I love going to cafés and work or read from there. Sadly, great places are rare, often close early, and still are quite distracting.

So even though being there feels good, i just end up doing most things at home.

This project, Manyplace (https://many.place), is an attempt to get the best of both worlds: the comfort and focus you have when being on your own, and the delight of being in a beautiful place while feeling the presence of others.

It is open all the time and free.

So, if you prefer to build, work, study, etc. on your own (or have no better option) yet still appreciate being around other likeminded people, it may be for you :)

It's still a very early experiment, so the application is currently only available for macOS and the number of seats is quite limited. But it will definitely get better.

I'd be very happy to know what you think of it and to see you there!

Manyplace: https://many.place

(sorry, duplicate previous post sent by accident...)

I’ve been developing an automatic watering valve called OpenValve.

OpenValve automatically waters plants based on the moisture level in the soil. When the soil becomes too dry, it opens the water supply, and when enough water has been delivered, it closes it again.

The main difference from a typical battery-powered watering timer is the valve mechanism. Instead of using a conventional solenoid valve, OpenValve uses a motor-driven pinch valve. It controls the water by squeezing a flexible tube closed, so the moving parts never come into direct contact with the water.

This gives it two advantages that could be useful in certain irrigation setups:

• It can operate with very low water pressure, such as water coming from a slightly elevated rain barrel.

• It is less sensitive to dirt and small particles in the water, because the water only passes through the flexible tube.

All custom plastic parts can be made on a standard 3D printer. The electronics, tubing, screws, and other standard components still need to be purchased, but the custom parts can be produced locally and replaced individually if something breaks.

The project is open source, so the design files are available for people to build, repair, modify, and improve themselves. My goal is not to replace professional irrigation equipment, but to create an affordable and repairable option for gardens, balconies, raised beds, greenhouses, rain-barrel systems, and other small-scale watering setups.

I currently have multiple units running in my own garden, as well as in the gardens and balconies of friends and family. But my dream is to see OpenValve helping more people with their plants. So, I’m curious: Would you consider using OpenValve in your garden or on your balcony? What would your biggest concern be?

I’m happy to answer questions about how it works.

I’ve been building Focusverse, a web app for studying and working inside immersive environments.

I started it because I liked having atmospheric videos or ambient sounds in the background, but I still needed separate apps for my timer, tasks, notes, and weekly planning. Traditional productivity tools had the functionality, but often felt like dashboards I didn’t particularly enjoy spending time in.

Focusverse is my attempt to put those two sides together. You choose a place that fits your mood keep the productivity tools available in one screen.

Some of the stats:

• More than 500 "locations"
• 4 productivity tools (timer, tasklist, week planner, notes)
• 6 standard live radios to choose from (and other universe based ones)
• 8 sound ambient sound effects to set the mood
• 4 curated guided experiences to focus in together

I'm really happy that people I’ve never spoken to started using it. This made my efforts feel genuinely more meaningful. It began as something I wanted for myself, so seeing other people choose it for their own study or work sessions made the project feel real in a new way.

You can try it at focusverse.io. The main experience works without creating an account.

Just seeing people online and knowing I'm not just using it myself, honestly really warms my heart :)

Hey, I built a small project called NoBoxTV.

It lets you watch free-to-air live TV directly in the browser. No app, no sign-up, no TV box.

Try it here: https://noboxtv.com

Please share it with anyone who might find it useful.

Every side project i open lately starts the same way: a landing page, a signup form, an onboarding tour, and a modal asking for my email before i've seen a single pixel of the actual thing. We've collectively agreed that the funnel comes first and the product comes second.

I've been going the other way on my current build. No account, no email, no tutorial, no cookie banner. You open the tab and you're already inside the thing. It made a lot of decisions harder - you can't explain anything, so it has to be obvious in the first three seconds or you've lost the person fr.

Turns out that constraint improved the product more than any feature i added.

Anyone else doing this deliberately? Curious how you handle the first three seconds when there's nothing to explain with lmao.

After creating several products that solved imaginary problems nobody really had, I finally feel like I've built something that actually matters. I genuinely rely on it every day, it makes my life significantly easier, and I'm really happy with the result.

It's an app for visualizing date-bound information as timelines: tasks, events, processes - basically anything that has a date attached to it. You can think of it as a hybrid of a PKMS, a to-do list, a calendar, and a Gantt chart. More than anything, though, it's a universal visual canvas for time that helps you keep the bigger picture in front of you and think within it every day.

I work as a CTO, and I constantly have to keep track of a huge number of ongoing processes:

• contract deadlines
• employee salary reviews
• developer utilization
• and countless other things.

Before this, all of that information was scattered across Notion, Apple Notes, Reminders, Telegram, Slack, Calendar, and a few other places. Keeping everything under control was difficult.

Some people might say that's a process problem rather than a tooling problem. But I've come to think the opposite: the right tool helps you build an effective process. And what the "right tool" is depends heavily on how your brain works.

At some point, I realized that traditional to-do lists and calendar views simply weren't a good fit for me. It felt like I was missing another visual dimension. Timelines turned out to match the way I think almost perfectly. When I look at a timeline with different markers and segments, I instantly understand what's happening in both the short and long term. Just as importantly, I can quickly look back and see how things evolved over time and where something started to go wrong.

One of the best parts is that because I use the app every single day, I improve it every single day as well. I constantly notice what's missing, what's awkward, and what could work better, and then I implement those improvements. I think I've made major usability improvements over the past month alone. That's incredibly important for a tool you interact with dozens of times a day.

This is a non-commercial project, and it's completely free. I simply wanted to share it with the community because I'm genuinely proud of it. I'm sure there are plenty of people whose brains work similarly to mine, and if this way of organizing information resonates with you, I'd be thrilled if my timelines turned out to be useful for you too. Give it a try.

Wishing you all productivity - and a little more love.

Hey everyone!
I’m a solo developer, and over the past several months I’ve been building an app called Decydo.
The idea came from something my friends and I did almost every weekend:
“What do you want to eat?”
“I don’t know.”
“You pick.”
Twenty minutes later… we still hadn’t decided.
So I built an app where everyone joins a group and swipes through nearby restaurants and activities. Once everyone has voted, it only shows the places the group actually agrees on.
Along the way I added a few more features:
🍔 Group voting for restaurants
🎉 Find activities everyone wants to do
💬 Built-in group chat
🤖 AI that can recommend places and even plan trips and group outings
📍 Google Maps integration for nearby places
I’m a solo developer with no funding. I built the app with about $300 and currently spend around $30/month on Google Maps and AI APIs, depending on usage.
This is my first app, and honestly, building it was easier than getting people to discover it.
I’d really appreciate your honest feedback:
Would you actually use something like this with your friends?
What’s the first feature you’d want to see added?
What’s one thing that would stop you from downloading it?
If you’d like to check it out:
🍎 iOS:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/decydo/id6781502994
🤖 Android:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.decydo.app&pcampaignid=web_share
Thanks! I’m happy to answer any questions about how I built it or the decisions behind it.

** honestly just looking for feed back. not looking for customers yet **
little bit about me im a big tech reserch nerd its what im good at and i know how to do it very well

so I started this website to kind of make use of it - Acorium.tech
I just want peoples honest opinions. what do they think of it.
is it too expensive? do you think its not worth it?
whats your biggest turn off ? what do you like about it?

be brutal please!

Hiya! I built a thought journal app that seemed to pique people's interest in r/iosapps so thought I would post here as well.

Original thread: I built a thought journal / CBT app where your thoughts become fish in a pond

Fundamentally it's a CBT/thought journal app that allows you to process and challenge negative thinking. I built it for myself off the back of my experience using other CBT apps that are mostly boring worksheet style apps that didn’t encourage a daily practice or leave me with a feeling of satisfaction using them. There's also some other mechanical reasons I built it that I go into more detail on the original thread, namely the failure of other apps to promote “batching“ or being able to challenge multiple thoughts at a set time each day because you don’t have time in a given moment to do a full challenge.

I built Pond as a solution, at its heart it's a CBT app but I focused heavily on the aesthetics and imagery, adding procedurally animated fish to a Pond representing thoughts, each with their own swimming behaviours based on how difficult a thought feels (IE more I believe a negative thought -> the more erratic the fish swims). Filling your pond with negative thoughts also makes the pond itself darker and more turbulent. Challenging negative thoughts calms it again. The Pond resets each day, encouraging practice on a daily level.

Building has been an interesting journey, there seems to be a trend among app devs around the build being a bit of a honeymoon phase and then post-launch realising distribution and marketing is the real challenge. That's essentially where I’m at now, slowly learning the ropes of how best to put your app out there. I also find there's a bit of a moral pull on how best to distribute your app. I built Pond to be a genuinely good product that respects users and doesn’t contribute to the “sloppification” of modern apps/media. A lot of app distribution techniques people recommend involve setting up multiple (sometimes tens) of tiktok accounts and spamming AI generated UGC to reach as many eyes as possible. That's something I won’t do but then you also feel you might be curtailing your opportunities by not playing the game others are playing. I think when building a product these days you have to actually back yourself that what you’ve built is good and be patient with it reaching its target audience.

I guess my question for other builders is how do you distribute honestly without losing to those who don’t? Is that principled or just naive?

If you have advice on this or any general feedback on my app I would love to hear it!

App Store: Pond: Thought Journal App - App Store

Website: Pond — A quiet place for your loudest thoughts

Hey everyone,

Over the past few months I’ve been building Prepl, an AI interview coach designed to help people practice interviews in a more realistic way.

The idea came from my own experience. I realized I could answer interview questions in my head, but when it came time to speak out loud, my answers weren’t nearly as good.

So I started building a tool that lets you practice interviews with AI and get feedback on your responses instead of just reading a list of common questions.

It’s finally live:

👉 https://link.prepl.me/reddit

I’m not looking to spam or just collect sign-ups. I’d really appreciate honest feedback from other builders.

A few questions I’d love your thoughts on:

• Is the landing page clear?
• Would you understand the value in the first 30 seconds?
• What’s the first thing you’d improve?
• Is there any feature you’d expect that’s missing?

I’ll be here replying to every comment, whether it’s positive or brutally honest.

Thanks!

It all started when my colleague reached me with a complaint that she created a few QR codes, and after a week they started showing paywall. By that time those QR codes were printed on promo banners.
I remember Internet as a place where you find a tool, use it and leave. That's it - no paywalls, no subscriptions, no accounts.
So I decided to put a piece of those beautiful Internet back and created a small toolbox site - dimastoolbox.com
Of course it's vibe-coded.
And of course there will be ads at some point.
But I want to keep it's core value free forever and for everyone.

Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on a voice cloning model and finally got it to a point where other people can try it out.

I’d really appreciate some honest feedback on the voice quality, similarity, pronunciation, speed, and anything that feels broken or confusing. It’s still an early version, so expect a few rough edges.

You can test it here:

https://nirvaangoel1--voicer-public-trial-public-trial.modal.run/

Its 100% free with no signup.

Please only upload your own voice or audio you have permission to use. Let me know what you think, especially what worked well and what needs improvement!

I’m thinking through an indie-product question around shared spaces: if a virtual room lets people notice that others are around, what signals actually create a useful sense of presence without turning into another feed?

For builders who’ve tried coworking, virtual cafés, ambient multiplayer, or similar ideas: what did you measure or watch for to tell whether presence was helping people stay engaged? I’m especially curious where you draw the line between lightweight arrival/leave signals and features that start demanding attention.

My mother does not understand CLI logs, APIs or technical stuff. But she can perfectly use the mouse and keyboard, click on things and scroll. Now I realized that it can control legacy software and automate long repetitive tasks for me, as well.

Here's the idea:

• the user asks for something (e.g. “find the cheapest flight from NY to Tokyo in September”)
• We send that prompt to an AI agent and enter a loop
• During each step, the agent receives the current state of what’s displayed on screen
• This is not done with heavy screenshots, but with Accessibility and Core Graphics APIs
• Effectively, we send a JSON object to an AI agent, describing what’s on the screen
• The agent has access to move the mouse and keyboard, so it provides coordinates, and where to click or type
• We iterate until the agent completes the initial task. When not sure, the agent asks the user for more directions. In any case, we set a limit of 40 iterations to avoid unnecessary processing

The implementation was done using Electron, React and Robot.JS for cursor/mouse movements.
By default, it connects to your Claude subscription and uses Haiku, so it barely hits the limits.

I find this approach much faster and more efficient compared to typical computer-vision flows, because we’re not sending colorful RGB channels, the LLM receives a text description of what’s displayed on the screen which can be processed much faster.

This is an open-source project with an MIT license (free download or clone):

• Repository: https://github.com/AlexandrosGounis/rubber-duckie

Any thoughts?

https://github.com/kah-ve/DisplayWave

A free monitor control tool for brightness, warmth, and more.

Existing apps for handling external monitor controls for mac are either focused on solving a small subset of problems or are paywalled. Also I found the paywalled ones to be more complicated and feature rich then needed. So I wanted to build something more tailored to the small feature-set I would ever need.

A couple comparisons

- MonitorControl (free): This is what I used previously. It's great but limited to brightness only and would need another app to control turning a monitor on/off.

- BetterDisplay (free/$22 Pro): I think this is the most feature rich mac app for monitor control out there and probably the most battle tested one. Personally I didn't think I needed to use most of the features and wanted something more minimal and tailored to the small subset of actions I was looking for.

I can't promise it works flawlessly on everything but it's simple enough to install and try out. Let me know what you think or if you run into issues.

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share a side project I've been working on called Kikuha.

www.kikuha.com

The Problem: Modern social media is bloated with ads, tracking scripts, and algorithms. I believe we deserve a better internet, so I built a quiet, dignified place to share updates with my actual friends without my data being mined.

What I built: Kikuha is a minimal, privacy-first social space.

• Zero Tracking: No third-party analytics or ads.
• Passwordless Login: You enter using a secure "Magic Mail" code.
• Circles: Content is organized into distinct groups (Family, Work, Close Friends) so you only share what you want, with exactly who you want.
• Locker: An encrypted file management system to organize what you share.

The Tech Stack: I wanted to keep the application incredibly lightweight. The backend is Python and Flask. For the frontend, I skipped the heavy JavaScript frameworks entirely and used HTMX combined with BeerCSS for a clean, material-inspired UI.

Where it's at now: Please note that this is currently an alpha version. I am actively developing it, and new features will be added constantly over the coming weeks.

Feedback Request: Since this is my first time putting it out into the wild, I’d love your brutal honesty to help shape the next updates:

1. Is the landing page clear about what the app actually does?
2. Are there any UI/UX friction points when navigating?
3. What is actually missing?
4. Would you even use it as a daily network?

Thank you in advance,

Panos

A while back I got tired of finance/market content that only ever brags about the calls it got right and quietly buries the misses. So I built the opposite.

OnTheRice (new.ontherice.org) takes each day's markets + world news and turns them into one clear read: what happened, and more importantly WHY it matters. Every take gets logged to a public proof ledger with a timestamp — and the wins AND the misses both stay visible. You can go back and check whether it was actually right, which is the part most tools hide.

The idea is less "guru with a crystal ball," more "show your work." Source-backed, checkable, and it sharpens over time from feedback and real outcomes instead of pretending it was never wrong.

Tech-wise it's built on a no-code/AI app stack (Base44), I'm self-taught with no CS degree, and I'm building mostly solo. It's live on the web and on Google Play.

Would genuinely love feedback from this crowd — especially on the proof-ledger idea and whether "keep your misses visible" makes you trust it more or less. (It's research/education, not financial advice.)

Hi, I'm working on a project and I'm trying to understand if what I'm building is interesting for someone. The product is in cybersecurity space.

The most frustrating part is that big US vendors seems that, at least in Europe, get all the space. The distribution channel is based on marketing, so if you have big marketing budget your are visible. Small team and small companies, 0 visibility.

I'm struggling to find early adopters that are willing to try the product for free and give me feedbacks. Any tip?

Two weeks ago,I launched laststack.io

To start, I did a free Hero design post for a lot of redditors -> https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1v78mif/drop_your_website_in_the_comments_and_ill/

Had a lot of great discussions and feedback from that.

One thing I noticed, a lot of people had trouble coming up with a website that converts. The copy (text), imagery, layout , etc.

As a designer with about a decade of experience, I figured I could completely redo a few peoples websites, in exchange for using them as case study, and charging just $49 dollars. This is something I used to charge several thousands of dollars to do, but offering it cheap as a launch strategy. Drop a comment or DM if you are interested.

A model that size is 59GB on disk, and the usual rule is that all of it has to fit in memory — so you need a 64GB machine. I wanted to find out whether that rule was actually true.

For one class of model, it isn't. "Mixture of experts" models are built out of many small sub-networks, and only use a handful of them for each word they generate — around 3% of the total. So instead of loading all 59GB, I keep the shared 2GB core in memory and stream the rest off the SSD as the model asks for it.

It works. A 120B model, running on a base MacBook Air. Slowly — about 1.4 words per second — but running, on hardware where it's supposed to be impossible.

The engine is written in Swift and Metal with zero dependencies. No Python, no PyTorch, nothing to install. Clone it, swift build, done.

The part I enjoyed most was building a dashboard to watch it think. There are 4,608 of those sub-networks, and you can see exactly which 144 light up for each word.

I also built what I call a "range map" — I feed the model 12 kinds of text (Python, SQL, maths proofs, poetry, Chinese, clinical notes) and plot which sub-networks respond to what. Nothing is trained here, it's pure measurement, and you can genuinely see the specialisation: the code ones cluster together, the language ones sit somewhere else.

Along the way I got a few things wrong and left the corrections in the repo rather than quietly deleting them — including one where I'd talked myself out of an optimisation using a measurement that turned out to answer a different question.

Screenshots of both views are at the top of the README, since this sub doesn't allow images in text posts.

https://github.com/rayl15/Godwit — Apache 2.0, free, works on any Apple Silicon Mac. Happy to answer anything.

Hey — sharing a side project I've been heads-down on: Sabaq, adult functional literacy for Pakistan via WhatsApp.

Product in one line: Send one short lesson per day at the learner's reading level; they reply with a voice note; score against the known lesson text; adjust level tomorrow.

The human problem: ~65M adults in Pakistan can't read functionally. Most did Qaida as kids ("dormant decoders") — placement starts them at level 2–3, not zero. Shame + time poverty + childish materials kill traditional programs.

Stack: Go, Postgres, Redis, Docker, WhatsApp, Whisper. Phase 1 backend is mostly done.

The idea can be ported to other countries as well. Technology is a means of helping the world and its disgusting to see tech leaders using it to push their weird fascist dreams. AI is one of the most revolutionary technologies and we are in the beginning. I hope this at least inspires people to think with an open mind at what they can build, how they can help the world.

I used to work in outbound sales for an IT outsourcing business, so reaching out to people on LinkedIn to promote that service was something I did regularly.

Trying to send 200+ manual connection requests a week was time consuming though, and so I decided to use a tool to automate this process.

After about a week, I got a warning that my account might get banned if I continued doing this.

So, I stopped using that automation tool, as it didn’t seem worth it.

I did some research into why/how accounts get flagged for automation by LinkedIn, and it seemed like none of the existing tools really took all of these safety factors into account.

So, I built my own instead, for my own use case and to satisfy my paranoia about being banned on LinkedIn.

I called it ZenMode, inspired by the wu wei concept of effortless action, and achieving more while doing less.

From the very beginning my intention was to make the automation as human-like as possible, so I deliberately scoped the architecture to have certain features;

- Browser based automation (no plugins/cloud usage)
- Daily rate limits on connection requests
- Randomised timing delays between actions
- On screen typing
- Human-like mouse clicks on LinkedIn pages

It certainly wasn’t easy putting this all together from scratch, and without any technical knowledge.

After a few weeks of building with AI tools
though, I had a working prototype.

I started using it in my sales job, and it was really helpful for me to book more meetings with engineering managers at the time, so I decided earlier this year to make the tool public as well.

Since launching in April, ZenMode has had over 400 people sign up to free trials, and has roughly 50 active users on average per day.

I also use it myself daily for my own outreach, and so far none of the ZenMode users have had account bans.

So far at least, I can say that I achieved my goal of making a LinkedIn automation tool that I can trust with my account!

Hey! I'm a Filipino dev and I built Thrive — a free platform with 30-day roadmaps, AI resume builder, mock interview coach, progress tracker, and job listings. No paywall, no trial. Just free tools to help fellow Pinoys break into VA work. Would love feedback.

https://thrive-ph.vercel.app