Growth · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I made $9000 posting on Hacker News about my microstartup
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…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. I made $9000 posting on Hacker News about my microstartup launched in 2020; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
Motherboard▲388I started working on my ideas a few months ago. I've shipped 4 apps so far. I love my numbers, so every morning I'd go through the payments dashboard, analytics, bug reports, feature requests, and everything else for each app. I wished for a single place to view it all, so I built Motherboard. It runs locally in the browser and tracks any visible data point from any website with just a click. A single dashboard for everything. Life's good.
2025 · trymotherboard.com · its alternatives →
- 2IM
TLDR: I made a public only web analytics without signup. Stores views and visitors for 10 days before deleting data. Exactly 25 days ago today I posted here, proud of my new web analytics. The response was mixed and my post even got flagged (understandable). It was my first real launch and I actually made a sale just a day later of 49$(!). Back then my project was pay once, keep forever. Since then I have sadly went over to the dark side (subscription based). Anyways, I never went back to look at the post after the first two hours, turns out I got a lot of answers. Most answers was something…
2024 · indielytics.link · its alternatives →
- 3
Never let users see your website down or with bad loading speeds. Receive alerts & insights in real-time.
2020 · simpleops.io · its alternatives →
- 4
Overlead▲146Here's the problem: I launched two products. I wrote blog posts. I posted on X, built in public. I tried running ads. And you know what actually got me customers? Replying to someone on Reddit who asked, "What's the best tool for this?" One reply. Three signups. I felt like an idiot for not doing it sooner. But here's the issue: I don't have time to refresh Reddit all day looking for these posts. I have products to build. Bugs to fix. Emails to answer. Life to live. So I built Overlead to do the searching for me. Overlead scans Reddit, Quora, and Hacker News (and many more to come) for…
Feb 2026 · overlead.co · its alternatives →
- 5
Hey HN. We’re Jay and Vadim from Highlight.io (https://highlight.io). We’re building an open source [1] monitoring platform for web applications. Today we’re excited to be sharing a performance tool we’ve been working on, which helps you inspect the latency of code execution from the client to the server. As engineers at past startups, we often had to debug slow queries, poor load times, inconsistent errors, etc... While tools like Jaegar [2] helped us inspect server-side performance, we had no way to tie user events to the traces we were inspecting. In other words, although we had…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6
One thing that had been bothering me about my websites—including this blog, but especially when launching https://www.endbasic.dev/ just a few months ago—was this: uBlock showing a warning that it blocked a tracker on the EndBASIC site. A tracking warning. uBlock complained that my prope
2022 · jmmv.dev · its alternatives →
- 7
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 →
- 8IT
After months of using Google Analytics I realized only about 50% of people accepted my cookie-popup. I had months of incorrect data for my website. I started looking for alternatives and eventually found Plausible, which is great (and open-source). Problem is, I didn't feel like paying 9$ a month to see the amount of visitors on a website i didn't even earn anything on, it was just a hobby project. Eventually I started making my own web analytics. Which actually isn't that hard. It took me about a month of working on my spare time every now and then. Being GDPR compliant basically means to…
2024 · its alternatives →
- 9IM
Hi Everyone, I've been working on FastMonitor.io solo for about a year now. FastMonitor monitors how fast your site is, and alerts you if it gets slower. Wanted to show it to you guys and get some feedback. Back Story: I built the basic tool kit for my previous startup - we were doing SEO and had very slow page speed across a wide variety of pages, so I ran lighthouse on an instance every day and put the results in the database and on a chart. This allowed us to chart our progress and celebrate when our pages got faster, or roll back / find the problem when things got slower. Feedback:…
2024 · fastmonitor.io · its alternatives →
- 10
FoundersWall▲35I used to be just a blogger. Now I build internet products, still without code, using AI, design, and taste. I was building in public on X for last 2 months. And honestly, I got tired of how it became performative and started to feel fake. I shipped 2 products. Both failed to get any real traction. I kept sneaking into popular builders’ profiles, hoping to learn how they do it. One thing I kept seeing everywhere, product launch directories. I thought here is the scope. So I started building one. Same UI like the rest. Nothing special. Suddenly one day when it was half built, I realized…
2025 · founderswall.com · its alternatives →
- 11AM
I built this after one too many 3 AM wake-ups due to API outages. Existing solutions felt overpriced and overcomplicated for my small-scale needs. Key features: Simple, GitHub-inspired dashboard Free tier: 5-minute checks, email alerts, 30-day retention Premium tier: 1-minute checks, SMS alerts, unlimited retention Significantly more affordable than enterprise solutions Tech stack: Next.js frontend, Node.js backend, MongoDB, Stripe for payments. This is my attempt to solve the "sleep vs. downtime" dilemma for fellow indie hackers. I'd appreciate any feedback or feature suggestions. What's…
2024 · martinup.app · its alternatives →
- 12RO
I was lucky enough to have my site trending on Friday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25872922). It’s an icon site that lists open source icons. I wanted to share some stats on the results after 3 days. Worth noting was that I submitted it on a Friday morning (at which point I went for a walk and a coffee; eek). - 24,997 page views. I (embarrassingly) didn’t have GA set up when I first submitted it, so this is probably missing a few hundred page views - 21 “feedback” emails (half of which were spam). I assume such a high percentage of these were spam because my Feedback…
2021 · its alternatives →
- 13HC
A year and a half after I published https://HackYourNews.com, I've rewritten it to be neater and added support for more news sources. HackYourNews.com v1 had a great response on HN [1] and consistently sees ~2k weekly unique visitors. There were many long-standing requests that I wanted to fulfill (thanks for your patience!): a proper dark mode, correct rendering on mobile devices, and more cogent summaries. This rewrite is the result. gpt-4o-mini reduces the cost of summarization to an absurd degree, so it's now sustainable to keep this free service going! Someday, I hope to use…
2025 · its alternatives →
- 14
Like many solo devs and indie hackers, I was paying $100+/mo for enterprise SEO tools (Ahrefs, Semrush) but only using about 5% of their features. I really just needed basic keyword research, SERP difficulty analysis, and simple rank tracking. I wanted to see what the actual floor was for raw SEO data if you stripped away the fluff and enterprise bloat. I spent the last few months wiring together different data sources to find out. I got my costs down to a few cents per report and because the data is so cheap to fetch on-demand, I packaged it into a minimalist tool which strictly…
May 2026 · idiotproofseo.com · its alternatives →
- 15
Top 50 Website performance rankings across the world in 2026. These websites include Linkedin, Google Japan, Twitter, Google Brazil, Duckduckgo, Xnxx, Google, Wikipedia, Craigslist, and Pornhub. See realtime performance and uptime status of each website along with user metrics and certificate expiry
2020 · simpleops.io · its alternatives →
- 16
I built a free SaaS uptime monitoring solution that helps you track whether your websites and services are running. Key features: Clean, modern UI for monitoring multiple endpoints Real-time status updates and response time tracking Instant notifications when services go down Easy setup and configuration Built with modern web technologies (Next.js, React) I created this because I wanted a simple and beautiful solution for monitoring my own services without relying on overpriced third-party providers. The focus is on simplicity and reliability. Would love feedback from the HN community on…
2025 · alivecheck.io · its alternatives →
- 17
exit1.dev▲11I'm trying to disrupt the insane pricing of uptime monitoring. I hope you'll help me out. I'm trying to create the absolute cheapest dev monitoring tool on the market, while still being competitive with all the others. This means $3/month plan, while still having monitoring for: Website, REST API, UDP/TCP, ICMP, Heartbeat/CRON, WS/WSS, DNS, Domain Intel/expiry and SSL. Everything with unlimited alerts through webhooks. I'm also taking an unlimited approach to the amount of checks you can have. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
2025 · exit1.dev · its alternatives →
- 18
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 →
- 19
AttackerView▲13Last week I wrote about building a scanner that writes its own exploits. A cron job runs Claude Code every night, it reads new CVEs, writes proof-of-concept checks, tests them against vulnerable and patched Docker instances, and opens PRs. I review and merge in the morning. That post was about how t
Feb 2026 · attackerview.com · its alternatives →
- 20
- 211R
I wanted to find a product idea to build. "Build things people want," right? So I thought, why not literally find people saying what they want? I wrote a script to collect thousands of Reddit posts where people are looking for a solution or complaining about a problem. Then I used GPT to filter out the noise and score each one based on how viable the idea seemed. Threw together a simple search interface so anyone can explore them. I was planning to build a more advanced paid version of this, but figured I'd share the raw version first to see if it's actually useful to anyone.
Nov 2025 · search.reddit-business-ideas.workers.dev · its alternatives →
- 22UB
A few months ago, i was looking for a simple uptime monitor service to monitor my websites, but i wanted some extra features that i couldn't find anywhere. These aren't wild features, but oddly enough couldn't find a service that was easy to setup, cheap, and that could do simple uptime mointoring for databases (sql & mongodb), docker containers, rabbitmq queues and os memory/cpu. It's only when i was almost done that i realized uptime monitoring services had become something of mania in the indiehacker/solopreneur world. Anyways, hoping it can provide value to some of you.…
2023 · uptimefunk.com · its alternatives →
- 23IM
To promote my startup, I made a free tool that compares your Google Analytics stats to the industry standard's stats that have been pulled from a whole bunch of sources. Let me know what you guys think! http://www.voodooalerts.com/is-my-site-broken
2014 · its alternatives →
- 24LS
We built this using investor tools. I really wanted to know which startups to work for. Are we on the right track? PS - there's a paywall but if you want to explore more, just DM me your email and I'll give you free access in our db!
2023 · usemassive.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 →