Alternatives
Products that do what Agora – An Organized, Social, Decentralized Experience for the Web does
While I do find LLMs useful for some tasks, I have been concerned about how centralized the web will be in a world after this hype cycle. Google learned that the best way to print money is to be the one place that everyone goes to before they go somewhere else on the web. Now these companies want to ingest everything on the web so people don't have to leave their sites; being the few points where all content goes to and comes from (this makes for a terrible spider web). Web development has become more accessible and easier for everyone, but it feels like the number of sites people are going…
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Heya HN, I've been working on a reddit-like platform as my primary side project for the last few years. Doing a (very) soft launch today, mainly because I want to use it to encourage discussion of alternatives. How non.io works: 1. Free to browse, paid to interact. 2. Minimum subscription is $2 (though you can choose more). I take $1 to run the servers, everything left gets split evenly between everything you upvote that month. It's a simple model, but I hope it's a better one than the freemium model we've been relying on for the last few years. Fundamentally I feel like any ad-supported…
2023 · non.io
- 2TA
I built this tool because I wanted a way to just take a bunch of URLs or domains, and query their content in RAG applications. It takes away the pain of crawling, extracting content, chunking, vectorizing, and updating periodically. I'm curious to see if it can be useful to others. I meant to launch this six months ago but life got in the way...
2024 · embedding.io
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Hi HN! I built Agora as a side-project leading up to the holiday season. I wanted to find an easier way to find Christmas gifts, without needing to go store-by-store. My wife asked me for a a pair of red shoes for Christmas. I quickly typed it into Google and found a combination of ads from large retailers and links to a 1948 movie called 'Red Shoes'. I decided to build Agora to solve my own problem (and stay happily married). The product is a search engine that automatically crawls thousands of Shopify stores and makes them easily accessible with a search interface. There's a few additional…
2023 · searchagora.com
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Hi HN! Agora is an AI search engine for e-commerce products. We've indexed 21 million products sold on 62,000 different Shopify and WooCommerce stores and made them easy for customers to search and purchase. Think of a decentralized Amazon. I originally built Agora as a side project and launched it here on HN. The search took 5 - 10 seconds to return results and the app looked like it was designed in MS Paint (by yours truly). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38635695 Since the MVP launch, here are a few technical challenges that we've been working on: 1. Figured out how…
2025 · searchagora.com
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Hello HN, I am the founder of Agora Cosmica. This started about three years ago. On a walk I asked a chatbot to interpret the cave dream from Cormac McCarthy's book "The Road" as C.G. Jung. It gave me a perspective I had not thought of. But for my own dreams the policies of the big providers felt wrong for so personal conversations, as zero data retention is not available. So I started building. The project evolved to a German nonprofit and we published the code (AGPL-3.0) last month. The content is still copyright, but will be opened to CC-BY 4.0 in the next 6 to 12 months. Agora Cosmica is…
Jun 2026 · github.com
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Hi HN, this is a platform (Discuit, pronounced "diskette") I've been working on for about two years. I initially built it for a niche demographic (my native country). But now with Reddit going dark and people looking for a new place to migrate to, I'm doing a quick launch today. A few quick things: 1. I don't believe federated platforms will ever become mainstream. They have a whole host of problems, not the least of which is that they're too complicated for most people to use. This platform is not, therefore, federated. 2. I don't know what the best way of monetizing a thing like this is. I…
2023 · discuit.net
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2014 · agora.sh
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Hey all! I wanted to share this project I've been working on that can maybe help you or your developer friends out. I built a RAG system for our product a while back and didn't realize how easy they were to get started. So I put together my learnings into this online course. It's not quite ready but if you sign up and mention HackerNews, I can get you early access. I'm looking to get feedback on the following: (1) materials — is it engaging & did you learn something? (2) UI/UX of the platform — did you have any issues that prevented you from starting or finishing the tutorial? (3)…
2024 · takehomes.com
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Allows people to transact business without middlemen. Storefront: https://ipfs.filebase.io/ipfs/QmQ2bzmZWRy1Cwm3s8xPyuCwiR7xuc... I’d love your feedback, thoughts, comments, etc.
2022 · ivyca.com
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Hey all! Super excited to share this! If you're familiar with the r/InternetIsBeautiful sub-reddit, then you'll enjoy this. I built the website as a fun side project project over the weekend, and it re-imagines what r/internetisbeautiful would be if it was a newsletter. It's meant to be a completely free and community generated resource of the most interesting, useful and awesome websites from the depths of the internet. The list is tiny right now and I would love to hear your recommendations of websites that you think we should include. Hope you enjoy it, and would love to hear…
2023 · internetisbeautiful.co
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Hi HackerNews, Lately, I have seen an explosion in posts offering paid APIs/services to get unstructured data into LLMs (i.e. langchain extract, ragflow, unstructured, unstract, just to name a few) and I have been largely disappointed by them, either because they fail to implement multimodal support, fail to give good context for "really tricky" PDFs / Word docs / Powerpoints, or are just plain difficult to use. In light of all these posts I figured I'd share my solution that has been working smoothly for me and my clients. I put it up on GitHub for free so you can check it…
2024 · github.com
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Hi HN! I’m working on Agora, an AI search engine for e-commerce products. Excited to launch the Agora API that helps other developers embed shopping experiences into their app. We provide endpoints to search, purchase, and track products sold on 25,000 different Shopify and WooCommerce stores. Early customers are building social shopping apps, marketplaces, and AI shopping assistants. I’d love your feedback!
2025 · developer.searchagora.com
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Hello HN! I've been working on http://underthesite.com for the last month and now think it is ready for some full strength HN feedback. What do you guys think? It crawls up to 10 pages of a given site while you wait, looking for community-provided CSS / XPath selectors and regular expressions. Additionally, I'd like to appeal to you to submit matchers for technologies that you care about. Technologies are easy to add, so add your favorite jQuery plugins, analytics tools, client-side node.js wrappers, what have you. I'm going to be running a large crawl in the next few days and want to make…
2011
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Over three months ago, I posted my book on HN and got tremendous +ve reponse. I am happy to inform that I have published the book to leanpub as per the comments I got on HN itself! It is pay as you go model, and the minimum is $0 because I wanted to contribute back to the FOSS Community
2016
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Hey HN! First post btw I want to share a product we are developing right now. It's a thing to gather your data from LinkedIn, GitHub, StackOverflow (and a couple more things in the future) and we obviously use LLMs under the hood :D So the idea of using it is that you don't need to share 69 links and docs and can use one link (or download PDF) now. When you connect all the stuff you will see your profile with a radar chart, which represents your "domains". The next thing will be a section with ai-generated-summary-bio + section with things you're open to. Then a section with work experience…
2024 · hackerpulse.io
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Hi HN! My name is Yossi, and I'm a solo indie maker. SEO tools are super pricey and free tools often fall short, leaving most users to costly subscription-based tools. So, I built SEO Stuff, a keyword tool that uses a credit-based system for builders like me who use SEO more sporadically. Have a great day!
2024 · seo-stuff.com
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It's dead simple. There's no fancy interface. Basic features are gone. That's all on purpose. If you're like me, you're always writing down ideas on pieces of paper. My webapp is like that, but for the internet. Let me know if you find it useful.
2012 · ideab.in
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Hey HN! Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on DataBridge, an open-source solution for data ingestion and querying across text, PDFs, images, and videos. In our latest update, we’ve added a fully local deployment option: - No internet required – Runs entirely offline. - Customizable Models – Supports any LLM and embedding model via Ollama (with options for any other private providers) - Extensibility – You can plug in your own models or tools easily. This local-first approach ensures better privacy, security, and flexibility, especially for teams dealing with sensitive data. You can…
2025 · github.com
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Hi HN, I'm the creator of epress. After a lot of work, I'm excited (and a bit nervous) to finally share it with you. For years, I've been feeling like a digital tenant on the platforms I use every day. My content, my social graph, my online identity—they were all stored on someone else's servers, subject to their rules, algorithms, and business models. I could be de-platformed, my data could be sold, or an API I relied on could suddenly be put behind a paywall. I looked into existing decentralized alternatives. While many are great projects, I found they often shifted the trust from a big…
Sep 2025 · github.com
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Hi there, I've decided to jump on the AI train and put something together with low effort & high reward, to see if it can get any traction. What do you think? Is it a promising area? Do you guys have ideas for me? There is obviously going to be sea of LLM generated content out there and one project adding up to it might not necessarily be what world needs. In the same time there is something intriguing about the area. Well, please play with it and let me know what y'all think. Much appreciated.
2023 · canonica.ai
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