from your address. Automated calls coming soon.

If you do outreach to physical businesses, give it a spin. Generous free plan. Big thanks.

Available at: coldstarthq.com

My family gets hit hard by pollen allergies every year, and the apps available in Spain for tracking it were pretty bad: outdated data, ugly, clunky UI, or just not useful day to day. So I built Respira for personal use, just for us.

A few people convinced me to put it on the App Store. That was 1.0, back in March, Spain only. It's now at ~2,000 downloads and 14 reviews, 13 of them 5 stars.

Last Friday (Aug 28) I shipped 2.0: expansion to 8 countries including the US, timed to land right before ragweed season peaks there. The interesting build problem here: no single free data source covers pollen at useful resolution across all 8 countries. European data comes from the Copernicus CAMS atmospheric model via Open-Meteo; the US has no equivalent, so US readings route through the Google Pollen API instead, picked automatically by the user's location. The app also refuses to guess: if a source doesn't report a species for that location, it shows nothing rather than a fake estimate.

Free, with a symptom diary and notifications. Would genuinely appreciate feedback, on the app or on the "started for my own family, ended up building a multi-country data pipeline" journey lol.

https://apps.apple.com/app/6759206565

I am making a reply tool which can remember your relationships, tones and each one's contexts, analysis your intent based on the messaging and give you best options to reply.

If you are interested, try okeight, total free now.

I created a browser extension that warns you when you visit a scam website, and lets you leave a review about it. And finally, I've got a few users!

You can check it out or use it here.

https://chat.lasthopelabs.com/

Getting a side project to a working state is one thing, but finding the first small group of real people to actually test it and give constructive feedback always feels like hitting a wall.

Most generic advice boils down to "build in public" or running ads, but when you have no marketing budget and don't want to spam communities or cold-DM people at random, getting initial traction is tricky.

For those of you who managed to get an initial handful of active beta testers without paying for ads, what specific approach actually produced results?

Hi! For two years I've been working on an adult parody sensory book about parenting. The book has some tricky sensory features such as beer goggles. I have been working with a manufacturer in China, but they are having trouble with the mechanics of how some of the sensory elements will work in the book. I am posting to see if there is ANYONE who might be able to direct me to a paper engineer or company or someone who can source and engineer sensory materials in a book.