Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I built an end user announcement service that needs no deploys
Hey everyone! My name is Will. I’ve been leading engineering teams for over two decades. Also, first time HN user here! One of the common pains I’d encounter in nearly every product I managed was alerting end users to infrequent events like outages, global announcements, beta launches, planned maintenance, etc. We’d always need to deploy custom, one-off modals or other alerts and then have to remember to revert them later. It was always a time sink for a developer to put aside what they were working on to make this happen. This Is Not A Drill! is a simple-to-install JS SDK that makes it…
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 an end user announcement service that needs no deploys launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1

A few days ago, I responded to a comment by bloggergirl offering to read anyone's web copy and help. I shot off an email hoping for a paragraph or two of feedback on my startup's copy. Instead I received a professional, detailed deck of tons of invaluable well thought out feedback. It must have taken her an entire afternoon. Here's a link to it: http://www.slideshare.net/shereefb/recommendations-for-bettermeans To top it off, this isn't someone with a lot of free time on her hands, she's only days away from launching her own startup (page99test) This community blows my mind!
2010 · slideshare.net · its alternatives →
- 2IM
orignally shared this on startup school... i thought id' share it here. i'm using a `nocode communication tool` (a web-based interface... a single browser tab!) for all of these things: 1. landing page — the landing page is the product and i wanted for folks to feel "transported" right into the app without having to walk through a shitty b2b marketing-style content. this is akin to my experience back in the `BBS` days of the mid-90's where you were immediately into the app, community, and tool. no terms of service, no privacy policy. just pure, immediate value. 2. building community — we…
2021 · its alternatives →
- 3SL
[1/2] Thursday evening (Mar 26) we made a soft launch for https://uidesigndaily.com (a UI website that I built for my wife) The goal was to get some feedback, fix bugs and get about 30-40 subscribers in the mailing list, to see how the newsletter performs. The launch went better than expected, and the feedback was generally positive. Below are some numbers for those interested. I posted it to 4 channels, IH, HN, Reddit and Twitter. It was best received on HN with 203 points, it made it in the top 10, and it stayed on the front page for a good while. Reddit also surprised me, I…
2020 · its alternatives →
- 4

2 months ago I launched a service that sends email alerts when you get a new comment/reply on Hacker News. I've only been able to acquire 6 users since releasing it (°ー°〃) I tried promoting it here (duuh), Reddit, and LinkedIn. Optimized it for SEO (ranking 3rd on my target keywords). All with limited success. So I've decided to open-source it! Links to... - frontend: https://github.com/mihailthebuilder/hackernewsalerts-fronten... - backend: https://github.com/mihailthebuilder/hackernewsalerts-backend I'm still using it for myself, since there's…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5

I loved this recent "Show and Tell" thread about side projects posted on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42373343 It inspired me to build a mini directory that aggregates over 500 side projects posted to HN since 2017. You can filter by year, category, or revenue level. Thank you Cursor + Next.js for making this insanely fun to build. Hopefully you discover hidden gems or find inspiration in what the HN community is creating. Happy browsing!
2024 · hnsideprojects.com · its alternatives →
- 6

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 →
- 7WW
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 →
- 8HM
Hi, I have set up this service to help people, HN people :) start side projects. The idea is that whenever we start a new project we need to: - Register a domain - Setup email - Setup cloud flare - Setup google analytics - Create a deployment pipeline - Deploy somewhere - Configure DNS to support all this Whenever I do this I spend at least 3-4 hours doing this on a project that might not go live and where I would much rather be hacking on something rather than waiting for cloud flare to find the nameserver changes! So you pay a one time small fee plus the cost of the domain and we set all…
2017 · its alternatives →
- 9GP
As a front-end engineer that worked in multiple product teams, there are a lot of discussions between PM/Designers/Engineers made to ensure everyone's aligned before features/fixes are shipped. I'm building a tool to make this process easier, so teams can ship faster. Ditch the screenshots/screen recordings, and simplify communication in a single tool. Got some features in mind, but I wanted to get some thoughts from the HN community. Thanks for checking it out! Happy to answer any questions.
2022 · pageblox-app.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 10HH
So my fiance and I are addicted to Hacker News and we have learned a lot about startups on here. We had an idea for a startup that would have taken a lot of time and resources to build but thanks to Hacker News we have learned about people like Eric Ries, Steven Blank and the whole customer development strategy. We decided to build the MVP for our startup to see if there was a market for our original idea and also raise money for our wedding. We shaved off all of the crazy features and launched https://www.crowdbundle.com/ Hacker News taught us to build a MVP and make sure there was a market…
2011 · crowdbundle.com · its alternatives →
- 11NB
I built a email newsletter that sends you personalized and no-bs job picks from Hacker News' most recent "Who is hiring?" thread. Free forever, instant unsubscribe. To those interested in the architecture, I wrote a small post: https://hnrecap.news/architecture
2024 · hnrecap.news · its alternatives →
- 12UO
When I see what some HN members have done in a weekend on their projects, it makes it hard to confess that it has taken us 1 year to get to this stage. I kept trying to make things perfect, but finally I have seen the light - it will never be perfect and even in its current state, I see so much we need to improve, but it's something. Instead of delaying even more, I thought I would release it to the best critics out there - HN say hello to MyProperty.com Hope to hear your feedback, criticism, thoughts.
2011 · its alternatives →
- 13SP
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 →
- 14

Hey everyone on HN! We recently spent the past couple of weeks building out an end-to-end platform which can plug-in multiple models (both open/closed-source) to create voice driven conversational applications. We've tried to make the process simple & concise through documentation. Feel free to try it out and provide feedback. We will be launching a dashboard in the coming week for monitoring and analytics alongwith more open source models. Let us know what you all think. (if you want to contribute, we have tons of features planned - do let us know)
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15PP
We've got a "launch" planned via a few partners here in town, from which we expect a significant amount of domain-specific traffic (i.e. a buncha designers). We'd love to get HNs take on our landing page from a marketing perspective and, if you feel so inclined, the functionality we have in place within the app. I've disabled the private beta lock such that if you register an account you will have immediate access to the app. You can find the landing page at http://www.pixelstew.com If you have any questions about anything at all please don't hesitate to ask!
2011 · pixelstew.com · its alternatives →
- 16TS
Some interesting posts/comments. Meteor (April 2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3824908 Codecademy (August 2011) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2901156 Kimono Labs (Jan 2014) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7066479 Firebase (April 2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3832877 Dropbox (April 2007) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 Watsi (August 2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4424081 Heap Analytics (March 2013)…
2014 · its alternatives →
- 17

Howdy friends! Tell me if this is an atrociously terrible idea - I've been working on building a leetcode for clientside devs so we can practice React and Javascript interview questions in a more concise way, I call it clientside.dev I just finished a beta version of it yesterday and plan on releasing it with many more problems on Jan 1st but it's there if you wanna play with it open to any ideas / feedback however mean or nice it may be :)
2022 · vacation-call-335691.framer.app · its alternatives →
- 18
wsgrok▲7I built it for myself because ngrok didn't let me add one more domain unless I paid $12 more. I probably should've looked for alternatives before building my own, but my grudge got in the way . Once I started, I wanted to make it better than the other options. Silly, I know. No one probably cares. I plan to open source it sometime next year because I’ve got other projects to finish first. It's free until I deplete my cloud credits, then it will switch to a tier-based model with a free option.
Jan 2026 · wsgrok.com · its alternatives →
- 19RS
Hey HN - Today we launched a new globally available Serverless platform that thinks about simplicity and DX first and foremost. Let us know what you think - try it now for free. Traditional serverless functions are islands. Each function handles a request, does its work, and forgets everything. Need one function to talk to another? You’ll be making HTTP calls over the public internet, managing authentication between your own services, and dealing with unnecessary network latency for simple internal operations. This architectural limitation has held back serverless adoption for complex…
2025 · its alternatives →
- 20IH
Hello HN, I had some christmas free time over the last two weeks (Merry Christmas btw ;-)) and used that time to completely recreate the website of my app[1]. I used all the fancy new tools. I didn't know some of them when I started. What was my goal? * Pretty website * Blazing fast * Mobile first * SSR * Webp support * Generally all the best website practices (high lighthouse score) What did I use? * Tailwindcss (https://tailwindcss.com/) * Tailwind Components (https://tailwindui.com/) * React (https://reactjs.org/) * ViteJs…
2021 · its alternatives →
- 21

This server started a few weeks ago via some HN comments. It's very unofficial! There'll probably be some negative comments about discord. I know that many people dislike discord. (Side note: I hope more founders build discord alternatives) If you're active on discord and would like a HN channel, feel free to join. The server has the same guidelines as HN: > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. > Off-Topic:…
2023 · discord.com · its alternatives →
- 22FS
## tldr You can deploy javascript apps on Cyclic after logging in with GH. Quick starts: ## Description At my last job I saw new developers struggle to get experiments and POCs from their local to live in the cloud. As we continue to expand the software development profession, more developers will need this same help. So we built cyclic.sh. Our aim is to empower even the most junior developer with robust infrastructure and deployments that just work. We can build and deploy your code in less time than it took to read this paragraph. ## What works now - Zero-config build, deploy and hosting…
2022 · app.cyclic.sh · its alternatives →
- 23

Hey HN, After GPT-3 created waves in the tech industry, a lot of AI tools were emerging and with that, some AI website builders But the results seemed way too generic to us. It felt like the developers were rushing to catch the wave instead of building a proper tool We took our time, did months of RnD and finally came up with something better than what others in the market are doing. It’s got better design output. While it’s still in beta, I wanted to show HN what we did. Will appreciate the feedback when you guys try it out. Here is the link to signup for the beta:…
2024 · dorik.com · its alternatives →
- 24HI
I’ll put the tl;dr up front: I built my first web app with HN’s news.arc: http://hubski.com The long version (I can be verbose): Recently, I was in a startup that sputtered out. It was my seed idea, but my contribution was on the design/UI end. We applied to YC fall 2010, and were rejected (rightfully so, in retrospect). My previous coding experience entails a bit of Fortran from undergrad research, and building a couple of simple websites (Frontpage even. o-O). Anyway, I had tons of energy for the project, but lamented not being able to contribute to coding, where it was badly needed. After…
2011 · hubski.com · its alternatives →
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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 →