r/SideProject • u/UnicornAdoption • 16h ago
r/SideProject • u/SheriffRat • Dec 18 '25
As the year wraps up: what’s the project you’re most proud of building and why?
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 • u/MembershipEuphoric38 • Oct 19 '25
Share your ***Not-AI*** projects
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 • u/mfhawley • 13h ago
A basketball app that tracks your shooting, with just your phone
I made an android basketball app to track your shooting, with nothing but your phone.
Its still in early beta testing but it's pretty rich with features.
Accurate tracking of your makes/misses, shot locations, recorded sessions, montage video of all your makes, and more. Eventually there will be more social features to play with friends but just individual for now.
See the video (sped up 2x)
Also, currently only on android in closed testing. And i'm looking for android beta testers to give it a spin. It would be sweet if you could give it a try 🙏.
Here is the google form link - https://forms.gle/SrJPBd5CaeFYKeYH9
Fill it out and i'll send you the play store download link.😊
Upvote and comment are appreciated for more visibility.
r/SideProject • u/Artistic-Stable-3623 • 4h ago
plopscotch, a knowledge + geography puzzle that is entertaining (i hope)
guys ignore this playing I'm extremely terrible.
Regardless, I hope you guys enjoyed what I made, this is found on plopscotch.com and I (hopefully) want this to be comparable to something like krillion or wordle. (Let a man dream 😭 ).
There is no plans to monetize, and there is no monetization right now so yeah, also right now (because I have no users) the distribution chart & average is basically a mock, however I do average it out with more values. I did make some minor changes after taking this video, but I hope you do enjoy.
Side note: thanks so much wikidata for the data holy shit that's been a life saver as well as the map thingy saves much much much time
Also ik I'm bad at this game? But can you get higher 😉 😉 love yall!
edit PS: it is cropped video so you would be seeing more...
r/SideProject • u/toxic-gamer1234 • 17h ago
I sold a voice AI agent for 20K to my FIRST BIG CLIENT
I’m a developer at a super small company in my town plus I do some freelance voice AI work on the side and had built small bots and agents before but nothing at this scale. A friend who knows what I do referred me to an ecom company whose support line was getting messed up coz customers call in hindi, tamil and english and their current IVR just routes everything to humans who are overloaded and many many calls drop before anyone picks up and they were getting like 4 to 5k calls a month.
They did tell me two agencies had quoted them $40k to $60k and 3 4 months so when I quoted $20k and 8 weeks they were skeptical but my friend vouched and I did a live demo on a test number which got them convinced.
I built their setup on Gnani’s websocket streaming API for STT, it handles all 3 languages plus code switching on one stream so no separate models per language. TTS is also gnani, sounds natural enough on 8kHz that I didn’t need anything on top. Telephony runs through a sip provider, calls hit my server, audio streams to gnani STT in 100ms chunks, bot processes intent and pulls order status and shipping info from their CRM API in real time and IF intent confidence is below my threshold or the query is outside defined flows it does a warm transfer to a human with the full transcript attached.
their CRM had a decent REST API so integration wasn’t that hard but I spent 3 days just mapping their order status codes to natural language responses coz they had like 14 different statuses and many of them were the same thing. The actual Gnani integration took a day tho, most of the time was on the business logic around their specific workflows.
and on top of the initial $20k they pay $3k/month retainer and I priced it as such coz I figured 10 15 hours a month for maintenance and prompt updates and it’s not 3 4 hours of easy work like I expected coz new edge cases keep coming up that didn’t exist in testing like a customer asked about a return in tamil then gave some order details in English and the bot matched the wrong order coz my entity extraction was splitting on the language switch, took me a full weekend to fix that.
Their call drop rate went from 40% to under 10% and based on my logs about 65% of calls resolve without transferring to a human, they were going to hire 4 more support agents so from their side the investment made sense on day one and they didn't even negotiate.
I’m still at my job but thinking about whether to find more clients and turn this into a proper agency or keep it as one client and collect the retainer also not sure if I can manage more while working full time but the margins are really really good.
r/SideProject • u/RaspberryParking8759 • 1h ago
I made a free class action litigation tracker so you can what you're rightfully owed from corporations who would prefer you don’t
Basically, there are a few platforms out there that track these, some well, some not so well. I figured out a cool way to do it better. What happens currently is companies do messed up stuff, settle, barely anyone files, and a lot of the money just goes unclaimed. This makes me extremely annoyed.
having recently learned working can be fun and it's possible to concentrate for more than 10 minutes at a time due to a later in life adhd diagnosis, I had a ton of fun building a platform and dataset (direct court dockets, and aggregate of 10+ additional data sources) that regularly tracks all of them on a free website: classactionhero.app
The site lists every open settlement (207 rn) with the deadline, fund size, and a link to the official claim site. You can filter by no proof needed (23 open right now), and you can sort by deadline so the ones closing soon sit on top. It takes about 3-5 minutes to fill out a claim, and if you like being sent random amounts of money between 5 and 900 dollars or so throughout the year, i highly recommend using the tool. I included a updated list of data breaches as well, and if you hate the design, there's a serious journalist mode you can toggle on.
speaking of, i also made a free api for journalists because consumer protection is massively undercovered and the way that it's covered is extremely lacking in substance and critique, and media consolidation and attention harvesting algorithms sadly hide good journalism under a pile of italian brainrot remakes of chinese tiktok drama shorts. The free journalist api has all open settlements in JSON, RSS feed, CSV cuts, search index, Story leads and some more stuff: https://classactionhero.app/api
I'm really proud of it, and i think it's an improvement over the current options in the space. don't be deceived by the 90s vintage lucas arts computer game animations, i put a lot of thought into the data sources and maintenance. I'm hoping people can try it out and give me some feedback and also claim a bunch of free money as well as protect their data privacy in some small way.
r/SideProject • u/dm146 • 5h ago
I built a free pregnancy app for dads. Looking for expecting fathers to try it and tell me what’s missing
When my partner got pregnant all the apps I tried was written for her. I wanted something that told me what was going on that week and what I could actually do about it.
So I built ExpectDad. It’s free on iPhone (US only for now):
- This week: her week in a few lines, the baby’s size (eggplant, pumpkin…), and three small things you can do today, picked for how she’s feeling. “Ten-minute back rub, because she has lower back pain.”
- Visit guides: what each appointment is, what to bring, questions to ask, and somewhere to note what you learned.
- Gear: what you actually need and by when, with picks at three budgets.
- Dad’s Corner: a private space to check in with yourself and plan money and leave.
No ads. Your data is yours, and you can delete it any time.
What I’m asking: try it for a week and tell me honestly:
- What’s useful, and what’s noise?
- What did you go looking for and not find?
- Anything confusing, broken, or a bit cringe?
- What else would be useful ?
App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/expectdad/id6818917713
Comment here or DM me, and I read everything. If you’re past the due date or it isn’t for you, a share with an expecting dad you know helps too. Thanks!
r/SideProject • u/trustsigRobert • 16h ago
Built a JavaScript file that plays Tetris, but turns into Snake when you format it
trustsig.euA formatter, minifier or deobfuscator can be made to turn one script into another.
You can go try out all 186 techniques with this script: https://divergence.trustsig.eu/
Or try the Tetris-Snake demo here: https://divergence-game.trustsig.eu/
Techical breakdown: https://trustsig.eu/blog/javascript-divergence/
r/SideProject • u/Zealousideal_Bit3600 • 42m ago
I built Chessinda, a free site that turns your own chess blunders into puzzles
Random chess puzzles never fixed my actual mistakes, so I built something that uses my own games.
You enter a Chess.com or Lichess username. It pulls your recent losses, finds the moves that lost 2+ pawns of evaluation, and turns each one into a 3-move puzzle you solve on the page.
Free, no sign-up
Stockfish runs in your browser, so your games are analysed locally
Choose Stockfish 10, 11 or 16
There’s also a position analyser: set up any position, pick a rating from 800 to 2800, and see which moves a player of that strength would likely choose
Stack: a single static HTML file, chess.js, and Stockfish in a Web Worker, hosted on Vercel. No backend of my own.
Where to try it: I’m keeping links out of the post body, so the link is on my X profile. Click my username here, then the X link on my Reddit profile, and the app link is in my X bio.
It’s early. If you try it, I’d like to know:
Did it work for your username?
Did the puzzles feel like your mistakes?
What was confusing, broken or missing?
r/SideProject • u/anonkozume • 12h ago
I built a free, simple audio editor for trimming and merging clips
I kept running into audio editors that felt overkill for one simple task: trimming and merging clips on a visual timeline. So I built Waveform.
It runs in your browser, with no sign-up or uploads—your audio stays on your device.
You can trim, split, arrange, and mix clips, then export an MP3. Longer term, I’d like to turn it into a fuller editor with AI audio enhancers, but for now I’m focused on getting the basics right.
Try it: https://realaudioeditor.com/
Would love some honest feedback. What’s one simple audio-editing task you wish were easier?
r/SideProject • u/Responsible-Lake85 • 1h ago
i was tired of going around a bajillion apps and tabs, so i built one workspace for all of them.
panels is my solution to organization.
when i'm building projects, i have my vs code, agents, 20 tabs (half of which i dont need), discord, the terminal, basically everything you can imagine open.
panels brings it together in one place: markdown-supported notes, to-dos, browser panels, timers, and everything you need in one app, with everything being one panel to arrange in one drag. intuitive and snappy.
quick rundown of features:
- rambler style dictation: talk to it in notes and it'll enable quick dictation that formats well and removes the filler.
- lock in mode: expand your current focused panel into the ENTIRE app, and have a little stats counter at the bottom, helping you just put down your thoughts in one conscious, uninterrupted stream.
- sounds: calm, adjustable background / interaction noises that help you stay on task and gets things done.
- browser -> full app: open a browser, but find the whole "browser" look to be too distracting? simply make it encompass the whole panel.
- keyboard shortcuts (bonus: command palette!): are you a power user? panels is designed for you too! theres a shortcuts tab in the settings, so you can learn all of them for ease of use in the app.
i really hope you guys enjoy my latest creation! please leave feedback for me in the comments, i greatly appreciate it.
links:
website: https://getpanels.app
github: https://github.com/thecatthatflies/panels
have fun!
r/SideProject • u/jsprogrammer • 6h ago
I split my one-person business across ~17 AI agents. Here's what worked and what didn't.
Each agent gets one job, its own memory, and its own folder, and they all share files on one box. Three lessons: narrow agents beat one giant chat, asking agents to "mark anything you couldn't verify" changed how much I trust them, and once making things is cheap, finishing becomes the bottleneck (15 books built, 6 live, 0 sales so far). Full writeup with real numbers: https://blakelapierre.substack.com/p/i-run-my-one-person-business-with
r/SideProject • u/BigWetDeck • 10h ago
The sports API I was paying for went down, so I ended up building one
I’m working on updating my media app Surge Player, and the sports API I was paying for went down. I needed that data for the app, so that sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole.
My solution was apparently to give myself another project lol.
I built a small API on Cloudflare Workers that pulls together scores and schedules and returns them in a consistent JSON format. There’s a shared cache so every request doesn’t have to fetch everything again, plus API keys and rate limiting.
Getting the data into a consistent shape was a decent chunk of it. Different sports have different ways of representing game status, periods, scores, and missing fields. I wanted the code using it to stay pretty similar whether it was showing football or hockey.
I called it SportyApi. Just added a little scoreboard to the homepage that automatically finds games in progress, so there’s something to play with without making an account.
I also put together a starter repo on GitHub if you want to try building something with it. It runs with sample data out of the box, so you don’t need an API key to get started.
Still early, but now I have something I can use for Surge Player, and maybe it’ll be useful to someone else.
r/SideProject • u/mushair • 14h ago
You built it, you launched it… now how do you actually get users?
I recently launched my first app on iOS and Android, and now I’m realizing that building it was the easy part.
How did you get your first users without an audience or marketing budget?
What worked for you—social media, Reddit, ASO, paid ads, or something else? I’d also love to hear what didn’t work and wish you knew earlier?
r/SideProject • u/DavidIsSupah • 26m ago
I built a free, open-source, local-first budgeting app (FlyBudget). 3 weeks after launch: 100+ GitHub stars, 1.5k repo views, and a new release with European bank sync and multi-currency!
Three weeks ago I launched FlyBudget, a zero-based budgeting app (think YNAB or Actual Budget) that keeps your data on your own machine. Today I shipped v0.2.0, which makes it usable outside the US via Enable Banking, and also supporting multiple currencies in different accounts! This was a feature widely requested by initial users.
I’ve been using budgeting and personal finance apps for years, and I’ve always liked tracking where my money is going. Over time I ended up trying a bunch of different tools and kept wishing I could combine the parts I liked from each of them into one app.
So for the past couple months I’ve been building FlyBudget, a free, private, open-source budgeting app inspired by tools like Monarch, YNAB, Mint, and a few others.
I wanted something that felt polished, but could also be self-hosted and completely controlled by the user.
The frontend is built with React, TypeScript, and Tailwind, and I’ve probably spent an unreasonable amount of time tweaking the UI.
Some of the stuff I’ve built so far:
- Monthly budgeting
- Account + transaction tracking
- Recurring transaction detection
- Cash flow / Sankey reports
- Custom reports
- Self-hosting with Docker
- Desktop app
- Demo instance so you can try it without installing anything
- European bank support and multi-currency support
- Full documentation site
This is also my first real attempt at building an open-source project, so I’m still figuring out that side of things.
Would genuinely love feedback from other web devs, especially on the UI/UX, project structure, or anything that immediately looks like it could be improved. If you find the project interesting, please consider helping us out by giving a star on GitHub! We have gotten a great response so far so I am very excited to continue our momentum!
Demo + docs: flybudget.org
GitHub: github.com/dtymoszenko/FlyBudget
r/SideProject • u/Beautiful_Mud9391 • 33m ago
I am a pharmacist who built an offline, AES-256 encrypted family health and medicine cabinet organizer for iOS. Making Lifetime Pro completely free this week for feedback!
Hi everyone, I am a practicing pharmacist and solo developer. Over the past few months I built my side project, MediFamily: Health Organizer for iOS. To celebrate the launch and get honest feedback from builders and early users, I set the MediFamily Pro Lifetime In-App Purchase from $69.99 down to $0.00 through October 22.
Working in a pharmacy every day, I saw how hard it is for parents and caregivers to keep track of daily medication schedules, opened bottle expiration dates, children's immunization records, and doctor visit notes across multiple family members. When I looked at existing apps on the App Store, almost all of them forced users to create a cloud account, upload sensitive family health data to external servers, and pay a monthly subscription just to get basic reminders.
I built MediFamily with a strict zero-cloud architecture so families own their data completely. There is no account signup, no cloud database, and zero analytics or tracking SDKs. Every profile, routine reminder, vital log, and scanned paper lab result stays inside the local iPhone sandbox using hardware-backed AES-256 encryption with PBKDF2 key derivation.
You can manage separate profiles for yourself, your kids, elderly parents, and household pets. I also built a First-Expired-First-Out medicine cabinet inventory tracker that alerts you before stored bottles pass their shelf life, official WHO pediatric growth percentile charts, one-tap PDF summaries for doctor visits, and streaming encrypted local backups that you can save to the Files app or AirDrop to your spouse.
If you want to grab the free Lifetime Pro unlock, download the app from the App Store, finish the quick offline onboarding, and tap Unlock MediFamily Pro on the home screen or in Settings. Choose the Lifetime tier and confirm the native Apple StoreKit checkout sheet where the price shows $0.00.
App Store Link:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/medifamily-health-organizer/id6810080893
I have already added custom growth chart date pickers, surgical history logs, and French and Spanish localization to my next update roadmap thanks to early user emails this weekend. I would love to hear your thoughts on the onboarding flow, UI, or any features you would want to see next!
r/SideProject • u/5thepoormans25 • 36m ago
I got tired of link shorteners wanting an account or a subscription, so I made one that just works and looks pretty for free with no catch: u1.lol
Every link shortener I tried either wanted me to sign up, pushed a paid plan, buried the button under ads, or looked like it was built in 2009. I couldn’t find one that just worked and looked nice, so I built it myself.
Paste a link and it’s instantly shortened and copied. That’s it. On phones there’s a Paste button, so it’s one tap.
- No account, no ads, no tracking. Completely free, no catch.
- Short links. Codes are as short as possible, often a single character (like
u1.lol/K). - Custom endings, e.g.
u1.lol/music, with a live “available / taken” check as you type. - Preview any link by adding
+to the end (u1.lol/K+), so you can see where it goes before you click. - Strips tracking junk (
utm_,fbclid, etc.) from links automatically. - Checks every link against Google Safe Browsing, so it can’t be used for malware or phishing.
- Your recent links are saved in your browser (not on a server), with export/import.
- 12 color themes, and the whole page is under 10 KB, so it loads instantly even on bad signal.
It runs on Cloudflare.
Would love feedback, especially anything that feels confusing or broken on your phone.
r/SideProject • u/nabreit • 47m ago
Piano Maze Game
My daughter asked me to build a piano maze game for her so I asked the AIs and after many rounds of testing and prompting I think we ended up with something pretty fun. Its intended to be played with a midi keyboard, but it has a touch screen piano mode as well.
r/SideProject • u/Real-Speech-2033 • 7h ago
Prism World - a social content calendar with dates, timezones and campaign status in view
I'm the maker of Prism World, a browser workspace for preparing social content. I'd like feedback on its calendar, especially when plans change after a draft has been written.
A hypothetical example: a small business moves a Saturday event to Sunday. The useful next step is more than finding a new slot. Someone needs to identify the affected drafts, check their captions, review any scheduled timing and see whether anything has already been published.
Prism World's calendar view shows campaigns and their statuses. Unscheduled drafts are labeled as drafts, and the view offers All campaigns, Scheduled and Needs attention filters. It also states the timezone used for the displayed times. The filters group existing campaign statuses. In the event-change example, a person would still need to identify and review the affected captions.
You can change timing or pause before publishing starts. Automatic delivery requires explicit saved authorization; other schedules remain manual. Each destination also has its own delivery record, so a campaign's place on a calendar is only part of the picture.
The interface question I'm weighing is where to start when something urgent changes: start with the full calendar, or make the attention filter more prominent? If you manage a small content calendar, which view helps you catch the affected work without losing the rest of the week's plan?
The workspace, calendar and media tools are available. Direct publishing still depends on the network and eligible account, with provider reviews and limited pilots in progress. The availability page lists those restrictions.
Plans start at $15/month. The seven-day trial requires a card and bills automatically unless canceled before it ends.
Product: https://getprismworld.com/
Current availability: https://getprismworld.com/availability
r/SideProject • u/Glad_Cantaloupe_6739 • 1h ago
Everyone's building tools to make more hook variants. I built the one that tells you which ones are worth making.
I make talking-head videos and I kept losing people in the first line. Every tool I tried helped me make MORE hooks: 27 variants, 50 variants, a CSV of them. Then I'd film the three I liked, post, and still have no idea why one worked and two died. I was picking by feel.
So I built the opposite thing. Contextify scores what you say on camera before you post it, on a fixed rubric: hook, clarity, pacing, rewatch, search. It quotes the exact phrase that loses people and writes a stronger version, then scores that version on the same rubric so you can see if it actually beat the original.
Here's one of mine from this week: my old first line scored [BEFORE]/100, the rewrite scored [AFTER]/100. Not a view prediction. It reads the spoken words only, so visuals, timing, and the feed are outside what it can see, and it says so on the page.
The part I'm most unsure about, so I made it checkable: with a free account you give your TikTok handle and it scores your last 3 talking videos next to the views each one really got. If the scores don't line up with the views, the page tells you. I'd rather you catch that than find out after paying.
Tech, since this sub likes it:
- The rubric is published. Same weights every time, so two takes are comparable.
- The judge never sees your creator profile. It scores the words, not who you are.
- A rewrite only ships if it beats the original on the same judge. Otherwise, you get told the original was better.
- In the full video breakdown, every quoted phrase has to be word for word in your transcript or the analysis is thrown out. On launch day, that guard failed a real video twice in a row. Fixed the same day, and I'm counting how often it fires.
- Video never leaves your browser. Only the audio and one cover frame are uploaded, and the audio is deleted when the breakdown finishes.
Free hook check, no account: contextify.ca/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sideproject
After that, it's 3 analyses for $4.99 CAD, no subscription.
Question for people who make talking videos: how do you pick which hook to film? Gut, a small test, or something else? I built this because I had no answer, and I want to know if that's just me.
r/SideProject • u/Massive_Capital9611 • 1h ago
Built a search engine for debugging which is not a wrapper
TLDR: I built a search engine that reads a bug report (or lets you define it) and points to the exact file (93%) and to the exact function (79.4%) you need to fix.
Hey everyone,
I recently made a new project while trying to get into RAG and automation.
Odin is more than a search engine, all you have to do is paste a public repo URL and link the issue or describe the bug yourself and it downloads, parses and ranks the functions based on the mentioned bug.
Why its different than any LLM:
It runs mostly in your browser: It uses Tree-sitter (via WebAssembly) and small local models (via WebGPU) so your code isn't just blindly shipped off to a giant cloud LLM.
It punches above its weight: Evaluated on 300 real issues from the SWE-bench Lite dataset, it puts the correct file in the top 10 results 93.0% of the time, and the exact function 79.4% of the time.
It’s incredibly efficient: It matches the accuracy of heavy Claude 4.5 agents using models under 1B parameters, cutting the cost per issue to a fraction of a cent.
There’s also a GitHub Action you can drop into your repo to automatically comment on new issues with the most likely functions to fix.
I would really appreciate it if you would give it a try (it would help me with the benchmarks as well)
feedback, questions, criticism are welcome
r/SideProject • u/MaximumGiraffe7838 • 7h ago
My approach to building my first app, what worked, what didn’t and what I’d do differently
A few months ago I started building my first Shopify app, True2Size: Chart & Recommender. It’s a tool that helps clothing stores create size charts and recommend the right size to their customers.
I’ve recently started seeing my first real signs of success. Merchants are installing the app, people are actually using something I built and I’ve had some really interesting conversations with store owners along the way.
I’m obviously still very early in the whole process, but I wanted to share a few philosophies I’ve had since the beginning that I think have helped me a lot. And also some things I wish I’d done differently.
My first philosophy was to build something that could do everything my competitors could do, and more.
Before I started building, I spent a ridiculous amount of time looking at existing apps in the same category. I tried pretty much everything I could find, looked at their features, how their interfaces worked and what merchants were complaining about in reviews.
And instead of picking one competitor to improve upon, I wanted to take the best parts of all of them and combine them into one product.
If competitor A had a feature I really liked, I wanted that functionality in my app. If competitor B had a completely different approach to something that worked well, I wanted to offer that too. And wherever I thought something could be done better, I wanted to improve on it.
The idea was pretty simple. I wanted a merchant to be able to recreate whatever they had already set up with another app, but then have even more possibilities available to them.
In my head, this would remove one of the biggest reasons not to switch. Why would someone stay with their current app if they could do everything they were already doing, plus more, potentially for a better price?
Obviously that’s not exactly how it works in reality haha. People value familiarity, trust and not having to spend time switching software. But as a mindset for building the product, I still think it was really useful.
It forced me to look beyond what I personally thought was necessary and understand why different competitors had built certain features in the first place.
My second philosophy was that the app should feel like it was made specifically for every merchant who installs it.
I know that sounds a bit unrealistic, and to some extent it probably is. But that’s always been the mindset I’ve tried to have.
Every merchant runs their store differently. They have different products, different preferences and different ways they want things to look and function. I didn’t want someone to install my app, realize it almost does what they need and then have to compromise because a certain setting or feature is missing.
So whenever someone installs True2Size, I try to get in touch with them. I offer to help set everything up, sometimes through a call, and ask them what would make the app perfect for their specific store.
And I actually try to do something with those answers.
If someone needs a feature that isn’t there yet, I’ll look into adding it. If something is confusing, I’ll try to make it easier. And if I notice multiple merchants struggling with the same thing, that immediately becomes a priority.
I also have a habit of writing down literally every idea that comes into my head. Doesn’t matter if I’m working on the app, walking somewhere or lying in bed. If I think of something that could make the product better, I write it down.
And if I genuinely think it’s important, I try to implement it as soon as possible.
I’ve basically been repeating this process for months now. Build something, let people use it, listen to what they need, improve it and repeat.
But there’s a problem with building this way that I didn’t really expect.
At some point your app starts becoming a bit of a mess.
You keep adding features, settings, options and little exceptions for different use cases. And while every individual addition makes sense, eventually you end up with an interface that has way too many things going on.
This is where I think a completely different kind of work begins.
Instead of adding more, you have to start removing things. Or at least removing unnecessary complexity.
You start combining settings that belong together, reorganizing features, simplifying the interface and figuring out how to make all those possibilities feel like one simple product.
And honestly, I think this is one of the hardest parts of building good software.
It’s relatively easy to make something with very few features look clean and minimalistic. It’s much harder to build something that can do a hundred different things while still feeling like anyone could figure it out in a few minutes.
That’s what I’m trying to achieve with True2Size. I want merchants to have the freedom to configure everything exactly how they want, without feeling like they need a tutorial just to get started.
I’m definitely not fully there yet, but every time I simplify something without losing functionality it feels like a bigger achievement than adding another feature.
Something else I’ve learned is how valuable it is to personally help your first users.
Especially when your app has quite a few settings, don’t just expect everyone to figure everything out themselves.
Offer to set things up for them. Jump on a call, walk them through the interface and actually watch where they get confused.
I still offer this to new merchants, and those conversations have probably taught me more about improving the app than anything else.
Sometimes you’ll discover that a feature you thought was really important barely gets used. Other times someone will ask for something that seems so obvious afterwards that you can’t believe you didn’t think of it yourself.
And that’s exactly why I think getting real people involved as early as possible is so important.
Now for the things I wish I’d done differently.
My biggest mistake was waiting too long before properly marketing the app.
I was so focused on building the perfect product that I kept telling myself I wasn’t ready to start promoting it yet.
There was always one more feature I wanted to add, one more thing to fix or one more part of the interface that didn’t feel quite right.
Looking back, I think I should’ve started getting people to try it much earlier.
Because the reality is that the perfect product doesn’t exist. And even if you think you’ve built one, the first person who actually uses it will probably find something you never considered.
You need those people to make the product better.
Another thing I’d recommend is trying not to lose momentum. I personally try to never go more than three days without working on the project in some way. It doesn’t have to be a full day of coding. Sometimes it’s just fixing something small, answering a merchant or writing down ideas.
For me, once I stop working on something for too long, getting back into it becomes much harder. Keeping that momentum has helped me a lot.
And probably just as important is learning how to prioritize.
Not every idea needs to be built immediately. Even if it’s a great idea. I’ve definitely wasted time working on things I was personally excited about while ignoring things that would’ve made a much bigger difference to actual users.
I’m trying to get better at asking myself what will have the biggest impact before deciding what to work on next.
One last thing about perfectionism.
I actually think being a perfectionist can be a really good thing when building software, as long as you’re perfectionistic about the right things.
If you’re going to build something, build it properly. Think about how it’ll work six months from now, not just whether it works today.
Spending a little extra time making something reliable and easy to maintain can save you so much work later.
But don’t confuse doing something properly with needing everything to be perfect before anyone can use it.
That’s probably the biggest lesson I’ve learned so far.
I’m still figuring out a lot of this myself and I’m sure I’ll look back at this post in a year and disagree with some of my own advice haha.
But seeing something that started as a random idea slowly turn into a product that real businesses are using has honestly been one of the most satisfying experiences I’ve had.
I’m curious how other developers approach this. Do you try to make your product as customizable as possible, or do you prefer keeping things simple even if that means some users won’t get exactly what they want?
And for people who’ve been building SaaS products for longer, at what point did you realize you needed to stop adding features and start simplifying what you already had?
r/SideProject • u/Educational-Comb-956 • 4h ago
pagegoat.com - turn files into shareable web pages in seconds
Hey everyone!
PageGoat.com makes it easy to turn HTML, PDF, Markdown, and text files into shareable web pages without setting up hosting or deployment.
You can choose who gets access: make pages public, password-protected, or restricted to specific email addresses. You can also collect visitors’ email addresses before they access your content.
Free public links are available without creating an account and expire after four hours.
Check it out: https://pagegoat.com
Would love to hear your feedback and suggestions!
r/SideProject • u/Background_Net9892 • 2h ago
My drives were full so I vibe coded a Windows app to clear node_modules and build caches, got back about 200GB
My drives were completely full.
Turns out most of it was leftovers from building stuff. node_modules, .next, dist, build, Gradle, Rust target, Python venvs, all sitting in old projects.
Everyone's vibe coding now so most of us have loads of projects lying around. I reckon a big chunk of our disk space is just this.
So I spent a few hours with Claude Code and built StackSweep, just for fun. It scans a folder or a whole drive, works out each project's stack and marks every folder Safe, Review or Blocked.
Nothing gets deleted until you tick it and confirm. It never touches anything committed to git, so your source code stays put.
Ran it on my own drives and freed around 200GB ⬇️
Free and open source (MIT), Windows only for now:
https://github.com/mehrabsha/dev-cache-cleaner
If something's missing tell me and I'll add it :)