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Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to San Fran Sim

An isometric startup-tycoon game. Ship features, squash bugs, survive the burn rate — and keep the kombucha stocked. Play free in your browser.

San Fran Sim is a browser-based startup simulation game where players build a software company from a garage through to IPO. Players manage hiring, shipping features, fixing bugs, and controlling burn rate while… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.

  1. 1AF

    I've seen some interests in (simulation) video games here on HN so I thought I'd share a short version of our story. More than 6 years ago, me and my friend from university were playing around with an idea of making a game we always wanted to play. We worked on it on weekends but the progress was quite slow, especially due to so many dead ends and wasted effort. Eventually however, we solidified our direction and decided to take the risk to resign from our well paid SWE jobs and work on it full time. It took more than a year but yesterday we have finally released it on Steam:…

    2022 · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    A free city-building game in your browser. You are the mayor. You know what the city needs. Now get it past the zoning board, the neighbors, the appeals court and the next election.

    1d ago · permit.petercai.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3AA

    This is a weekend project that spiraled out of control. I was originally trying to get Claude to play a ROM of the SNES SimCity. I struggled with it and that led me to Micropolis (the open-sourced SimCity engine) and was able to get it to work by bolting on an API. The weekend hack turned into a headless city simulation platform where anyone can get an API key (no signup) and have their AI agent play mayor. The simulation runs the real Micropolis engine inside Cloudflare Durable Objects, one per city. Every city is public and browsable on the site. LLMs are awful at the spatial stuff, which…

    Feb 2026 · hallucinatingsplines.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Hi HN We built a tool to help founders understand how modern fundraising (with safes) works, and how much dilution you can expect when raising money. The project is open-source. The code is a mess right now, but it'll get better I promise. You can also help with that. We didn't build this to make money. We genuinely did it because we were looking for it, and couldn't find it. We're in fact in the process of fundraising for a company, and at first glance the process looks simple. Just an excel sheet will do! But then the more we dug into it and tried different simulators, the more we realized…

    2024 · fundingsimulator.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Hi HN community! We want to share AI-town, a deployable starter kit for building and customizing your own version of AI simulation - a virtual town where AI characters live, chat and socialize. Inspired by great work from the Stanford Generative Agent paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03442). A few features: - Includes a convex.dev backed server-side game engine that handles global state - Multiplayer ready. Deployment ready - 100% Typescript - Easily customizable. You can fork it, change character memories, add new sprites/tiles and you have a custom AI simulation…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    The Startup Sim That Doesn't Lie

    Jul 2026 · foundersim.in · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Can you make it in the gig economy?

    2017 · ig.ft.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    This is a little game implemented over a week of tinkering and targeting Emacs. The point is both to have fun with this kind of simulations, and also explore the "functional core / imperative shell" approach to architecture. I also developed a tile and tile effect definition DSL, which makes this even easier to extend. From this point of view it's a success: easy testing, easy extension, Gameplay-wise the simulation is too simplistic, and needs input from people interested in this kind of toys. The original Micropolis/SimSity is the last time I built a virtual city.

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    A isometric city builder in JavaScript. Contribute to victorqribeiro/isocity development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    A business simulation sandbox game

    2018 · store.steampowered.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Hey HN, Waleed here. We're building Sim (https://sim.ai/), an open-source visual editor to build agentic workflows. Repo here: https://github.com/simstudioai/sim/. Docs here: https://docs.sim.ai. You can run Sim locally using Docker, with no execution limits or other restrictions. We started building Sim almost a year ago after repeatedly troubleshooting why our agents failed in production. Code-first frameworks felt hard to debug because of implicit control flow, and workflow platforms added more overhead than they removed. We wanted…

    Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    A real-life startup themed escape room in SF!

    2018 · startupescape.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    An imaginary venture capital valuation game.

    2020 · olivecapital.vc · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Free browser-based business and economy simulation game. Trade stock, exchange currencies and run your own businesses.

    2017 · moneyga.me · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    I built this with Claude cause I always wanted to tinker with a simulation economoy and I love space themes. A space-economy sim where nothing is scripted. A few hundred autonomous ships each run their own planner. Some chase the best trade route, take a delivery contract, refuel, retrofit at a shipyard, or dock so the crew can rest before morale tanks. Markets price everything off supply with shortage-urgency multipliers, factions tax and subsidize, populations migrate when they're unhappy, and stations that go broke get abandoned and rot. It started as an Elixir/Phoenix prototype, but…

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    It all started as an experiment to see if I could build a game making heavy use of Deno and its SQLite driver. After sharing an early build in the „What are you working on?“ thread here, I got the encouragement I needed to polish it and make a version 1.0 for Steam. So here it is, Microlandia, a SimCity Classic-inspired game with parameters from real-life datasets, statistics and research. It also introduces aspects that are conveniently hidden in other games (like homelessness), and my plan is to continue updating, expanding and perfecting the models for an indefinite amount of time.

    Dec 2025 · microlandia.city · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    I am a solo developer, and I built Core MBA because I was frustrated with the "video course" default in business education. I wanted to build a "compiler for business logic"—a tool where I could read a concept in 5 minutes and immediately test it in a hostile environment to see if my strategy actually compiles or throws a runtime error. The project is a business simulator built on React 19 and TypeScript. The core technical innovation isn't just using AI; it's the architecture of a closed loop between a deterministic economic engine and a generative AI validation layer. The biggest technical…

    Jan 2026 · core-mba.pro · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Hi HN, I’m a chemical engineer and I manage logistics at a refinery down in Texas. Whenever I try to explain downstream operations to people outside the industry (including my kids), I usually get blank stares. I wanted to build something that visualizes the concepts and chemistry of a plant without completely dumbing down the science, so I put together this 5-minute browser game. Here's a simple runthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is-moBz6upU. I pushed to get through a full product pathway to show the V-804 replay. I am not a software developer by trade, so I relied…

    Mar 2026 · fuelingcuriosity.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Settlers of Catan for Startups

    2015 · indiegogo.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Catch all the money for your startup. Demo day game

    2017 · socialarcadeapp.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Open source stock market simulation game

    2022 · game.joinbloom.co · its alternatives →

  22. 22MP

    I have been working on this game somewhat sparsely for the past three years or so. However, it is still in a very early stage, and there is a lot of work to do. One of my friends encouraged me to post about it here, since he felt people might find interesting how I don’t use any libraries for it. The game can be played on a browser by virtue of WebAssembly. There are native ports using either MiniFB or SDL2, but you have to build those yourself. I decided to write the game in C because I feel like it is a simple language that a lot of people can understand well enough, and I didn’t think I…

    2023 · zamfofex.neocities.org · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Get rich quick as you simulate a businessman.

    2016 · play.google.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Make money by beating other players in mobile games

    2018 · 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 →