Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Cryptick – free and open-source alternative to Minute Cryptic
Hi HN! I'm an amateur cryptic crossword solver and setter, who cut my teeth on Minute Cryptic. I liked that you could create custom clues on MC but was annoyed that it required creating an account to do. I wanted to create a free, open-source, and (as much as possible) anonymous version to make it easy to share clues online; not everything needs a user account to provide a good service to users. I'm primarily a backend developer so this was also a learning experience in creating a site with no backend; it's all vanilla client-side HTML / CSS / JS, built using Metalsmith.js, hosted…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1US
Author here. This site lets you put in a username and get the users with the most similar writing style to that user. It confirmed several users who I suspected were alts and after informally asking around has identified abandoned accounts of people I know from many years ago. I made this site mostly to show how easy this is and how it can erode online privacy. If some guy with a little bit of Python, and $8 to rent a decent dedicated server for a day can make this, imagine what a company with millions of dollars and a couple dozen PhD linguists could do. Here's Paul Graham:…
2022 · stylometry.net · its alternatives →
- 2AC
Hi HN!, We're a group of High Schooler's who have made a website for an international cryptic hunt we have been organizing. Everything has been built from the ground up and has been open sourced. We'd love feedback on our work. And if it interests you, feel free to register and try a level or two! URL: https://halocrypt.com/ Source: https://github.com/halocrypt We're particularly proud of our frontend, since we have used a framework we built ourselves!
2021 · its alternatives →
- 3
One cryptic clue a day. Wickedly satisfying.
Feb 2026 · wordplay.studio.gold · its alternatives →
- 4
- 5SL
So a while ago I was thinking it would be neat to build a site that had the most absolute utility. The idea I came up with was a site to store those little protips that are super useful, if you know them ahead of time. I hired a guy to work on it with me, and ClueDB was born: http://cluedb.com/ Please give it a whirl (it uses Twitter auth as login but doesn't tweet anything) and tell me what you think! (Various trivia: My first try at a project coded by someone else and "product managed" by me. Runs on Flask + MongoDB. Also, this is totally unrelated to my startup.)
2011 · cluedb.com · its alternatives →
- 6AM
First, I'm by no mean a programmer. Second, I am reading HN for years, just registered to make this public and see if it can be useful for someone. I have nothing to gain monetary. A while ago, I decided that no blogging system was simple enough and I looked for a small wiki to use as a CMS/blog. Found WikWiki on C2.com and I mixed it with some basic Markdown syntax, a minimal template and added password protection. The result is a single php file, no database and no dependencies. Code is a mess, not modulable, probably wrong in so many ways, but it can probably used by some as personal…
2022 · mindwi.se · its alternatives →
- 7HC
A year and a half after I published https://HackYourNews.com, I've rewritten it to be neater and added support for more news sources. HackYourNews.com v1 had a great response on HN [1] and consistently sees ~2k weekly unique visitors. There were many long-standing requests that I wanted to fulfill (thanks for your patience!): a proper dark mode, correct rendering on mobile devices, and more cogent summaries. This rewrite is the result. gpt-4o-mini reduces the cost of summarization to an absurd degree, so it's now sustainable to keep this free service going! Someday, I hope to use…
2025 · its alternatives →
- 8CP
Hi hackers, long time reader, first time "real" submitter. This is by no means a revolutionary idea, or even execution, but rather something I've always wanted to do, just to see if I could write a good implementation of it. So without further adieu: http://ca.pitali.st/ Yes, it's just an URL shortener. Please check out the API and if there anything you like about it, please share, so I can take this feedback with me to my future projects. If there's something you REALLY hate, that's feedback too. Don't be afraid to hurt my feelings; this was put together in less than 4 hours to see if I…
2011 · ca.pitali.st · its alternatives →
- 9
Build, solve & share cryptic clues
May 2026 · coffeecryptics.com · its alternatives →
- 10
Wordfall▲13I've been working on this for a while as an experiment and I'm now pretty happy with it. I've always written code, but I've always been a frankly incompetent frontend developer, and I've never really been able to talk myself into making a game; it was just too much trouble, even though I had ideas I wanted to try! Claude Code made it possible for the first time. I hope you like it. I'm still working on it!
2025 · playwordfall.com · its alternatives →
- 11MF
Hi! Long time reader, first time submitter. I've finallllyy got my first webapp online. It's been a long time coming, I started it over a year ago and just been an hour here, a couple of hours here, and a period of a couple of months of nothing. I first wrote it as a way to learn some python it sort of grew to fill a need I had. It's at a point now where I'd LOVE some feedback as I am going round in circules. Please, it's free, just hit the home page, plugin in a name/email and url you want to links checked on. If you use the name 'DeleteMe' I will remove the account after a week, so feel…
2012 · sitecrawl.net · its alternatives →
- 12
Hi HN! I'm a solo developer from Iran. Built this because Stack Overflow is blocked here. CodeAnswr combines instant AI answers with community Q&A, focusing on accessibility. Key features: - Free AI answers powered by Claude Sonnet 4 - Works everywhere (no geo-restrictions - Iran, China, etc.) - End-to-end encrypted private questions - Multilingual: English, Persian, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, French, German - Zero karma barriers (unlike Stack Overflow) - Privacy scanner detects API keys before posting Tech stack: - Frontend: SvelteKit + TailwindCSS - Backend: Cloudflare Workers + Hono.js -…
Jul 2026 · codeanswr.com · its alternatives →
- 13IB
Hi HN, For the last 18 months, I've been working solo on building a completely independent search engine from scratch. Today, I'm opening it up for beta testing and would love to get your feedback. The project powers two public sites from the same 2-billion-page index: Searcha.Page: A session-aware search engine that uses a persistent browser key (not a cookie) for better context. Seek.Ninja: A 100% stateless, privacy-first version with no identifiers at all. The entire stack is self-hosted on a single ~$4k bare-metal EPYC server in my laundry room (no cloud, no VC funding). The search…
2025 · its alternatives →
- 14
Generate your own excuse in a nifty comic style!
2017 · xkcd-excuse.com · its alternatives →
- 15E
Hello everyone, A couple of months ago I was introduced to Excalidraw and fell in love with it instantly. The only thing I didn't like was that I couldn't easily save my whiteboards and had to put everything in one whiteboard which started to lag my PC after a while. So I made ExcaliHub. It's exactly as it sounds: a hub for Excalidraw. It's free, open source, and I aim to keep it that way. Thanks in advance for any feedback!
2024 · excalihub.dev · its alternatives →
- 16HD
For ClojureCup this year, we have built an online dictionary for programmers where people share information (subjective or objective) in dictionary format. Our aim is to build an online dictionary where people can share information about the programming world. Since the judging period is in progress, we cannot make any modifications yet, but will start making it better by introducing much needed features like editing/deleting once the ban is lifted. Enjoy and vote for us at http://clojurecup.com
2015 · its alternatives →
- 17AS
Hello Hacker News! In the past few weeks I've been working on a side project that allows you to post anonymously a short message and a photo that is tied to your location. Other people can see posts around them in a radius of 1 kilometer. Posts are ephemeral and disappear after one day. That's all. It started as an exercise to try to write a geohash index and to try nodejs and Redis. I'm not sure if/how it could be useful. Maybe it could be used as a quick way of sharing something with someone next to you, or to leave a reminder for someone at a specific location. Or it could be abused…
2015 · its alternatives →
- 18
Hi HN! In the last couple of weeks I've been working on Cranki: Cranki = Crosswords + Anki. (It's a stupid name tbh, haha) I like doing crosswords in Spanish (to learn vocab) but none of the apps out there allowed me to use my own list of words that I come across. So I built one instead. It's entirely client-side. No server, no database, no accounts, etc. Your words and stats are stored in local storage. I built this for myself but let me know if you like it!
Apr 2026 · cranki.app · its alternatives →
- 19
Create custom crossword puzzles in seconds
Jun 2026 · freewww.com · its alternatives →
- 20AAnswerHN▲6
I had an itch to build a weekend project, and I've noticed that a lot of Ask HNs often go unanswered, so I built AnswerHN as a simple way to see recently asked, but as yet unanswered, questions on Hacker News.
2025 · answerhn.com · its alternatives →
- 21HA
Hello HN! Here's my November Startup Sprint project (coded in two days). http://hackerlunch.com It allows you to post your lunch plans and lets other hackers join you. I built this because I often see HN users are interested in meeting each other if they are in the same area. I am not a coder, so this version is very rough. If people use it, I will work with others to build a more polished version. I would love some feedback. What do you think? Is this something you will be using?
2010 · hackerlunch.com · its alternatives →
- 22CCCodr.cc▲8
I finished building Codr.cc last night. Codr is a code snippets sharing website much like pastie or snipt.org, but with a few innovations. First is that it autodetects the language and highlights it accordingly. The second, killer feature, is that it allows you to create snippets from files on your computer. You can select a file using the file browser, or you can drag and drop it into the site. The app will read its contents and create a snippet from it - ready to share. -- Now, I'm a college student in need of some quick cash. Recently I sold wrttn.in rather quickly thanks to HN, and I…
2011 · its alternatives →
- 23
hi hn, today I'm open sourcing a new SQL-like query language that's built for the web. it has dedicated syntax for request, parsers, selectors, and javascript snippets... it was built on nodejs with the incredible moo lexer and nearley parser. if you're a fan of regular expressions, do I have some code to show you! the website is mostly just a few examples and a playground where you can write & run (& share!) your own queries. there's also an introductory blog post where i try but ultimately fail to justify why this should be its own language and not a library/framework. enjoy!
2024 · getlang.dev · its alternatives →
- 24
I’d like to share CodeSwissKnife 1.1.0, a free all-in-one developer toolkit I built for macOS and Windows. It’s designed to help developers simplify everyday tasks like encoding, decoding, text formatting, and more—fully offline for privacy and speed. This toolkit was born out of the frustration of relying on scattered online utilities. With CodeSwissKnife, everything is in one place, ad-free, and secure. Key features: - Text converters (e.g., CamelCase, KebabCase) - Encoding & decoding (Base64, URLs, etc.) - JSON and XML formatting - UUID and hash generation - Regex testing and Markdown…
2025 · codeswissknife.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →