Alternatives
Products that do what IncentivizeThis – a bounty board in the era of the Dead Internet does
"The Internet is dead. The Internet remains dead. And we have killed it." Online advertising is broken, especially for small or local businesses. You either pay a fortune to giants like Google and Meta for questionable "engagement", or you try to work with niche influencers, which has a whole different set of challenges, not the least of which is that it's hard to scale. I've been working on IncentivizeThis to create a more direct and (hopefully) authentic alternative. The idea is to connect businesses with content creators in specific communities (both local and online) that are uniquely…
- 1NI
Heya HN, I've been working on a reddit-like platform as my primary side project for the last few years. Doing a (very) soft launch today, mainly because I want to use it to encourage discussion of alternatives. How non.io works: 1. Free to browse, paid to interact. 2. Minimum subscription is $2 (though you can choose more). I take $1 to run the servers, everything left gets split evenly between everything you upvote that month. It's a simple model, but I hope it's a better one than the freemium model we've been relying on for the last few years. Fundamentally I feel like any ad-supported…
2023 · non.io
- 2IM
2021 · github.com
- 3IB
I’m an indie maker, just like many of you. A few months back, I launched a product on one of the big platforms, and... nothing. It got buried under dozens of other launches within hours. All that work, all that excitement is gone in the blink of an eye. No one even saw it. It stung. I wasn’t mad, well, maybe a little but mostly, I just felt invisible. The truth is, indie makers like me don’t have big teams or budgets to fight for visibility. We rely on genuine support and connections. I couldn’t stop thinking about how many great ideas never get the attention they deserve because they’re…
2025
- 4FO
HN, I've been mostly lurking, semi-active on HN for over 4 years. For most of that time, I've been working on my startup, Learndot. I have always wanted to do a "Show HN" post, but I never thought it was ready. We've now finally launched web signup and using a freemium business model. I feel I can now post and offer something to the community (a new app to try out) and hopefully get good quality feedback. Here's the site: http://www.learndot.com Would appreciate any or all thoughts: From pricing/positioning, to design/performance. The app is written in Sproutcore and backed by an API written…
2013
- 5CI
Abstract. Token-funded bounties to incentivize competition-style participation in blockchain development projects would result in wider and better allocation of investment, and allow investors to diversify exposure across a field of potentially successful projects. Overall this would increase the rate of progress within development of the blockchain space. We propose a centralised platform for the administration of token-funded bounty driven development projects whereby experts allocate pools of invested capital according to the technical merits of development projects, and investors are…
2017
- 6SA
Hey HN, A buddy and I have been working on a side project in the online community space in our free time over the past few years. Our platform is a sort of Discord/Reddit/Patreon hybrid. Decided to do a soft launch today in light of all the recent Reddit news. Community features: 1. Customizable discussion boards. Community owners can setup threaded discussion boards for different topics related to their niche. Say a user creates a community for a niche like "Cars", under that community they could create different discussion boards for sub categories like "Car-mods", "Car-photos",…
2023 · sociables.com
- 7IB
Hi HN! My name is Yossi, and I'm a solo indie maker. SEO tools are super pricey and free tools often fall short, leaving most users to costly subscription-based tools. So, I built SEO Stuff, a keyword tool that uses a credit-based system for builders like me who use SEO more sporadically. Have a great day!
2024 · seo-stuff.com
- 8IM
It has: War Alliances Presidents Voting for community leaders No users and much more... I made this because I'm terminally online and I'm hyper interested in online communities, how they function, how they evolve and this is basically my bet in the direction that it's all going in. That bet is that online communities will evolve to require much stronger tools to enable mass collaboration, democratically elected leaders/moderators and the war thing is just for fun.
2022 · popresolve.com
- 9IM
I build a lot of small products myself and I realized how many indie founders want an exit that doesn’t involve platforms charging large commissions or requiring big revenue numbers. Sometimes a project makes $50/month, sometimes $500, sometimes $0 but has a great codebase, and that’s enough value for someone else. So I built buy-startups.com, a very simple, privacy-friendly marketplace for buying and selling small online startups. It’s not fancy. There’s no commission, no listing fee, no hidden funnel. Just a straightforward way for indie devs and bootstrappers to list a project and…
Dec 2025 · buy-startups.com
- 10AG
Almost a year ago, we got hundreds of feedback here from the HN community https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15732752 After months of hard work here we are with our new version. https://sievehq.com/ Sieve is a complete platform for running your freelance business without paying a percentage of your earnings. We’ve built every tool you need to run a freelancing business faster and more efficiently — Client on-boarding, Requirement collection, NDAs, Estimations, Agreements, Invoicing and Payments. This time, we did close to 300 signups with 12% adding their…
2018
- 11
Is Meta your partner - or just a black hole for your cash?
May 2026 · tally.so
- 12RA
I made a site to sell the husk of your stupid startup/project/whatever that you stopped working on for some reason. The idea is that you may have worked on some projects, wrote code, bought a domain, got customers even; and then life happened and you quietly abandoned your thing and now it's just collecting dust. Your useless project of the week might have some utility though for someone else, who knows? You can post anything for free that you're interested in dumping, and you can browse the projects you find cool and contact the sellers directly. I just list the stuff. The other…
Jul 2026 · repoinpeace.app
- 13MA
Hi there, So a buddy a couple of days ago came up with the idea for a new SaaS product regarding gpt and image generation. We did a quick MVP that barely works, it breaks almost 50% of the time but we still wanted to validate the idea before going all in. We have almost 1k followers on Twitter together. Did a quick post describing the idea with a stripe link in the comments with a 5$ value, no landing page, and no shipped product. In exchange, the buyers become beta users. Around 30 mins later we got our first sale next 30 mins another 5$ and so on. Do we consider the idea validated? The…
2023
- 14RA
Friends, HNers , countrymen: tl;dr Employee Unions are dead (non-existent in tech). A collective where employees own shares in the company they work for should give a voice to the employees with the management. I am happy to launch Rank And File, a platform for employee activism. Think Institutional Investors but instead of suits, it is employees who own a large number of shares in their own company and act as a collective. R&F aims to provide a private forum for employees to discuss company policies and act as a platform where employees can connect with legal experts and activists who will…
2025 · rankandfile.me
- 15UA
Hey folks. I have been working on Unsolved.xyz for a bit now. The idea was to help idea stage entrepreneurs make progress using a combination of a self serve game and Founder to Founder problem solving 1. Automated To-Dos that help them make progress from one level to the next 2. As you progress you get access to a network of high reputation founders 3. You gain reputation by helping other founders solve challenges and getting unstuck Reputation is live, but not the To-Dos. It looks a little like a mashup between product hunt and stack overflow. But it is for ideas I really was hoping you…
2020
- 16IB
So I've been obsessed with a weird question for the past 6 months, what happens to SEO when everyone starts asking ChatGPT for recommendations instead of Googling? The answer, apparently, is chaos. And maybe opportunity? I built FirstClick because I noticed something strange. My previous startup was getting zero traffic from AI assistants, but our competitor (objectively worse product, sorry not sorry) was getting mentioned by Claude and Perplexity constantly. It drove me crazy. So I reverse engineered why. Turns out there's a whole new game being played and most founders don't even know it…
Dec 2025 · firstclick.so
- 17AC
Hi HN, I’m one of the founders of Anyone.com, a new platform we’ve quietly been building to fix the chaos of real estate transactions. Call us the Uber of real estate really. Most platforms just list properties. We built the part no one built: the actual transaction workflow. On Anyone, buyers, sellers, and agents collaborate in one shared environment: from search → to agent matching → viewings → offers → deal → closing. We previously built Dan.com to modernize domain ownership transfers (acquired by GoDaddy), reducing transfer times from days to minutes. Real estate is even more broken and…
2025 · inman.com
- 18TS
Hey all, my co-founder (@adamjwalker) and I have been working on TogetherLetters for a few months. We all realize that people aren't (can't be?) authentic on social media. So we decided to launch an automatic regular newsletter for groups to share honest updates. TogetherLetters sends members of a group an email for an update and then combines all the updates from group members into a group newsletter. Importantly, updates are never published on the web so we've seen people be honest, vulnerable, and authentic in updates and thus get help and support from their groups. We have a few paying…
2021
- 19OO
I'm currently participating in Philadelphia Startup Weekend. I successfully pitched my idea for a not for profit and we're currently hacking away on making it a reality. We are one2many.org, we foster a culture that celebrates giving & helping and that inspires people to be generous & compassionate to one another. People donate used goods to us - items like old iPhones, iPods, routers, trumpets, bunk beds, etc. - and we then give these items away to people for free, in exchange for their volunteer service participation at local organizations (Habitat for Humanity, local soup…
2012
- 20SL
Hello Hackernews! I've been building startups for 3 years and finding my initial customers has always been a big struggle. I recently got into the "build in public" trend and love how it helps founders like us get noticed without big connections. I saw many of us sharing our ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) on IndieHackers, Twitter, and other places. But there wasn't a simple place to see how we're all doing compared to each other. So, I built StartupLeaderboard.com, a site where we can see each other's ARR and learn from it. It's straightforward: you share your ARR, see others, and we all get…
2023 · startupleaderboard.com
- 21IB
Do you want to monetize a private group/ channel/ community? Use Subjoin to create a personal membership page in minutes. It's easy to use and free to try out. No need to integrate Stripe if membership is free. - - - - I have never built something this fast, what a thrill! I saw there was no easy way to create a simple subscription page. Big platforms are confusing and expensive for simple needs. - - - - What are you building? Would love to connect with like-minded people on X: @tjmakingof
2024 · subjoin.me
- 22IW
TL;DR: https://infstream.com/?code=HN Hi HN – we’re Ben & Callum from Infstream. We’ve always been heavy users of YouTube, for entertainment, education and sharing. Towards the end of last year, we saw more and more horror stories of YouTubers losing their livelihood to the ad algorithm. We decided to build a content-first video platform, which aims to reduce issues by removing advertisers from the equation. Instead, we charge for the content you watch – bold, I know. Instead of paying in advertising and data, users on Infstream build their own streaming package, a channel at…
2020
- 23IM
Hey everyone! I wanted to share a tool I built to help you quickly find potential customers across social media for your product. It's a really simple concept: you simply paste in your landing page URL, and it shows you highly relevant posts across Reddit (Working to integrate few more) from people who likely need your product or service. For example, if you have a minimal to-do list app, it will show you posts like "Anyone know of a minimal to-do list app?" or "Really starting to dislike how complex Notion is." These posts are from the last 48 hours, updated in real-time, and uniquely…
2024
- 24
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