Commerce · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to soft-launching one of my pet projects
So a while ago I was thinking it would be neat to build a site that had the most absolute utility. The idea I came up with was a site to store those little protips that are super useful, if you know them ahead of time. I hired a guy to work on it with me, and ClueDB was born: http://cluedb.com/ Please give it a whirl (it uses Twitter auth as login but doesn't tweet anything) and tell me what you think! (Various trivia: My first try at a project coded by someone else and "product managed" by me. Runs on Flask + MongoDB. Also, this is totally unrelated to my startup.)
ClueDB is a web platform for storing and sharing practical tips and tricks that are useful to know in advance. Users log in via Twitter authentication and can browse or contribute to a database of helpful protips… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. soft-launching one of my pet projects launched in 2011; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
One year ago I open-sourced my very first 'real' project and shared it here. I was a college student in my senior year and desperately looking for a job. At the time of sharing it i couldn't even afford a domain and naively let someone buy the one i had my eyes on lol. It's been a hell of a year with this blowing up, me moving to another country, and switching 2 jobs. In a year we somehow managed to hit 26k stars, grow a 1000+ person discord community, and support 37 languages. I couldn't be more grateful for the community that helped this grow, but now i don't know what direction to take…
2025 · drawdb.app · its alternatives →
- 2
Hey everyone! I am an enthusiast trader and a year ago I had this idea to create a free-to-use website that would feature all the most essential tools that traders would use on a daily basis. So I learned to code and build it—I did everything including design, texts, code, and SEO—which took me 12 months to launch and a year and a half to make it look like it currently does. I was into marketing and design before, but I didn't know barely anything about coding. The website is built using Next.js, Tailwind CSS, and Typescript with Framer Motion animations and lots of APIs. I’m actively…
2023 · tradingdigits.io · its alternatives →
- 3MF
Hey HN. I've just launched my very first webappp and would love your feedback. http://www.7bks.com It's a book list sharing website - kind of like playlists for bookworms. The site is built on pyton/appengine - and I learned to code in under 4 weeks to build the site. There's more details on the background of the site here: http://www.7bks.com/blog/179001 I've also published the full Python code for the site here: https://gist.github.com/670034 Feedback is really important to me and I want to work hard to make the site better so any and all suggestions are greatly appreciated. Contact…
2010 · 7bks.com · its alternatives →
- 4MO
I made this site over the past year in my own time, http://bizspeaking.com/ , the Twitter for deals. I'm going full-time on this project and sincerely seek all suggestions on building a viable business -- partner, funding, mentor, referrer, designer, developer, legal, anything. Technically, this site is mainly made with the Pyramid (Python) web framework, PostgreSQL as relational db, MongoDB as document store, Redis as cache/queue, and Solr for search. Do follow our AngelList page http://angel.co/bizspeaking , and official blog http://bizspeaking.posterous.com/ Thank you!
2011 · bizspeaking.com · its alternatives →
- 5
Hey folks, There has been some talk about search engines here so I thought maybe I'd share a new project I'm working on. Built it partly to help me sell my own projects. Still a lot of work to be done but would be happy to get feedback. Very early phase so don't trust your life with it. Cheers --- Edit: if anyone needs a free/no CC account just DM me on https://www.linkedin.com/in/crufter/
2024 · singulatron.com · its alternatives →
- 6
Two years ago, I started building this site that allows people to document their learning and progress in real time. The idea is: as you learn new things, you document your progress piece by piece, creating a collection of failures, breakthroughs, and knowledge. Along the way, your friends can cheer you on, and the community can give you tips and feedback. Over time, we'll create a public collection on how different problems were solved. With each progress, the site prompts you to reflect on questions like, "If you could go back in time, what do you wish you had known?" This was my first web…
2024 · opus.cafe · its alternatives →
- 7
Discover interesting blogs from around the Internet
2022 · blogdb.org · its alternatives →
- 8IM
Hello everyone. I'm a relatively new developer and I started my first project to go full production recently. It is a directory of payment processors and payment service providers. It's free to use and gives detailed info on their pricing, business model, supported business types, available countries, prohibited businesses and high risk business support. So far only 40 have been added with more to come. And I allow processors to contact me so that they're details can be added to the database. I'll eventually automate this and add verification the months to come. I hope you'll find it useful.…
2025 · sourcefees.com · its alternatives →
- 9MF
Here is the link: http://www.wikihowtodo.com I know a lot of geeks share the same dream -- build the next kick-ass todo-list/project management system. So do I. However, as I was quite positive that my web development skill is worse than 99% of developers' in this community, I decided to build something simple, useless but unique. So I built this. Basically it's a Wikihow scraper, nothing more. It gives you a place to store interesting Wikihow articles and yes, they are converted into todo lists. I know this site is not that good, but I still need your guys' feedback. For example, as I am a…
2010 · wikihowtodo.com · its alternatives →
- 10
I built a tool (https://1mil.app/hn) to help me test my intuition about various weird business ideas that were on my mind. Initially, I wanted to create a database with 1 million business ideas (hence the name - "1 million opportunities"). But turned out to be a dumb idea already. So instead I built this tool that returns only 10 ideas. It's all based on your input, market + your background. The first release scored on demand only and it gave false confidence. So I rebuilt the the scoring around "winnability": can a solo founder with a specific background "win" against what…
Aug 2026 · 1mil.app · its alternatives →
- 11
Monghoul▲8Last year I decided to start a fun side project - a love child of VS Code and NoSQLBooster. I wanted a GUI that looks modern and snappy, minimal, not like 2003 MS Excel with dozens of buttons and dropdowns everywhere. I also wanted it to have a smart autocomplete that actually knows a schema, not just keys of the current collection, but their types and enum values. I wanted to type find({status: "}) and see "pending", "active", "cancelled" in the autocomplete suggestions. As a tech stack, I chose Tauri for the shell, Bun for the sidecar running the MongoDB driver and a tRPC server, and…
May 2026 · monghoul.com · its alternatives →
- 12IM
I'm writing a book which teaches Python/Django web app development for non-programmers, and fundraising on Kickstarter (passed minimum funding, 2 days left): http://hellowebapp.com https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1868398473/hello-web-app-intro-to-building-web-apps-with-djan It's basically the process I used to teach myself programming as a web designer a few years back, which I then launched a small web app (infant-version of WeddingInviteLove.com), which has grown into my bootstrapped startup which supports me full-time (WeddingLovely.com). Most…
2014 · its alternatives →
- 13ND
Hi HN, I'm happy to finally ship my first development project: http://favsi.com. Favsi is a site to share lists of random stuff. Things you probably wouldn't post anywhere else. Like: • Favorite cheesy ninja movies • Favorite original NES games • Favorite songs to sing in the car There's been lots of list-type apps cropping up lately: Bagcheck, ListGeeks, Listry, and probably others. Mini-trend? Some Background: By trade, I've been mostly a business guy [shudders] at startups, but have been working to change that for awhile now. I started learning Ruby a few times last year but had trouble…
2011 · favsi.com. · its alternatives →
- 14MF
Hi! Long time reader, first time submitter. I've finallllyy got my first webapp online. It's been a long time coming, I started it over a year ago and just been an hour here, a couple of hours here, and a period of a couple of months of nothing. I first wrote it as a way to learn some python it sort of grew to fill a need I had. It's at a point now where I'd LOVE some feedback as I am going round in circules. Please, it's free, just hit the home page, plugin in a name/email and url you want to links checked on. If you use the name 'DeleteMe' I will remove the account after a week, so feel…
2012 · sitecrawl.net · its alternatives →
- 15AE
http://yeay.me This is a project that we've been developing for the last year and a half with a friend of mine. We didn't promoted it properly yet, so it's kinda of a premier here. We've built a service that is helping you to create your wish-list and have-list and based on your choices it recommends you products, an easy way to discover new stuff. We've built it using Grails, MongoDB, Nginx. Would love to hear your thoughts about it.
2012 · yeay.me · its alternatives →
- 161R
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 →
- 17GA
Hello HN! These last few months I've been working on my first open source project: an embedded database written in pure-go. That took me some months, as I had to learn how to deal with such large packages. Until then, all packages I had made were quite small an did not require much. I usually did not have to worry about things like allocation optimization and instance pools until This project. It started when I wanted to make a port of a tool to a TUI environment. I'm actually used to working with TUIs in golang, so that was my language of choice. The tool I wanted to port is written in…
Feb 2026 · its alternatives →
- 18IT
I created http://devtest.net as a weekend project, and I'm pretty proud of it from a technical and UI standpoint. The problem is, I've built this by myself in a bit of a vacuum, to "scratch my own itch", and I don't know if this is useful to anyone other than me. I'm also not so hot on the business side and don't really know what I'm doing. Basically, I'm looking for some advice, now that I've actually launched, what now? One thing that this has shown me is that I'm capable of putting together a pretty decent web application on my own in my spare time. Should I stick with this idea, or…
2012 · devtest.net · its alternatives →
- 19IC
After 6 months looking for an idea, procrastinating and over analyzing what I should build. I built a tool that allows people to find problems using custom plugins built with Grok and Claude.
2025 · gotaprob.com · its alternatives →
- 20
Howdy friends. I've been a zero to one product manager for 12 plus years and along the way I kept borrowing pieces from different discovery frameworks until I had a methodology of my own, one that actually raises the odds of an idea succeeding. This does not replace user interviews obviously, but it leads you in the right direction. Looking forward for your feedback
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21MF
HN, I would appreciate some feedback on my first coding project ever. It's a visual instant search for iTunes (using Apple's API) I consider it MVP at this point, some features are still missing. I've tested the site in Safari, IE, and Firefox, and it seems to work in all of them. http://38069.vs.webtropia.com/tester/test/ (not too fancy of a URL) My background is nowhere near coding or designing (English major in the making, quite sure my code shows) and I only knew some basic PHP going into this last week, so don't be too harsh. Why this idea? I strongly believe visual search will be…
2011 · 38069.vs.webtropia.com · its alternatives →
- 22MF
Please have a look at www.socialeaks.com and tell me what you think. This is my first adventure in coding (my background is not CS). I started learning rails about a month ago via railstutorial.org. When I finished that, I felt the best way to continue learning would be to just build an app from scratch. I came up with this concept while observing how crazy the world had gone over WikiLeaks. I thought this was a funny idea. I also thought it would be fun to build! So, here I am. I built this in rails 3 and it is currently living on Heroku. It took me about two weeks to code, doing just about…
2011 · its alternatives →
- 23
Brutally Honest Feedback for Your Next Big Idea.
2024 · ideadestroyr.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 24AM
First, I'm by no mean a programmer. Second, I am reading HN for years, just registered to make this public and see if it can be useful for someone. I have nothing to gain monetary. A while ago, I decided that no blogging system was simple enough and I looked for a small wiki to use as a CMS/blog. Found WikWiki on C2.com and I mixed it with some basic Markdown syntax, a minimal template and added password protection. The result is a single php file, no database and no dependencies. Code is a mess, not modulable, probably wrong in so many ways, but it can probably used by some as personal…
2022 · mindwi.se · 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 →