Solo dev here. I launched an iOS app about two weeks ago and it just passed 100 downloads per day without spending anything on ads. Sharing what worked because I think it’s reproducible.

1. Pick a market where people are already looking for alternatives.
I didn’t try to create demand. I looked for an app category with strong demand where the leader is expensive or frustrating (paywalls, ad grinding, missing features). When users are actively searching “alternative to X”, half the marketing is already done.

2. Get ChatGPT to recommend you.
This was the surprise. I noticed ChatGPT showing up as a referrer in App Store Connect. People ask it “what’s the best alternative to X?” and it answers with a short list. So I built pages on my website specifically around those alternative/comparison questions, honest and detailed. A few days later, my app was the first recommendation for my main query. ChatGPT now brings me 50+ downloads a day on its own.

3. Go multi-language from day one.
Most indie devs launch in English only and compete in the most crowded market. Every new language is a new funnel: new App Store search results, new ChatGPT answers in that language, less competition. I’m rolling out more localizations on the store listing and in the app itself, and launching on Android in several languages.

4. Watch the data closely and iterate fast.
I check analytics every day: where people drop in onboarding, when they hit the paywall, who converts. Small changes (shorter onboarding, paywall timing, pricing tiers) ship within days, not months. The first version is just a test.

That’s it. No growth hacks, no ad budget yet. Happy to answer questions about any of these steps.

Every designer I know has The Folder.

Mine was called inspo_FINAL_v3. 4,000 screenshots, zero names, and I could never find anything in it. Pinterest wasn't much better. I'd search "dashboard" and get someone's kitchen.

So one night I said to my wife, "give me one weekend, I'm going to fix this."

That was 200+ hours ago.

I can't really code. So I did the whole thing with Claude Code, which mostly meant me explaining what I wanted, Claude building it, and then me explaining again, slower, with more feelings.

At one point I asked it to make a single button blue. It rewrote half the site and proudly told me it had "made some improvements." Nothing worked. I learned what git was that night.

But then, around 2am one night, the "similar designs" feature finally worked. I clicked one design and it pulled up five I didn't even remember collecting. I just sat there clicking for an hour like a kid.

What it turned into:

* 14,000+ real app screens, full flows from signup to settings
* 5,000+ curated designs, branding, illustration, ads, launch and motion videos
* Search that actually gets design words like "empty state"
* Pinterest style "more like this," but only design stuff

It's called PixlPin and it's free. You're honestly some of the first people to see it, so tell me what's missing or what annoys you.

https://PixlPin.com

I've been building a site for board game cafes to help them digitize their catalog and showcase their games to customers. For customers it gives them easy search/filtering AND game tools to get them started (small stuff like rolling dice or picking who should go first... admittedly I have been having a lot of fun with making the tools and then going to board game cafes to try them out myself)

I've spent months building it, and recently started reaching out to cafes to see if they'd be interested in using it. (yes I talked to people and ai and research before making this to see if there would even be value and a lot of people seemed interested)

One of the responses I got was:

"If we wanted a vibe coded website, we could 'make' one ourselves, thanks."

I'm not even sure they looked at it 🥲 This is was imo a harsher response than called for but also not the first person to have a similar response.

I have feelings too random internet business owner.

"Why would I use this when I can make my own?".

1. Its free for you and your customers (unless you want more features).
2. You haven't made one yet or we would not be having this conversation.
3. It's free for you and your customers.......

I was born in the ancient times now referred to as the 90s

I have been coding since blah blah continued my career with web dev in 2018, and while I do use AI in my process..often.., there's a lot more going into this project than simply "vibe coding".

I feel like the response also came from my own marketing shortcomings. I poured time into a lot of features for board game users like myself that I really believe have value but I'm not sure how to express that in a quick message on insta.

Anyway, this whole thing has me thinking:

Has the rise of vibe coding made it harder to convince people that software has value?

It seems like the mindset now is shifting from "Wow, you built that?" (which was always fun to hear) to "Anyone can build that now." (and my non-verbal answer to that is "Ok but you didn't so here we are").

I'm curious whether other indie developers have run into this during outreach, and how you've handled it. Kinda related: Is AI assisted coding still just vibe coding? If claude writes my documentation and codex makes my images and google's stitch and other ai tools make my design.... Then its still "vibe coded"?

About the site: My goal is to make it easy for board game cafes to show off their catalog, and for users (especially new users) to be able to get into new board games without feeling completely overwhelmed.

Hey all, I’ve been working on this for the past few weeks and wanted to share it.

I got tired of checking multiple apps to see who was live, and honestly I missed just flipping through channels and stumbling onto something new. So I made StreamSurf, a TV-guide-style grid of what’s live right now on Twitch, YouTube and Kick.

What it does:

• Everything live in one grid, with categories (Gaming, Just Chatting, Music, Sports…) and filters by game and language
• Click a row and it plays right there in the platform’s own player, so you can flip through streams like channels
• A Trending tab for streams that just started or are picking up viewers fast, so it’s not just the same big names
• Streamers live on more than one platform show up as one row, with each platform’s viewer count
• Only want some of the platforms? Switch any of them off in Settings and the guide only shows the rest
• Favorite channels to get your own list, with what they’ve got scheduled later and a notification when they go live (while the site’s open in a tab)
• Multiview for watching up to 4 streams at once on desktop
• A retro mode based on the old ’90s TV Guide channel, slow auto-scroll and all

It’s free, with no account or sign-up, and it works on your phone too. Favorites are saved in your browser.

I’d really like honest feedback. What’s missing, what’s confusing, what would make you actually use it?

https://streamsurf.tv/?ref=sideproject

My little app Weatherling www.weatherling.app that I released a month ago is #3 in the Mac App Store today! (It even shows up on the front page!) It's #2 in Utilities category. I gotta give all the credit to subreddits like this and r/macapps because I have yet to spend a dime on advertising, and the community feedback has been amazing.

I'm about to start a paid tiktok push, though, so wish me luck. I need all the eyeballs to beat out Logic Pro for the #2 spot in the rankings.

Keep the feedback coming. I've already got a lot packed into the next v1.7 release.

I'm the developer. Lenslines is a teleprompter for Windows that puts your script in a small black notch at the top of the screen, right under the webcam. You read your notes and still look at the camera on calls and recordings.

What it does: It scrolls while you talk and waits when you stop. Point at it to pause, scroll back, or pull it down into a floating window. It's hidden from screen shares and recordings in apps that use Windows' standard capture.

What was harder than I expected: Making the voice scrolling feel natural. It follows whether you're speaking, not each word, so it waits for you instead of racing ahead. And getting through Microsoft Store review: my first submission got rejected because one of my search keywords was a brand name.

It went live on the Microsoft Store this week. $9.99 once, no subscription: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9PJJ4RZ3PB0P?cid=reddit-sideprojects

My main gripe i was spending too long creating mock ups and using multiple tools. This solved my problem and hopefully it can help others.
It’s completely free: https://github.com/burhanuddin20/studio941-releases

Whenever I tried to learn something new from YouTube, I'd end up 40 tabs deep with no idea what to watch next or whether I'd actually learned anything. So my friends and I built "Learn This Way".

How it works:

• Type any topic ("sourdough", "Excel pivot tables", "music theory") and how much time you have

• It builds a lesson plan and picks one YouTube video per lesson. These are real creators' videos in YouTube's embedded player. We don't host or re-upload anything

• After each video there's a 4-question quiz written for that video. Get 3 right to unlock the next lesson

Three things I'd love feedback on:

1. Did the videos match what each lesson was supposed to teach?

2. Were the quizzes fair, too easy, or annoying?

3. Where did you get confused or bored enough to leave?

https://www.learnthisway.com/

I'll be in the comments all day. Happy to answer anything about how it works.

saw the post about ChatGPT sending 50+ downloads a day and then the question arises "ok but how do I know if chatgpt even mentions me / what to fix"

that's literally what I built visible4ai.com for so figured I'd share (yes it's mine)

you drop in your url and it:

- asks chatgpt, perplexity, gemini and claude through their actual APIs whether they cite you
- gives you a score out of 100
- tells you what to fix first (blocked crawlers, missing llms.txt, weak content signals etc)

first check is free, takes like a minute. seriously just run your site through it, most people I've shown it to were blocked from at least one AI crawler and had no idea. cloudflare and some templates do it by default

couple things I learned building it if you'd rather check manually:

- type "best alternative to [competitor]" into all 4 and write down who shows up. that's your real competition now, not your app store competitors

- answers change when models update so recheck every couple weeks

drop your score in the comments if you try it, curious what ranges people get. and if anything breaks tell me.

http://enquantodurarafe.com.br/

Writing is a hobby of mine, and I thought it would be a great idea to build 3D scenes from my book on this website to bring the story to life and engage readers.

I'd love to get your first and final impressions of the site. Specifically:

• First impression: When the page first loads (before scrolling), what are your immediate thoughts and feelings?
• Final impression: After browsing the content (feel free to just skim it as you normally would), how did that impression change?

I wanted to build an automatic garden irrigation with a few Arduinos, and couldn't find a simulator that runs more than one board at a time – let alone simulates the water, weather and heat around it. So I started building my own.

What it does right now:
- you place Arduinos, sensors, pumps etc. in 3D, wire them up and write normal Arduino code
- several boards can talk to each other over serial
- water, weather and day/night are simulated, you can fast-forward days
- thermal view and a test bench that shows where your build would break

Tech: vanilla JS + three.js, no framework, no build step, small Python server for feedback. Everything runs in the browser.

It's an early prototype – I'm mainly trying to find out if anyone besides me would actually use this before I put months into it. First feedback from was really helpful (someone tried serial between boards, so I added it the next day).

https://test.betting-chess.com/?von=sideproject
(the domain is just a test server I had lying around, sorry 😅)

Would love honest feedback – what would make this useful for you?

I am a builder. It’s free, no ads.
You write a real quote and the story around it. A person (editor) reads it before it goes live.
Honest answers needed:
- Within 5 seconds, what did you think it was?
- Would you write a story, if not, what stopped you?
- Anything that felt off?
- Did it make you feel like it is a safe space for you?

Link : https://livedquotes.com/

I got tired of revenue screenshots, so I started tracking AI businesses whose revenue is pulled straight from their payment processor (Stripe, RevenueCat or Superwall, via TrustMRR) instead of a founder's tweet.

I've checked 45 so far. A few things surprised me:

- The biggest one, Chatbase ($864k a month at its last sync), stopped syncing on Jul 31. Then this weekend its TrustMRR page disappeared completely. So I took it out of the ranking. It's listed separately with its last verified number and date.
- The new #1, GojiberryAI ($424k a month), hasn't updated since Aug 14 either. Its payment key expired, so that number is frozen too. I still rank it on its last figure but flag it as stale.
- The middle business of the 42 I rank makes about $31.5k a month. Drop the 5 with stale data and it's about $22.5k. Way less glamorous than the timeline.
- An AI agency with 55 paying clients (AEO Engine) makes about $165k a month. That's roughly $3k a client.
- A calorie tracker app (Nutria) has about 15,000 paying users at about $3 each. Similar money to plenty of SaaS on the list, totally different business.

Full disclosure, this is my site. The table is free to browse and sort, no signup: https://imademoneywithai.com/leaderboard/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=launch1026

If you want it as a spreadsheet, that's free with an email, and you can reuse it with a link back.

If you know an AI business with public payment data that I'm missing, drop it below and I'll check it.

Hey everyone! 👋
I’m an 18-year-old developer from India, and I recently built DakNivesh 🇮🇳 — an app designed to make calculations for Indian Post Office savings schemes simpler and more accessible.

💡 Why I built it
Calculating returns on savings schemes can be confusing, especially when you’re comparing different options. I wanted to build a simple tool that helps people estimate their returns without having to do all the calculations manually.

🚀 What DakNivesh offers

• 🧮 Savings calculators for Indian Post Office schemes
• 📊 Easy-to-understand maturity and interest calculations
• 📱 A simple, user-friendly interface
• 🇮🇳 Designed with Indian savers in mind This project has been a great learning experience for me, from developing the app to publishing it on Google Play.

🔗 Try DakNivesh:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.postoffice.post_office_calculator

🌐 DakNivesh Website:
https://www.daknivesh.thebytelabs.site
I’m still working on improving the app, and I’d genuinely appreciate your feedback!

🌐 Developer Website:
https://www.thebytelabs.site

I’d love to know:

• What would you improve about the UI/UX?
• What features would make this app more useful?
• What advice would you give a young indie developer launching their projects?
  

Thanks for checking out my project! ❤️

Hi all, solo dev here.

I got tired of finding an app, downloading it, and only then seeing it's a subscription. So I built AppSift, a site that searches the App Store and shows what an app actually sells before you install it.

What it does:

• Filters the App Store doesn't have: no subscription, can buy outright, no in-app purchases, rating, number of ratings, size, last updated, language and more
• Shows every in-app purchase with its price on the app's page
• Price history for the apps I track, and a page of recent price drops for iPhone, iPad and Mac apps
• Compare apps side by side, and a watchlist saved in your browser
• 10 storefronts (US, UK, Germany, France, Japan…)

It's free and there's no account: https://appsift.app

There's also a Mac app with a watchlist that alerts you when an app's price or subscription drops, and it checks the apps on your Mac for updates.

Any feedback is welcome!

I've been building PadLoop on my own for a few months: 16 pads, a 16-track looper, a sampler and a "Split a song" tool, all on a phone.

The idea: your first beat in 5 minutes, even if you've never made music. You pick a Ready beat, play on top, press REC, and the loop keeps going while you stack layers. Everything lands in time and in key, so it's hard to play a wrong note.

Where it is now:

- Google Play: live

- App Store: approved a few days ago

- A bigger update (new Ready beats and sound kits) is already out on Android and will reach iPhone as soon as Apple approves it

Pricing, because people always ask: 7-day free trial with everything unlocked, then a free version or a single payment of €9.99. No subscription, no ads.

What I learned: the hardest part wasn't the audio, it was making the first minute feel good for a beginner. I'd love feedback on that: is the first minute clear?

Site: https://padloop.net/

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=es.positivevibration.padloop&referrer=utm_source%3Dreddit%26utm_medium%3Dpost%26utm_campaign%3DSideProject

iPhone: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6815178474

Hi all, I'm a student in Brussels and this is my side project: Tarmako (https://tarmako.com/en/?utm_source=reddit_sideproject).

What it does: every two hours it checks fares on about 1,900 routes from 68 European cities (Brussels, Paris, Amsterdam, Milan, Lisbon, Madrid...). Each route has a "usual price" built from all the fares we have logged on it since September. When a fare drops far below that, the people who follow that departure city get an email with the dates, the airports and a search link. It doesn't sell tickets.

Stack: Python, PostgreSQL, a small server, plain HTML pages in 7 languages, and the reels on our socials are generated automatically from the alerts.

What I'm struggling with: getting from free sign-ups to people who actually pay (there's a 7-day trial with every alert, then €4.99/month billed yearly, or a small free plan). If you've built a newsletter or alert-type product, I'd love to hear what made your first users pay.

Any feedback on the landing page or the emails is welcome too.

Hey everyone,

Streaming recommendations have gotten completely stale for me. Whenever I finish something that really lands, like a tight psychological thriller, an intense character study, or a story with a very specific, gritty tone, the "Because you watched X" row is almost always useless. It just pushes the same generic genre tags or whatever licensed title the platform wants to promote that month.

I was constantly spending 45 minutes doom-scrolling three different apps and digging through years-old Reddit threads just trying to find something that scratched the exact same itch.

So I built Tangent.

• Maps, not lists: Pick a title and it shows what surrounds it, linked by shared themes, story devices (unreliable narrators, time loops, slow-burn tension), and creative DNA.
• Every link tells you why it's there: Written out in plain words so there are no mystery black-box match percentages.
• Movies, series, and anime in one place: An anime that hits the same nerve as a live-action show you loved can actually turn up right next to it.
• Where to watch: Integrated streaming info across 20 countries (including the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and India).
• Free and zero friction: No paywall, no account needed to browse.

It's an early side project. The connections are strongest for story-driven, character-focused titles right now and naturally thinner for obscure ones, but I'm actively improving it.

I'm keeping direct links off the main post to avoid self-promo spam filters, so drop a comment below or send me a DM and I'll send the link right over!

Hey all, solo dev here. I built this gamified app for actually sticking with the stuff you want to get better at, and I’m looking for people to help me try to break it and find ways I can improve it. 

A while back I was struggling a lot, with many things. This is one of the things I wish I’d had back then, and I’m guessing some of you could use it too.

It’s based on the Solo Leveling system (yes, yet another one), but it uses AI to break any goal you have down into small “SideQuests” you can get done in a day or a week, so you reach that goal step by step. My goal is to make it as free and easy to access as possible, with no ads either. Right now it uses a copy/paste format: the app gives you a prompt to paste into an AI of your choice (I recommend Claude, I’ve had the best success with that one). If you have a Anthropic API key, you can plug it in and everything works right in the app.

If you want to try it out: https://testflight.apple.com/join/Jjgx6AwH

I’d love to hear about places you got stuck or confused, or anything that feels off.

Free, iPhone only, no account, no API key needed, and everything is stored on your phone.

I look after a handful of Linux VPSs for my own projects and clients, and I wanted one simple place to see how they’re doing and run a few routine commands without SSHing into each one. I started VPS Pilot in early 2025, abandoned it, and restarted it this year with a much clearer idea of what it should and shouldn’t do.

How it works: you run one hub (a single Go binary with SQLite and the dashboard built in) and install a small Rust agent on each server with one command. No external database, no cloud account.

What it does today:

• Live and historical CPU, memory, disk and network charts per server
• Alerts to Discord, Slack or email
• Run commands you’ve declared in a config file on the server, with live output and an audit log

The hub can only trigger commands by name from that config file, never send arbitrary commands, so even if the hub is compromised it can’t run anything you didn’t write on the server yourself.

Next up: log tailing, backups and cron jobs.

On AI: I design the architecture and write the specs, and AI coding agents (Claude Code) write the code. I review everything, and CI runs tests on every PR.

It’s open source (AGPL-3.0). I’d love feedback, especially on what you’d want from a tool like this.

GitHub: https://github.com/sanda0/vps_pilot
Website: https://vpspilot.dev

I'm an 18-year-old developer from Georgia. I built a tool (working name: Tripwire) that scans the files AI coding agents obey (.claude/settings.json, .mcp.json, CLAUDE.md, .cursorrules) for dangerous patterns before the agent trusts a repo: hooks that run commands, MCP servers that launch a shell, wildcard permissions, and instructions hidden in invisible Unicode. It runs as a VS Code extension, a CLI, and a GitHub Action that fails a pull request and reads its config from the base branch, so a PR can't suppress its own findings. It's read-only, offline, and rule-based (no AI decides what's dangerous). I scanned 110 public repos that use agent configs: 24 had at least one high-severity pattern (the sample is biased toward repos that already use these files, and I labeled 40 findings myself: 29 clear true positives, 8 low-value, 3 false positives). It can't see malicious code in a repo's own source and it only flags known patterns. I know Snyk's agent-scan, Cisco's scanner, and a few small open-source tools cover parts of this. Two honest questions: does anyone here actually need this, and if you were me, would you try to monetize it (paid audits, a team tier, something else) or just keep it open source? Brutal feedback welcome. link: https://tripcord.georgeotskheli.workers.dev

AnythingLLM and Open WebUI are great for local AI and document retrieval.

ODK is great for structured field data collection.

Cursiv aims to bridge that gap.

It’s an open-source, offline-first research tool combining local AI, document retrieval, tamper-evident field notebooks, verified calculations, and portable USB workspaces.

The goal?

Help researchers collect, preserve, and work with their data without relying on the cloud.

Still actively developing it and looking for real-world feedback!
GitHub: https://github.com/Cursiv-Local/Cursiv
Website: https://cursiv.us

It's called OpenClicky. It sits next to your cursor. Hold a key and ask out loud, and it looks at your screen, answers, and a little pointer flies to the button you need. It also takes dictation into any app.

The new part in the video is Teach Me: ask it to teach you something and it finds an empty bit of your screen, draws a labelled diagram in handwriting, then explains it. If your sound is off, it writes the answer instead.

Mac and Windows, Linux as an early preview. Works with your own OpenAI or Anthropic key, or a free account. MIT.

Site: https://openclicky.flowsxr.com

Happy to answer anything about how the drawing or the pointing works.

Hi! This summer I started a solo project: a free practice site for the Romanian national math exams (the baccalaureate and the 8th-grade exam). I built it because I couldn't find a good place to practice on the official past papers and check my answers right away.

The feedback so far has been really positive. In it's first week it had about 650 visitors and it now has 70 active accounts.

What I'm struggling with is marketing. I don't really understand how to run ads that actually work, or whether paying for ads even makes sense at this stage. Most of my users are high school students, so targeting is limited too.

Do you have any guides you'd recommend, or tips for getting better at marketing a product like this? Thanks!

Hey everyone,

I built Just Player Pro, a video player I made mainly for my own use, and wanted to share the new 5.0.0 update since it got a completely new look. It's built on top of Just Player by Marcel Dopita, which is where the name comes from.

Before anyone asks: yes, roughly 50% of it is vibe-coded, but not all of it. I'm a developer myself, so I reviewed and fixed a lot by hand. Again, it's built for my personal use, so feel free to try it and give feedback, or just ignore it :)

Some of what it does:

• Two engines, Media3 and mpv. If one can't play a file, it switches to the other, so pretty much everything plays.
• Works on phones and Android TV, with a proper remote experience.
• Recognises what you're watching and shows the cast and ratings from IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Trakt and others (needs a free MDBList key).
• Subtitle search across OpenSubtitles, SubDL, Wyzie and Stremio add-ons.
• No ads, no tracking, open source (GPL-3.0).

GitHub: https://github.com/Zain-Imam/just-player-pro