Alternatives
Products that do what Freebie finding site using interesting algorithm does
A little while ago I built an automated website that finds free stuff while filtering out scams. It works in an interesting way. Most freebie sites on the web contain a mix of real, useful free stuff and scammy affiliate and pyramid schemes. I realized that affiliate links are always unique (because they need to contain an affiliate code) while real freebies have URLs that co-occur across multiple sites at roughly the same time. I wrote a crawler in Perl and MySQL that looks for repeating, off-domain URLs that temporally cluster on multiple free stuff sites. I was surprised and pleased to…
- 1ME
I've been a bit obsessed with the idea of flipping through the internet a bit like you would a magazine, of undirected browsing as a discovery mechanism, and I think I'm approaching something that's beginning to feel pretty fun. The link at the top will return results out of a pool of approximately 10,000 domains, you can refresh to get new ones. You can also explore in a directed fashion by using the 'Similar Domains'-buttons. These are not random. A sampler, beyond the random sites offered with the head link https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/www.amiga-news.de…
2022 · search.marginalia.nu
- 2SR
2020 · stumblingon.com
- 3MW
This was more of a sandbox to play with Raphael and Flot than anything else but I think there are some interesting statistics in there. It'd be awesome to do this over time but I really don't have the spare time required.
2011 · burntbrunch.github.com
- 4RM
Hello HN! Being a software engineer and an SEO guy I wrote a heap of tools and scripts to make my life easier. Now I've decided to share some of them with the community, and made a small site where I will be publishing them. They are all completely free (yes, free forever) and you don't even need to sign up for the site. Just use the thing as you like, no limits. Currently you can access 4 instruments: - Backlink retriever - Thin/weak content analyzer - Traffic trend analysis - Visitor list retriever I am planning on releasing more free tools with time, and trying to stay original by…
2018
- 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
- 6HC
I built HackerBuddy.com with the idea of helping the Hacker News community get one-on-one help with fellow hackers that know their stuff. It matches up people that are good at a particular skill (Ruby on Rails, Python, beta-testing, general startup advice etc) with people that need that specialist help. All it does is swap your email address so that hackers can give fellow hackers one-on-one advice. I built the site as a way to learn Ruby on Rails, I'm still a bit green when it comes to coding so there's a very good chance that the server will fall over. Any feedback you guys have would be…
2011
- 7MS
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
- 8IB
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
- 9MF
A little background: I'd been throwing this idea around in my head for a while, and finally had some free time between two quarters of school, and decided to make the site. I spent several days over the break laying out the backend for the site, and starting coding, and then the next few weekends finishing it up (and I've been making small changes since then). Where I got the idea: I originally got the idea when trying to look up coupons for some pizza places, and having a lot of trouble finding any that worked at my store since they were all regional, or weekly codes, so I just manually…
2012
- 10SS
Hey there HNers, First of all, apologies for the shameless "self-promotion" - just felt like sharing :-) I've just launched a very simple project on the e-commerce front and although I'm currently involved in a few "bigger and bolder" projects, decided to give this a go. It's a DIY e-commerce tool that allows people to setup stores on Facebook, for free. We started this project as a weekend hackathon to help a friend bring her products online and decided to turn it into a product, so there's still definitely a lot to be done. Apart from showing off, this thread is here to start a discussion…
2011
- 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
- 12IM
I build a lot of small products myself and I realized how many indie founders want an exit that doesn’t involve platforms charging large commissions or requiring big revenue numbers. Sometimes a project makes $50/month, sometimes $500, sometimes $0 but has a great codebase, and that’s enough value for someone else. So I built buy-startups.com, a very simple, privacy-friendly marketplace for buying and selling small online startups. It’s not fancy. There’s no commission, no listing fee, no hidden funnel. Just a straightforward way for indie devs and bootstrappers to list a project and…
Dec 2025 · buy-startups.com
- 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
- 14AA
Hi all, This past month I have been working on Affililink, a way for blog and forum owners to monetise their site without the need to display adverts. With a small javascript snippet, Affililink will scan all outbound links and where possible, add your affiliate code, effectively automating your affiliate scheme. The idea came to me when I noticed a number of users post ebay links on a forum I manage. As ebay runs an affiliate scheme, I soon realised these links could help cover the running costs of the site. I'd love to hear your feedback on this as it's my first serious project launch.…
2011
- 15IM
Hey Hacker News, I'm the maker of Kopage, a free & self-hosted Website Builder. While working on new, cool features (AI, of course), it would be great to hear some HN feedback :) Thanks, Simon
2024 · kopage.com
- 16TT
I built a simple tool that suggests good domain names based on your idea, something I usually spend way too long on myself. It's free, no sign-up needed, 5 searches / day (a bit wonky, working on that part). Mainly built it for myself but would love some feedback and tips for improvement! :) Thanks!
2025 · helpmefindagooddomainnameformyidea.com
- 17IM
Hi there! I made a project for pure joy called Indieseas.net. I made it because I disliked how search engines completely ignore smaller websites, prioritizing ads and businesses. That said, I decided to make my very own search engine! But, how could I keep business websites outside the system? The solution were 88x31 buttons. These are images or gifs that were used back in the days to connect websites between eachother. This was useful because search engines weren't very bad in the times. Thankfully, people still use them a lot nowadays! So, I whipped up a program in Typescript using Bun…
2025 · indieseas.net
- 18IB
I haven't seen anything like this so I decided to build it in a weekend. How it works: You see a bunch of things pulled from Wikipedia displayed on cards. You ask yes or no questions to figure out which card is the secret article. The AI model has access to the image and wiki text and it's own knowledge to answer your question. Happy to have my credits burned for the day but I'll probably have to make this paid at some point so enjoy. I found it's not easy to get cheap+fast+good responses but the tech is getting there. Most of the prompts are running through Groq infra or hitting a cache…
Apr 2026 · sleuththetruth.com
- 19IM
Hi HN! I've created [UFreeTools](https://www.ufreetools.com/), a collection of developer utilities (60+ tools and growing) that's completely free, ad-free, and runs entirely in the browser. No data leaves your device - everything is processed locally. ## Background As a developer, I found myself constantly searching for simple utilities like JSON formatters, UUID generators, and color pickers. Most existing options were cluttered with ads, required sign-ups, or sent data to servers. I wanted clean, fast tools that respected privacy. So I built UFreeTools as a modern SPA using…
2025 · ufreetools.com
- 20RW
Been messing with cosine similarity and decided to try calculating nearest neighbors over the entire link graph for the marginalia search engine. Turns out that you can just bruteforce that in a day or two. And the results are pretty good. One drawback is that depending on if you're looking at an older website, a lot of the links are dead. The deduplication isn't great either.
2022 · explore2.marginalia.nu
- 21DG
I tend to use AI to brainstorm domain names, but I kept wasting time pasting each idea into Namecheap to see if they were available. So I built DotComBuddy - it generates ideas (using DeepSeek V3 - switched from GPT-4o after realizing quality was just as good) and checks availability in real time via Name.com’s API. Built with Next.js and Vercel’s AI SDK, the app gives you a table of available domains with their price. 10 free searches to try it out, then $9/year (what I’d pay to never do this manually again). Sharing this for anyone else tired of switching tabs to check domains. Happy…
2025 · dotcombuddy.com
- 22IB
I built this free tool to check how my website and its pages would look like on Google search results (SERP).
Nov 2025 · fastseofix.com
- 23SA
My weekend hack project was to put together a small web app for sharing links in the spirit of memepool.com. It uses a bookmarklet to let people clip interesting articles to share while reading and uses a subset of markdown to add links and blockquotes to posts. It also uses oEmbed to pull in content from popular sites (youtube, slideshare, vimeo, etc) and API integrations to show tweets. It was fun to build - I'd love feedback. Thanks! http://findsignal.com
2011
- 24IB
Hi, folks. How would you define the "Golden Age" of the internet? In my opinion, it’s when people ran personal websites, blogs, or portfolios to share thoughts and stories. These websites could be unstable, slow, or "ugly", but they were the true digital gardens of individuals, making the internet colorful. It's such a pity that most of the content from independent websites is hidden in the corner. Therefore, I built RawWeb (https://rawweb.org) to index all these hidden gems. It collects content through feeds (RSS, Atom) and sorts the results by relevance. It also features an OPML…
2024 · rawweb.org
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →