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24 alternatives to your personal, self-built productivity tool

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.

This is a personal productivity tool combining calendar and money-tracking functionality built by its sole user. The standout feature is the ability to forecast monthly income based on scheduled work. Built for… 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 2 we have checked on their own sites, 2 of them free or with a free tier. your personal, self-built productivity tool launched in 2013; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    Hey everyone! After another year of building as a solo dev on nights and weekends, I'm back with an update on this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31083093. TL;DR - ProjectionLab (https://projectionlab.com) is a privacy-friendly personal finance planning tool where you can create financial plans that go beyond the standard online retirement calculators. And by popular request, it now supports self-hosting for Lifetime users! Something I'm grateful for is that our community here on HN is the difference between PL existing and not. There was actually a time…

    2023 · projectionlab.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Let AI increase your productivity

    2023 · timetracking.monitup.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Hi HN, I’m the founder of Zesfy, a productivity app that I’ve been developing over the past few years. It’s designed to seamlessly integrate your tasks with your calendar, allowing you to transform your to-do lists into actionable events in just seconds. Here are some of its key features: - Task Progress: Automatically update your progress based on subtasks completed - Step: Create step-by-step breakdown of the subtask - Target: Organize tasks with due date - Session: Insert multiple tasks to calendar event - Space: Filter event from specific sets of calendars I recently introduced new…

    2024 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Stick to a budget by tracking what you spend.

    2021 · steadytheship.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Your custom productivity toolkit of the top hidden gems

    2022 · tally.so · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Get ready for 2023, set up once, use forever

    2022 · templatesfornotion.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    More habit tracking software. Contribute to willmeyers/working-increments development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    My Expenses is a very simple app to track expenses for one-time budgets. Let's say you're going on vacations in Italy and you want to allocate $1.500 to this trip. You create a budget "Italy" in 30 seconds and you're ready to go. Each time you make an expense in Italy, you add it to the app in a few seconds and you instantly know you're remaining budget. I'm bored of super complex apps. Yes, they do a lot of things, but it often takes a while to get used to the app and understand all its features. That's why I created this app. I want people to be able to track their expenses in seconds, as…

    2023 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    The most motivating way to get shit done.

    2022 · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    An extended diary to track your daily progress

    2019 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Three Productivity Lessons from Google Calendar

    2016 · delivery-edge.libsyn.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12
    QTR▲30

    Hello all I know there are plenty of productivity apps. Still, I found myself using many different apps for my productivity needs: Todoist for tasks, calendar for time-blocking, a physical planner for weekly/quarterly/yearly planning, Day One for journaling, and Roam for notes. QTR is my attempt to blend these together. It's like Trello mishmashed with a calendar. You start with tasks for the year, and then drag them to different quarters, then zoom into a quarter to then drag tasks to weeks, and then zoom into a week to then drag tasks to days, and then zoom into a day to then…

    2025 · qtr.ai · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Hi HN! Happy to introduce Proddigy- a Productivity tracker and optimizer. Proddigy helps you track your productivity with seamless, customizable, notification-based tracking (track directly from the notification- no need to open the app). You can then learn about your patterns from analytics, as well as optimizing it by measuring the effects from behavioral changes experiments. More analytics features coming soon! Would love to hear if there’s anything you’d find interesting. The app is still in beta (and free), feedback will be highly appreciated here. To those who care- the app was NOT…

    2025 · proddigy.app · its alternatives →

  14. 14IP

    Hey hackers, Like many of you, I'm always trying to optimize my productivity, and I have tried a lot of apps out there to do so. I didn't find the exact one that I could use, so I built one for myself. Check it out and let me know if you have any thoughts!

    2024 · focusmax.io · its alternatives →

  15. 15
    Calera▲8

    Generate any personal schedule with AI

    2025 · its alternatives →

  16. 16KT

    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 · accountant.besperk.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Hey Hacker News! To test implementing AI (and paywalls tbh) in software for the first time, I made this simple calendar creator (no mail address required) that lets a person create a calendar based on his needs and availability and export it to his calendar app, pdf or receive a daily newsletter with his daily tasks (and more). After wrestling with different models (f.e. with huggingface) and encountering different problems, I decided to use ChatGPT's models, tune them a little and see how the result works out. ChatGPT's low price enables me to give users the opportunity to create calendars…

    2024 · calendarplusai.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Get rid procrastination & boost your productivity 💪

    2018 · captaincarnet.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19DI

    This is my first web app, so there are bound be to be a few kinks that need to be worked out. That's why it's here, in hopes that some of the awesome people I read about on HN can take a minute to offer some criticism. http://dailydo.it/ DailyDo.it is meant to replace the canonical to-do list with a do-it list – a list of things that you will actually do. My monetization plan is based on team do-it lists, where you can see your teammates' do-it lists and assign them tasks, while keeping the individual do-it lists totally free. Please let me know if you find any bugs, what the pain points…

    2012 · dailydo.it · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Everyday Matters

    2024 · timeline-17.web.app · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Hello HN! As apps grow increasingly complex, I started to question whether only feature-packed apps are truly helpful. That led to what I call the *Small App Project*—a philosophy of building small, focused tools that do just what you need, and nothing more. Money Keeper is one of the apps I created as part of the Small App Project. It’s a small expense tracker built for clarity and efficiency. --- What it does: - Fixed Expenses. Easy to Grasp at a Glance. - Payday Calendar. Customize Your Start Day. - Monthly Summary. Expense Visualization. - Customizable Categories. - No Ads. No Data…

    2024 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    I’ve always liked fast online tools for jotting notes or organizing thoughts — but most “productivity” sites either save data to the cloud, require sign-ups, or are full of distractions. So I built an online productivity tools website, a small collection of browser-based tools. It includes an online notepad where you can write and save notes right in your browser, a cornell notes tool available in more than 20 languages, and more coming soon like a pomodoro timer and a simple blank page for focused writing. Everything works entirely in-browser using localStorage — no accounts, no cloud sync,…

    2025 · onlinenotep.ad · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Organize Tasks, Set Goals and Write a Journal

    2022 · sarvam23.gumroad.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    I've been building TimeTracker over the past few years, and it's grown into a comprehensive self-hosted platform for time tracking, project management, and invoicing.*What it does:*- Time tracking with persistent server-side timers- Professional PDF invoice generation- Project & task management- Client CRM- Expense tracking- Advanced reporting & analytics- Role-based permissions- REST API*Why self-hosted:*I was tired of paying $15-20/month for time tracking tools and having my data locked in SaaS platforms. This gives complete control.*Tech:*- Python/Flask backend- PostgreSQL +…

    Nov 2025 · timetracker.drytrix.com · 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 →

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