I built a text-based birthday reminder app
I bought the birthdays.app domain a few years ago and decided to build a simple birthday app, just text message reminders. I had hacked together a duct-tape version for myself a couple years prior (using zapier + google sheets), and found it useful. It was a pain sifting through Facebook birthdays (90% irrelevant), and I found the text reminders simpler than a calendar. The app has been slowly growing since 2023, and is now up to 739 paying users (mostly on the $9/yr plan, with a few paying $3/yr). Earlier this year, I built a Google Calendar integration to automatically sync…
I built a text-based birthday reminder app launched on August 5, 2025 with 46 votes, #486 of 8,530 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.
In plain words
Birthdays.app is a text message reminder service for birthdays. Users log in via phone number and can input birthdays manually, by text, or by syncing their Google Calendar. The app sends SMS notifications on birthday dates and avoids the clutter of social media birthday lists. It requires no download and operates as a web-based service, focusing on simplicity and functionality without ads or engagement tactics.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
birthdays.app is a text-based birthday reminder app. • Birthday + early reminders via text message • Import birthdays from Google Calendar or Facebook • Add friends easily via text (“Joe Aug 8”) • Send a real card: choose your card, write your message, and we’ll mail it. Just because a calendar works doesn't mean it's the right tool. Texts are simpler and impossible to miss.
remember birthdays simply, with text message reminders. no ads, no app to download. add friends manually, by text, or with google calendar sync.
The app is so beautifully simple and brings me so much value. I love it! I have no idea what I'd do without this app tbh. People are constantly surprised I remember their birthdays and it feels great :) Helps me stay in touch without the burden of social media. I wish more people executed ideas like this - simple and effective. been using this for over a year and can confidently say it has made my relationships stronger bc I get a text the morning of their birthday and just call the person. Usually the first to wish them a HBD. One of my favorite apps continues to be birthdays.app by @sam_feldman_. It texts you reminders for your friends' birthdays and that's it. A weekly reminder that…from birthdays.app
In the maker’s words, at launch
I bought the birthdays.app domain a few years ago and decided to build a simple birthday app, just text message reminders. I had hacked together a duct-tape version for myself a couple years prior (using zapier + google sheets), and found it useful. It was a pain sifting through Facebook birthdays (90% irrelevant)…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →
SMS Reminders for Birthdays2024 · birthdaytexts.com · ▲6I built a simple service that sends SMS reminders for birthdays. Why? I kept missing birthdays, even with calendar apps. This single-purpose tool is simple and (so far) reliable. Since my texting inbox has a far better signal-to-noise ratio than email or calendar events, it ensures I never miss an important date. Facebook used to serve the same purpose, but it's a dying social graph for me.
I built a Chrome extension–export Facebook birthdays to text reminders2025 · chromewebstore.google.com · ▲5A few years ago I bought the birthdays.app domain, and decided to make a birthday reminder app based only on text reminders—SMS in the US, WhatsApp outside the US. This year, I've focused on improving the app's importing options. Previously, it only supported adding friends manually or via text. Earlier in the year, I built a Google Calendar sync flow (using OAuth), and just recently, made a Chrome extension to import Facebook friends' birthdays. The flow is—install the extension, pull Facebook birthdays, select friends, then import to birthdays.app (using an import code from the web app).…
Giftopedia Birthday Reminders2023 · giftopedia.app · ▲101Never forget another birthday, get text reminders
More work this month
the category →
Endless lofi beats composed live in your browser, over pixel-art nights in Paris, Tokyo, New York, Hong Kong, Sydney, San Francisco and more. Free, no sign-up.
Work · 25d ago · loficities.com
Smooth Recorder▲257Mac screen recordings that look edited when you hit stop
Work · 19d ago · smoothrecorder.com
Work · 13d ago · readrare.com
Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
Launched alongside, August 2025
the whole month →
I built the world's most impractical 1000-pixel display and anyone in the world can draw on it. It draws a single pixel at a time and takes 30-60 minutes to complete a single image. Anyone can participate in the project by voting for the next image to be drawn, and submitting images. https://kilopx.com/
Work · 2025 · benholmen.com
Kitten TTS is an open-source series of tiny and expressive text-to-speech models for on-device applications. We are excited to launch a preview of our smallest model, which is less than 25 MB. This model has 15M parameters. This release supports English text-to-speech applications in eight voices: four male and four female. The model is quantized to int8 + fp16, and it uses onnx for runtime. The model is designed to run literally anywhere eg. raspberry pi, low-end smartphones, wearables, browsers etc. No GPU required! We're releasing this to give early users a sense of the latency and voices…
AI · 2025 · github.com
I was wondering how I can arrange objects along a spherical helix path, and read some articles on it. I ended up learning about parametric equations again, and make this visualization to document what I learned: https://visualrambling.space/moving-objects-in-3d/ feel free to visit and let me know what you think!
Life & fun · 2025 · visualrambling.space
For HTML Day 2025 [1], I made a web service that displays the current sky at your approximate location as a CSS gradient. Colours are simulated on-demand using atmospheric absorption and scattering coefficients. Updates every minute, without the use of client-side JavaScript. Source code and additional information is available on GitHub: https://github.com/dnlzro/horizon [1] https://html.energy/html-day/2025/index.html
Dev tools · 2025 · sky.dlazaro.ca