Alternatives
Products that do what I built a message board where you pay to be the homepage does
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?…
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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
- 2HN
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
- 3CW
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
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Hey HN – I built Dock after years of team chat frustrations as a founder. Free forever for teams up to 5. Unlimited search, unlimited history. No "upgrade to see messages older than 90 days" nonsense. Built for teams who work both async and sync/real-time when it matters. runs on SOC 2 infra, compliant, secure and in-transit and at-rest encryption, runs on Cloudflare. Early stage – would love feedback from anyone who's felt the same pain.
Jan 2026 · getdock.io
- 7HF
I wanted to see how difficult it would be to build a web app using a sub-$300 android smartphone. Decided to build a fun predictions website where you could bet virtual (not real) money on predictions made by others, and also make predictions of your own. Building it turned out to be considerably easier and more fun than I anticipated. Primary tools used were: # QuickEdit as the mobile code editor (Note: the free version of the QuickEdit app is riddled with ads, it shows an advert each time you close a tab, but it unfortunately had the best UI of the 3 or so Android code editors I tested.…
2022 · kudotap.com
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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
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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
- 13SP
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
- 14EC
I've been writing on Substack for the last year, and from the beginning I've been aware that I might want to migrate to a different platform at some point. I've been looking into the various alternatives to Substack for a while, and always found it difficult to compare costs across the different platforms. There's just too many variables that factor into the cost, and each platform has a slightly different pricing scheme. I've also been looking for the chance to try Streamlit, a Python library for making dashboards. Getting started with Streamlit was even easier than I imagined, so I ended…
2024 · nl-compare.streamlit.app
- 15SP
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
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10,000 permanent $1 text slots on one shared page.
Feb 2026 · dollarinternet.net
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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
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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
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I’ve always found it funny how simple feedback widgets end up as $20–$30/month products. The tech is dead simple, infra is cheap, and most of us here could rebuild one in a weekend. So as a “principle experiment” I built my own today as a side project and priced it at 1 dollar. Just because if something is cheap to run and easy to replicate, it should be priced accordingly, and it’s also fun marketing. 1$ feedback tool. Shipped today, got the first users/moneys today, writing this post today. Side Sunday project, then back to the main product tomorrow.
Dec 2025 · onedollarfeedback.com
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Hi, i was wondering what the HN community thinks of this email tone check application? Do you think this can be done better with open-source? Disclaimer: I am neither a founder or an employee at the company. Just someone who had a similar idea.
2011 · tonecheck.com
- 22TS
I created a SMS based chat application that connects two people to chat (aka SMS roulette). I've opened up some invites for HN. Signup with your hacker news handle with (hn) so that you know when you are chatting with another HN'er. http://textslide.com/hn Feedback is always welcome.
2010
- 23AS
built this as a joke. a friend bet me I couldn't make $1M off it by the end of the year. Currently at $5,010. Amazing it even worked
Jun 2026 · payfornoreason.com
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One tweet. One slot. Pay to take it, the price only goes up.
Jul 2026 · expensivetweet.com
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