Alternatives
Products that do what I made my first few dollars online by publishing a cheatsheet does
- 1
- 2WI
Everyone’s chasing AI hype. I built a Google Sheet and it quietly took off. In 2020, I made it to track my own finances for income, expenses, savings, yearly summaries etc. I shared it once on Reddit, forgot about it for a year… When I checked back, it had over 130k views and I was honestly stoked! No launch. No funding. No AI. Just a spreadsheet people actually stick with and find useful. I finally gave it a proper home: write-it-down.com Now, more than 2,300 people use it. It’s intentionally boring and that’s why it works. People don’t always need AI. They just need something that actually…
Oct 2025 · write-it-down.com
- 3
- 4MF
http://www.littlechits.com<br> This is my first web app; I built this on my own, over the past 4 months, using the Ruby on Rails Tutorial, a few other e-books, and a lot of help from the Stack Overflow community!<br>Feedback would be greatly appreciated, in particular: how can I make this more social?<br>Thanks,<br>Faisal
2012
- 5KT
I started to track my expenses on excel sheets earlier this year. It was interesting to see how much I spent casually on just another hangout with friends or on education. Excel sheets are painful, at least for me. So I built this with my friend: (it's just MVP) http://accountant.besperk.com Edit: Coming up next: > Mobile site and apps asap. > Graphs and reports > SSL > Custom Alerts (when you cross a certain limit, that you define, for certain tag) > Pre populated tags. Tech used: > Rails > on Heroku My co-founder is offline will ask him to add more details on…
2011
- 6
- 7DE
Hello HN! I am Aswin Mohan, full-stack mobile + web developer and I built PaperMoney(https://getpaper.money). PaperMoney is a double-entry accounting based personal finance app. It can help you keep track of your expenses, assets, liabilities and your net-worth. It is based on the command-line tools beancount and ledger. I had been using beancount to track my expenses for over two years. The plain-text accounting and reporting with fava was great, but I wanted a mobile based app to keep track on the go. Looked around existing solutions but everything fell short when compared to…
2024 · getpaper.money
- 8MI
My goal when I first started as an Indie Hacker was to earn $100/day. Everything that I did was to achieve that goal. I reached that goal after 6 months and I increased my goal to $200/day. I reached that goal a year back, now my current goal is $300/day. This might look small sometimes and easy to achieve but it's not and when you get small wins, you move to a bigger goal all the while maintaining the momentum and enthusiasm. On the flips side, if I had set my goal to $10K/month, it would seem very big and I might have given up very early (Actually I wouldn't because I…
2020
- 9CC
Cheatsheets could be a powerful tool for lots of people, especially a full-stack developer like me, but I hate online cheatsheets for a few reasons: 1. Most online cheatsheets are pdf files or webpages. I can't add my own stuff, nor only take the parts that are useful to me. 2. There is no easy way to search across all the cheatsheets I've collected. 3. Can't make part of a cheatsheet private, therefore, I have to delete sensitive stuff before sharing mine with others. I ended up using multiple txt files to store mine over the years which is cumbersome as well. So I built Cheaki.com. On…
2020
- 10
- 11LM
http://goalfinch.com I had the idea for Goalfinch while reading an article here on Hacker News about economic incentives and how effective they are. It got me thinking: What if there were an easy way to set up economic incentives for the goals I have in my own life? A few months later, after working on it off and on in my spare hours, it's ready for prime time. With Goalfinch, you define a goal and make a contribution of cash that acts as an incentive for you to complete the goal. Your Facebook friends confirm whether or not you've accomplished it. If you succeed before your deadline, you…
2011
- 12
- 13MF
I quit my job a month ago and have been heads down working on my startup. It's my first time working with Ruby or web development at all. I launched on the 7th - http://www.onefatpig.com Now I'm done with the easy part (code) and working on the substantially harder part (getting users). Any advice?
2011
- 14IS
Hey there HN! So for the last few weeks I decided I wanted to learn more about selling on Amazon and FBA - so I did what any normal hacker would do. I bought a website - https://www.chargeduck.com - Wrote some funny copy (Well I think its funny, but I suppose thats subjective) and then I went a step further. I called up suppliers, had samples made, designed packaging and even through some of that cheeky copy on the box. As I've been talking to people over the last week or two - especially other entrepreneurs its become apparent that this is a world a lot of people don't understand…
2018
- 15YP
Care to share a screenshot and the 'killer feature' of any of your personal, self-built productivity tools? eg. I made my own calendar and money-tracker last year - there are no other users, it makes no money, I have no plans to make it public, but it holds my life together :) http://i.imgur.com/h2keJDg.png GREAT BECAUSE... it tells me how much I'm going to get paid this month. Absolutely no ulterior motive here (ie. I'm not canvassing opinions for a productivity app startup or anything), just interested.
2013
- 16
- 17HN
Friends, Romans, HNers! Link: http://hackerbyte.com This is my first “weekend project” and it was really fun doing it. The sleepless weekends nights when all my friends were our partying or something we (me and two friends) were busy creating ‘hackerByte’ - a weekly newsletter to share inspiration with start-up people. Nothing fancy - just we’d like to share some really nice stuff we read and some news with you, every week. We know that newsletters like these already exist so why one more? Because we are not really satisfied with what they are doing and here is our version of the wheel. We…
2011
- 18IM
Hi HN, I am a solopreneur in the evenings and a software engineer during the day. In the past, I have created lots of calculators for my web projects and freelancing friends. These were pretty basic, but users always welcomed them. I also used currently available builders, but the problem was that they were either slow, broke on mobile devices, had nonsense page view limits, or were expensive. Some even ticked all those boxes. So I have decided to create my own, with a simple interface, and called it Creative Widgets (if it ever takes off, I plan to add more exciting stuff like charts, etc,…
2024 · creativewidgets.io
- 19AS
built this as a joke. a friend bet me I couldn't make $1M off it by the end of the year. Currently at $5,010. Amazing it even worked
Jun 2026 · payfornoreason.com
- 20WW
Hi everyone, I’ve been on Hacker News for a good number of years, but this is my first “Show HN”. I changed jobs recently. Tax is weird in Europe (and maybe other places as well?) in that different amounts go out at different times and repeat at various intervals. I needed to make sure I had enough cashflow to make all upcoming payments, I didn't want any surprises. So I created a little tool for my own purposes, then had fun putting a small HTML frontend on it as I thought it might be useful for someone else. I'm a backend developer in my day job, as you can probably tell from the design :)…
2023 · whenwillirunoutofmoney.com
- 21AS
I built this simple Chrome extension to always see how much I can pay myself based on my Stripe income. So now when I open my Stripe dashboard, I always see how much I can pay myself. How it works is pretty simple. You create a read-only Stripe API key (this key stays on your laptop), the widget gets the last 3 months of your revenue to calculate an average, and then you can specify your monthly expenses and adjust a tax and buffer %. Then you get a nice card that shows you how much you can pay yourself this month. It's fully open source under an MIT license. Please let me know if you have…
Jun 2026 · github.com
- 22MF
A little background: I'd been throwing this idea around in my head for a while, and finally had some free time between two quarters of school, and decided to make the site. I spent several days over the break laying out the backend for the site, and starting coding, and then the next few weekends finishing it up (and I've been making small changes since then). Where I got the idea: I originally got the idea when trying to look up coupons for some pizza places, and having a lot of trouble finding any that worked at my store since they were all regional, or weekly codes, so I just manually…
2012
- 23SI
Hey guys! About 6 months ago we launched the first version of Scribble on Hacker News & Product Hunt. Scribble (https://hiscribble.com) is a simple, no BS blog-writing subscription for startups, small businesses, and indie makers. Since launching our 1.0 we’ve learned a lot about how to run a service like this, and today we’re launching a huge revamp: We’ve about doubled the amount of writers on the team (all native English-speaking, all based in the USA) We’ve optimized our pricing & ops models to make us the most affordable premium writing service available (without outsourcing…
2019
- 24ST
I built a web app that lets you share your goals publicly, together with a pledged amount. If you achieve your goal, great! Else, you pay the pledged amount as a fine to me. Sounds goofy, but I hope it provides the extra reason for you to keep going when the going gets tough!
2023 · walkthetalk.app
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