Growth · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I built a message board where you pay to be the homepage
I kept thinking about what would happen if a message board only had one slot. One message, front and center, until someone pays to replace it. That's the entire product. You pay the current message's decayed value plus a penny to take the homepage. Message values drop over time using a gravity-based formula (same concept HN uses for ranking), so a $10 message might only cost a few bucks to replace a day later. Likes slow the decay, dislikes speed it up. The whole thing runs on three mini PCs in my house (k3s cluster, PostgreSQL, Redis Sentinel). Is it overengineered for a message board?…
This is a single-slot message board where users pay to feature their message on the homepage. The cost to replace the current message decreases over time using a decay formula similar to Hacker News ranking, so older… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
Motherboard▲388I started working on my ideas a few months ago. I've shipped 4 apps so far. I love my numbers, so every morning I'd go through the payments dashboard, analytics, bug reports, feature requests, and everything else for each app. I wished for a single place to view it all, so I built Motherboard. It runs locally in the browser and tracks any visible data point from any website with just a click. A single dashboard for everything. Life's good.
2025 · trymotherboard.com · its alternatives →
- 2
I built this last year but never posted it anywhere, but now with Reddit hiatus it seems like the right time to give it a shot. The main goal of zsync is to foster high quality content and discussion. That's it. If it can't accomplish that, then to me it is a failure. I watched Reddit go from having high quality discussion in 2008-9 to devolving into the PC meme dumpster it is today [1]. HN still has the highest discussion quality of any "forum" I know of, but (1) it can sometimes randomly be very hostile/toxic to new tech, the most glaring example being crypto. (2) HN is basically a…
2023 · zsync.xyz · its alternatives →
- 3HN
The use of the em dash (—) now raises suspicions that a text might have been AI-generated. Inspired by a suggestion from dang [1], I created a leaderboard of HN users according to how many of their posts before November 30, 2022—that is, before the release of ChatGPT—contained em dashes. Dang himself comes in number 2—by a very slim margin. Credit to Claude Code for showing me how to search the HN database through Google BigQuery and for writing the HTML for the leaderboard. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45053933
2025 · gally.net · its alternatives →
- 4
Hey HN We loaded a BigQuery dataset of all of Hacker News, every comment, story and user, into camelAI. You can ask questions like: • “When does dang tend to comment during the day?” • “Which domains have gained the most submissions since 2015, year-over-year?” • “How has average comment length changed each January since 2007?” • “Top five users who link to arXiv papers the most.” It's behind a log-in to prevent abuse but free to use for 10 messages. No payment info required. We use OpenAI o3 or Claude sonnet 3.7 for the agent which can be really expensive. Would love feedback especially…
2025 · app.camelai.com · its alternatives →
- 5IM
I noticed the who's hiring threads are very popular every month, so I decided to create a job board specifically for hacker news. You can tag jobs, search, view user's profiles and more. Tell me what you guys thing! Any feedback is appreciated.
2013 · hnjobs.org · its alternatives →
- 6
frontpage.sh▲165A perpetual auction for eight ad squares
Jun 2026 · frontpage.sh · its alternatives →
- 7
MinuteText▲135$1 message for 1 minute or possibly FOREVER | Make it count
2025 · minutetext.com · its alternatives →
- 8
Save money, without thinking about it.
2017 · messenger.com · its alternatives →
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
Connecting Hearts; One Scrap at a Time.
2023 · scrapitt.xyz · its alternatives →
- 13TA
Hey HN, we are long time members of this community, and we’d love to share a new product we’re launching today called Text-a-Pro. The product is entirely messaging based, and allows homeowners to book trusted pros at flat-rate prices to get their home improvement projects done. We’re also the first to provide an end-to-end transaction on Facebook Messenger (and also by texting 776-776). We’ve built a lot of tech behind the scenes for this – including generating dynamic images at run-time for things like personalized estimates and pro recommendations. Our pricing engine is built on a…
2015 · its alternatives →
- 14AN
Checking on some old material to provide some cross-referencing[1] I got this message: We've temporarily limited requests for old items. I've always taken it for granted that HN contained useful information that I'd be able to retrieve whenever I found the need, but this has brought me up short. Perhaps older discussions will eventually become unavailable. Will Google cache still have them? Will the Wayback machine still have them? How convenient will they be to find in the future. Probably this is a temporary glitch to prevent some overly enthusiastic crawler from bringing the site to a…
2012 · its alternatives →
- 15
- 16DL
We've just launched our new, three-headed API (part of which is an open WebSocket server) and we'd like to thank this community for the all the help, feedback and inspiration. Ducksboard launched as a Show HN and countless hours that should've been dedicated to developing the product went into browsing the site (until we discovered noprocrast, yay!) For the next 24 hours we're giving away free, full-featured plans to everyone with a HN account more than 10 days old, sign up at https://app.ducksboard.com/signup/hn/ These plans will always be free, but we can't promise we won't try to upsell…
2012 · app.ducksboard.com · its alternatives →
- 17
- 18
We think it's too damn expensive to send email these days. We built Anypost on modern (non-cloudy) infrastructure to ensure we can offer a top-shelf product without having to hit you with the cloud tax. We're not looking to be the next unicorn. We just want a sustainable product that helps solopreneurs and high-volume senders get their message out without having to worry about the bill. We're around - feel free to ask questions!
Jul 2026 · anypost.com · its alternatives →
- 19SP
Hi HN users, we've built a simple add-on which allows website owner to individually paywall content. Add-on allows website visitor to micropay anywhere between 5 to 15 cents to access a paywalled content. Check up an explanatory GIF at: https://zen.market Ad-generated revenue keeps falling. Some publishers have installed soft paywalls which push website visitors to start monthly subscriptions. However, the way paywalls are usually implemented is unfriendly and discourages visitors from paying. Most publishers report that only 0.1-0.3% of their site's visitors become paying…
2016 · its alternatives →
- 20SP
Hey, HN -- I just received the following email and I'm not sure what to do about it. Obviously I want to discourage requested-posting like this; is there some structured way that we can do that? One of the things I love about HN is how high the signal-to-noise ratio is relative to...pretty much the rest of the internet. I wouldn't ordinarily call someone out like this, but I want to innoculate HN against this sort of thing. ---- Hey doches, Not sure if it's conventional, but thought I'd ask anyway. Would you be open to posting about my product on Hacker News? I understand that similar to…
2022 · its alternatives →
- 21IM
42% of consumers waste more than $100 per month on unused subscriptions. That's $1,200 a year. That could do a lot for you don't you think? I saw a Twitter (X) post about how someone forgot to cancel a subscription and it cost them almost $50. It's happened to me before and I'm sure it's happened to you. I built Subout to fix that. And so you don't have to pay a subscription to track and cancel unused subscriptions, I have a one-time payment of $5 for lifetime access. The price increases up to $50 for new customers as I add the features below. => Finding you one-time payment deals => SMS or…
2024 · subout.tech · its alternatives →
- 22
Global chat where every message costs $1. Hacked for $21M.
Dec 2025 · its alternatives →
- 23
Intended for 10-year (plus hopefully) deployment lifetime on $10-30 of silicon. The kind of thing you screw to a wall, plug in, and walk away from for a decade. No telemetry, no phone-home updates, no external dependencies. Storage decisions get a sanity checked against NVS wear... a write-per-PUBLISH would shred the flash in months, so the retained store and in tables that stay in PSRAM. Its heavily written with AI and borrowed a lot of visuals from Tasmota. Not for production use yet (been currently running it for a month with great results!)
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24IB
Hey HN community, I built a tool that helps optimize your post for hitting the first page of Show HN. How it works: I used a Hugging Face dataset of all Hacker News posts from the past 3 years and trained a model that predicts how successful your post might be. There's still a lot of randomness on HN, so nothing is guaranteed, but the tool helps optimize your post for higher odds. A couple of interesting findings: - GitHub repo links work x3 better than regular domains - Open-source tools have a steady virality rate (13.9% - one of the highest) - "I built" outperforms "We built" - Using…
May 2026 · wannalaunch.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
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 →