Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
21 alternatives to I built a Tamagotchi that teaches French numbers
Hey HN! Halfway through moving to Canada and whilst my conversational French gets me by, I'm absolutely rubbish when someone rattles off phone numbers at full speed (quatre-vingt-dix-neuf anyone?). So I built a virtual pet that thrives on correctly answered number challenges. 20-second drills throughout the day: get them right and Lexie grows, get them wrong and it gets a bit sad (but never dies, this isn't the 90s). Speak, type, or tap your answers. Would love any feedback/bugreports. Or just rant about how the Belgians sensibly say "nonante-neuf" whilst we're stuck with…
Below are 21 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
Clevr▲147My friend and i built this because we were trying to just learn things in a more fun and interactive way. We think there's a community we could build around this? And there's definitely a lot of work to do. Super curious to see what you guys think, and where we can make the learning experience better.
2025 · theclevr.com · its alternatives →
- 2

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 →
- 3IM
Recently moved to Egypt, and in dire need to get the numbers down. Great excuse to explore learning software some more. Possibly very niche, but maybe it is useful for someone else out there. Feedback is always welcome.
2023 · arabic-numbers.koljapluemer.com · its alternatives →
- 4

It has been a while since I have shared my app, that I made to be able to practice my Danish while chatting with my grilfriend - I often used GPT to write as much as I can in Danish, and I replaced the words I didn't know with {Englis words in curly braces}. While this was great, it was rather annoying to type the prompt always, so I figured a GPT wrapper would work well here. Last time when I launched, it went viral! I was super happy (and grateful!) for all the feedback and excitement — but it also meant my tokens disappeared fast, and many people ended up trying an app that no longer…
2025 · menerdu.com · its alternatives →
- 5FA
Made this app because I was tired of not knowing 50 words/book when I read in English. You can try it on the AppStore searching "Quicky app". For Android user please use the web mobile version at https://quicky.app/. The Desktop version has a shitty responsive design. IMPORTANT NOTE: If you are not French, you will want to tell you are to try the features of the app (sorry it's only in French though) I'd love to hear your feedback.
2019 · its alternatives →
- 6WS
This is the first project I haven't written a single line of code. The entire codebase was prompt generated in Cursor using mostly Claude Sonnet 4.5. It's also the first time I'm genuinely happy with the end result from AI coding. What do you think?
Dec 2025 · wordsnake.co · its alternatives →
- 7IM
Hey there HN, I took a page from Wordle's mechanisms and made this game for fun for some friends and I. Check out Wheredle and let me know what you think of it! ↙ ↗ ↘ https://wheredle.xyz
2022 · wheredle.xyz · its alternatives →
- 8

Hey everyone, I'm Fabio, a very long time lurker here. Today I want to celebrate and share with you, again, a game that I conceived more than 8 years ago. I shared it last week with all its history (if you're curious) [1], but it just stayed in the "shownew" and never reached the main "show" page, hopefully this time it'll do better (:crossed_fingers:)! What changed since last week? Today I've also published the mobile apps for both iOS and Android (last week it was just web), which are also my first mobile apps ever. So I believe it's still a worthwhile post and something to show :) I'd…
2024 · fiftygame.com · its alternatives →
- 9

Fully leaned into vibe coding this time around. Started on v0, at some point ejected into running locally (getting v0's exported folder to run locally was a challenge), then iterated with Cursor over the course of a few hours. Really neat how much can be accomplished just conversationally these days.
2025 · macrodata-refinement.arjit.me · its alternatives →
- 10

I've been experimenting with ways to increase AI adoption for non-technical people. Basically, all companies are pushing for AI because it's all over the news and they feel left behind but most people have no clue where to start. I think 90% of people (ie non coders) are sufficiently well served by using cowork instead of claude code or something similar. If we can get people from sales, customer support, marketing, etc to collaborate with skills and cowork to form a company brain, I think it's gold. So I think there's opportunity for the community to share skills that work well for 1000s of…
Jun 2026 · claudinho.xyz · its alternatives →
- 11

I recently prototyped a web game for a nonprofit to highlight the dangers of phone addiction, but unfortunately I ended up making a really addictive game instead. :-\ I'm sharing this here mainly to serve as an indicator of what can be achieved early-2026 by a senior dev working with Opus 4.7 over 2 days using genuinely collaborative prompting. (ie plan->feedback->iterate) Hope it provides some inspiration or entertainment - there's a level editor too - maybe Hacker Newsers could share their favourite creations here? PS: If there's enough demand I'm happy to Open Source this (or DM me) -…
May 2026 · downtime.partridge.works · its alternatives →
- 12

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 →
- 13
Declaude▲7I had to develop a course related to quantum chemistry and unfortunately, Claude just kept writing it in its own very annoying claude-speak. It actually cost our team a lot of time and tokens to wrestle it to just speak like a normal human. We used skills, as well as initial prompts and subagents to make sure that all of the tics were gone, but there was one too many times where it just wouldn't fix itself despite telling it in the prior prompt! I made speak-english based off of https://github.com/gvzdv/claudish-to-english/commits/main/ and it runs a qwen…
Aug 2026 · speak-english.tenken.co · its alternatives →
- 14

Hey HN, I’ve spent the last 2 years watching my cousin in Morocco struggle to learn Python. Not because he lacked the brains, but because every tutorial assumed fluency in English. Every new term meant 10 tabs of Google Translate. Turns out, he’s not alone. 75% of the world’s population doesn’t speak English, yet 95% of coding resources are English. So we built FIKR: coding courses taught natively in French, Dutch and German (with more languages coming). Yeah, you can find a random YouTube video explaining Python in French or Arabic. But stitching those into a learning path? It doesn't get…
2025 · fikr.net · its alternatives →
- 15SY
Hi HN, I built Lengpal, a simple language exchange platform where two people get instantly matched on video to practice their native and target languages. There’s a timer built in so both sides get equal time to speak. I created this because I wanted something beyond passive apps like Duolingo. Something to actually speak with real people without the hassle of scheduling or chat fatigue. Right now we are testing the concept with a waitlist. We’ve collected 77 emails so far from Reddit and IndieHackers. I would love your feedback before launching the MVP. Site:…
2025 · its alternatives →
- 16IM
Try it at: ssh krnl.duetbrowser.com No sign up, totally free - no download. Let me know what you think. Prior art exists (brow.sh) but I wasn't satisfied with their graphical take. I wanted the raw, old skool terminal days of the early internet - BBS, and old green phosphor library comptuers - but running the modern web, with all the bells and jingle jangle whistles (JavaScript, etc). No funding, no VC, just 100% raw terminal fun. Not sure how long the demo will last, but try it out.
Jul 2026 · its alternatives →
- 17

Hi HN! I built this tool, because Large Language Models are hallucinating their asses off and I wanted to test just how bad it is with a topic I know best - myself. I'm sure there are other egos out there who google themselves and essentially this is the new googling yourself. It's early beta, so lots of room for improvement of course.
2023 · haveibeenencoded.com · its alternatives →
- 18IM
You can create your own spirit animal based on any description you provide. It responds with an AI-generated summary of the page that you are on, using meta tags in the HTML of that page. I made this during a hack week at work (koodos.com). I wanted to build something fun that used AI (this specifically uses DALL-E and GPT-3) that kind of acted like a companion as you browse the web - similar to a Tamagotchi or Clippy (rip). Would love to hear what people think of it - let me know! :)
2022 · aispiritanimal.com · its alternatives →
- 19

hey hacker news! no matter what I have tried, nothing actually got rid of spam calls. built an AI agent that picks up your phone to filter out these spammers dynamically. next on the roadmap is automating scheduling
2025 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 20TA
I created a small typing game. Would love to get some feedback on it. What can I improve? Are there any features you're missing? Are you having fun playing it? I certainly did have fun :)
Jul 2026 · typocalypse.florianrudaj.com · its alternatives →
- 21

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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 →