Alternatives
Products that do what I made $9000 posting on Hacker News about my microstartup does
I spent last 6 months trying to build Simple Ops [1] to democratize website performance monitoring so anyone can use it. A year back, while I was trying to measure performance for Visa List as it became a huge content website with more than 100K pages. Also as data is changing very frequently, it's very hard to keep doing this manually. I searched on google and found that all the solutions are just uptime monitoring and nothing and none of them truly measure performance. So I decided to build one for myself. But it turns out website performance monitoring is not so simple after all and with…
- 1IM
TLDR: I made a public only web analytics without signup. Stores views and visitors for 10 days before deleting data. Exactly 25 days ago today I posted here, proud of my new web analytics. The response was mixed and my post even got flagged (understandable). It was my first real launch and I actually made a sale just a day later of 49$(!). 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
- 2AO
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
- 3IT
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
- 4IV
2022 · jmmv.dev
- 5IM
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
- 6AM
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
- 7HC
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
- 8
- 9IM
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
- 10IC
http://hackernews.zopte.com 0 lines of code written and the entire operation took 2 hours. Its not perfect. It doesn't have the threaded comment view and the ranking is naive. But, I thought its worth showing off.
2010
- 11HC
I built HackerBuddy.com with the idea of helping the Hacker News community get one-on-one help with fellow hackers that know their stuff. It matches up people that are good at a particular skill (Ruby on Rails, Python, beta-testing, general startup advice etc) with people that need that specialist help. All it does is swap your email address so that hackers can give fellow hackers one-on-one advice. I built the site as a way to learn Ruby on Rails, I'm still a bit green when it comes to coding so there's a very good chance that the server will fall over. Any feedback you guys have would be…
2011
- 12
- 131R
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
- 14CS
Hey HN, Artem and Maksym from NewsCatcher here. Some of you know us as we started six years ago as two freshly graduated economics students who decided to build the best news API product. We started NewsCatcher thinking the market for news APIs was so big that we could build a self-serve platform and get millions of $29 users. Obviously, it was a wrong assumption. We pivoted to serve enterprises and had success with it. But we are hackers at heart, and we want to serve hackers. We haven't used our Launch HN yet, so consider this our smoke test. We're looking for feedback and power users…
Apr 2026 · platform.newscatcherapi.com
- 15EC
We launched an early version of our uptime monitoring service Erlywarn to the public this week. http://erlywarn.com The project was scratching an itch that monitoring services would only alert you if your site went down and not if they started responding slowly or erratically. So we built Erlywarn to keep track of the response times and allow it to send notifications if your site responds unusually, as this is often an early warning sign that something is starting to go wrong. It's only been 2 weeks from conception to this, so feedback would be most welcome, especially: Would you consider…
2011
- 16UB
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
- 17IM
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
- 18LS
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
- 19IB
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
- 20IB
Hey HN, I started my career as a finance manager, transitioned into product management, and now I’m building my own products. Back in my finance days, while managing a £6M budget, I uncovered a £15k leak hiding in plain sight: FX fees. Today, I see solo founders making the exact same mistake. I realised most founders are quietly losing 2-5% of their revenue to what I call the Lazy Tax: - Stripe's ~2% auto-conversion fee on inbound revenue, - plus their local bank's ~3% spread when paying for global SaaS tools (AWS, Claude, Ads). So I built FixMyFX to show founders their exact leak and how to…
Apr 2026 · fixmyfx.com
- 21IB
I posted this a few weeks ago and the server died under the traffic. Fixed that by adding an in-mem caching layer with Redis/valkey and added CloudFront caching for static content. Also upgraded the server. Also fixed the Firefox bugs, trying again. It's a research tool for US stocks. Financials for ~10k companies pulled from SEC filings. You can chart any metric across companies, filter news by ticker, ask questions in plain English and get a chart back. There's also SQL console against the whole database, which is the part I like to use together with the AI chat (generates an SQL…
Jun 2026 · terminal.tesseractanalytics.ai
- 22AW
I've tracked the top 3000 subscribed (and some subreddits that I visit frequently) subreddit's active user over time, so you know when to post to get the most feedback! I come from a nodejs background, and this is the first time coding with Go, so the structures might not be standard. But feel free to give me any feedbacks!
2024 · redditdb.info
- 23IB
Hey HN, I've just begun my solopreneur journey. I've been a "serial starter" - often starting projects and never seeing them through, and I have finally finished my first project! Maybe this sentiment resonants with some of you, let me know in the comments below I built this tool as a simple no-risk method for turning more visitors into customers by A/B testing your sale promotions and automatically displaying the promotion with the highest conversion rate. Did you know that increasing your conversion rate by just half a percent can have a dramatic impact on your sales without needing…
2024 · smartsalebanner.com
- 24IB
I've been frustrated by so many blogging platforms. Last I used Ghost. I thought it was expensive and I hated that www I had to prefix on custom domain. So, I built https://lykhari.com just for myself and then opened for public. If you want something simple do try. It became profitable and hence self sustaining!
2025 · lykhari.com
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