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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

IB

24 alternatives to I built a minimal website for Los Angeles

I built https://veryla.io - a minimal website for Los Angeles. After growing tired of the chaotic, fast paced, attention-economy focused state of the web, I decided to build something simple and quiet. A site with no "real" database (just a json file I update by hand), no email signups, no ads, no pop ups, no data collection (besides google analytics), and no comment section filled with highly polarized politics. A site updated only 1-2 times per week. It's just unique information in a simple and accessible format. The goal is for people to not check veryLA every day. I don't want…

VeryLA is a minimal website featuring curated information about Los Angeles, updated one to two times weekly. It operates without a traditional database, ads, pop-ups, email signups, or comment sections, using only a… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. I built a minimal website for Los Angeles launched in 2022; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    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 · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Hi HN! This is a personal project I finally got round to completing and shipping. It’s a simple feed of articles written by real people with interesting things to say. I wanted to explore some new technologies I haven't had a chance to try before, mostly rust and LLMs. As I browse HN each day I find myself most drawn to the content on personal blogs: people who have interesting things to say, from their own point-of-view, on a whole range of topics. Rather than being interested in particular topics, I’m more interested in reading from interesting people. This isn't a particularly new idea,…

    2024 · 100kb.danhill.is · its alternatives →

  3. 3AV

    Hey HN, I built justanotherday.lol today as a quick, fun project for people who aren't really into Valentine's Day. Just a lighthearted take on what some of us might be doing instead—scrolling Instagram, working late, or convincing ourselves that saving money is self-care. No signups, no fluff — just a simple site I put together in Next.js + Framer Motion in a bit of a hurry. Hope you find it fun. Let me know what you think!

    2025 · justanotherday.lol · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Hey everyone, I wanted to see if I could build something like DataFa.st myself, so I made MochiAnalytics. I'm pretty happy with how it's turning out. It’s got all the bells and whistles a small team or solo founder would need to track campaigns and to see which channel is driving revenue. It’s a cheaper analytics tool for side projects, indie hackers, and small apps. I honestly wish I could make it free, but it still needs servers, a database, and a backend to keep event ingestion running 24/7, so there are real costs behind it. I’m still working on it and will keep adding more features…

    Jul 2026 · mochianalytics.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    I was watching Deep Research do hours of research in minutes and thought why the hell am I still manually clicking through Ahrefs trying to guess what keywords to check? So I built an AI that does keyword research the same way. The problem with traditional keyword tools is they assume you already know what to look for. But I'd sit there thinking "okay I'm building a developer tool... do I search for 'API monitoring'? 'webhook debugging'? 'API testing'?" Then I'd spend an hour going down rabbit holes and miss the fact that "Postman alternative open source" or something like that gets 2k…

    2025 · jelloseo.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6AM

    TLDR: I built a "quick and dirty " private social network for my friends, posted on Reddit and HN, got some interest so now have built it properly along with my brother. site link: https://intimost.com/login/ demo creds: [email protected] Demo123! Full version: I needed a social network where I can just send updates and nothing else. So I built it, my friends liked and now I have built it "for the world". Everything is private by default. - Text-only updates - No likes. Only views to acknowledge a post - [in development] Comments are private between the poster and…

    Oct 2025 · its alternatives →

  7. 7CP

    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 →

  8. 8

    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 · its alternatives →

  9. 9MM

    Inspired by the following post by photon_off... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1683309 I made karmurl last night. It's a simple app where you submit a URL for feedback, then for every piece of feedback you give to someone else's, you get to read one piece of feedback for yours. http://karmurl.com

    2011 · its alternatives →

  10. 10IC

    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 · its alternatives →

  11. 11MN

    Hey guys! Im so happy to announce the launch of my new startup, Kiveve. Kiveve is a traffic exchange network created to help quality content bloggers and webmasters increase their traffic and therefore their revenue. We are at our very early stages and we are now open for website application to join our network I'd love to know what you think about it!

    2011 · kiveve.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Hi HN, I’ve been building a small social network where the feed is always chronological — newest posts come first, always. It’s not 100% algorithm-free (there’s still basic filtering to avoid spam or abuse), but the core idea is that every user has a real chance to be seen, even with zero followers. It’s lightweight, works well on mobile, and supports both posts and comments. Most of the content is currently in Portuguese, since it started with a Brazilian audience, but the interface is mostly language-neutral. I’d love any feedback on the concept, UX, performance, or anything else. Thanks!

    2025 · qqpost.netlify.app · its alternatives →

  13. 13SI

    I built constellational.com two days before November began, hoping it would help me write. It's just a blank canvas. The url updates itself as you type. You can send a different version to different people or bookmark the latest url for yourself.

    2013 · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    I've built this as a side project last month. I know there are a few similar sites out there, but I've found them cumbersome to navigate with ads that slow down the experience. So I decided to take a stab at it and build my own version, with a minimalist UI (+ I implemented a custom right-click menu to enable navigation even when the UI is hidden), ad-free, just for fun. There are over 130+ cities that you can explore right now, but I'm constantly adding new ones.

    2025 · citywalki.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15MP

    My first "real" web app! I appreciate any comments/suggestions.<p>Also I am available for hire. Contact me at www.sambolgert.com

    2012 · se.cret.ly · its alternatives →

  16. 16AB

    https://rxjourney.com.ng I realize SvelteKit is overkill, but I originally had bigger plans for the blog, before deciding to just keep it simple. Yeah, I had Medium open on a different tab while building. It's going to be a personal blog where I write about my experiences, if you're interested you can subscribe to the newsletter.

    2024 · its alternatives →

  17. 17IM

    I spent last 6 months trying to build Simple Ops [1] to democratize website performance monitoring so anyone can use it. A year back, while I was trying to measure performance for Visa List as it became a huge content website with more than 100K pages. Also as data is changing very frequently, it's very hard to keep doing this manually. I searched on google and found that all the solutions are just uptime monitoring and nothing and none of them truly measure performance. So I decided to build one for myself. But it turns out website performance monitoring is not so simple after all and with…

    2020 · its alternatives →

  18. 18AM

    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 →

  19. 19WW

    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 · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Hello everyone, I doubt this would be relevant to the kind of person who uses HN, but I thought I could share for some feedback. I built this site because there is a whole world of people who believe in new age spirituality and I am very much one of them. It is a site where you get the users gender their goals and their images and use AI and psychology to generate images of them in the process of achieving their goals. I am so deeply struggling with how to get this highly on Google. I don't even know if that is important anymore. What are your suggestions with distribution and getting in…

    2025 · visionboardsai.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21SS

    I recently launched my first web app, polls.io. It's a super simple polling app that doesn't require sign-up. In my opinion, this is the most simple/social polling app out there. There are certainly many similar apps out there, but I think this one stands out as it straight-forward and doesn't have any unnecessary "mess" getting in the way of the actual poll. From idea to inception this took about a week. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. We'll be listening to feedback in the coming days/weeks in order to make the proper changes. I'd love to hear your guys' thoughts and feedback!…

    2012 · polls.io · its alternatives →

  22. 22IB

    I love culture + travel, and one of my favorite pastimes is dropping into random streets on Google Street View. I just LOVE getting a tiny snippet into how people live, the architecture, and discovering hidden corners of places I'll probably never visit. I'm kinda weird like that. When AI came along, I started asking it to explain what I was looking at - and I learned a ton. I couldn't stop using this combo. So I built Streetwhip. It's kinda like reverse Geoguessr - instead of guessing where you are, you get educated about places as if you had a smart local guide with you. What used to be…

    2025 · streetwhip.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23IB

    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 →

  24. 24IB

    Think of HackerNews, but only for AI content. Did build this out of the wish for easier discoverability of new technologies in the AI/ML space. Obviously, so far only a tiny small community, but maybe a few of you find it nice to be around and want to post a link there every now and then :)

    2023 · news.aiapipro.com · its alternatives →

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