r/SideProject • • Dec 18 '25

As the year wraps up: what’s the project you’re most proud of building and why?

97 Upvotes

Like the title says, instead of what you built or how much money it made, I’m curious what project you’re most proud of this year and why.

Could be a client site, a personal project, something that never launched, or something that made £0.

Any lessons learned?

Would love to read a few reflections as the year wraps up.


r/SideProject • • Oct 19 '25

Share your ***Not-AI*** projects

644 Upvotes

I miss seeing original ideas that aren’t just another AI wrapper.

If you’re building something in 2025 that’s not AI-related here’s your space to self-promote.

Drop your project here


r/SideProject • • 12h ago

An app that instantly turns a photo into 360° view you can rotate & zoom into

169 Upvotes

Hey All,

We made an app in which you upload a photo of a person, and within seconds you get a 360° view you can drag all the way around and zoom into. Would really appreciate your honest feedback.


r/SideProject • • 22h ago

I’m 65, have stage IV cancer, and decided to build something that might make a difference

356 Upvotes

About a year ago, I was diagnosed with stage IV esophageal cancer. Since then, life has changed in ways I never could have imagined.

But something unexpected came out of it.
I was reading a conversation in a cancer community where someone mentioned they’d finished all their jigsaw puzzles and couldn’t afford to buy more.

That stuck with me.

I started thinking about how many perfectly good books, puzzles, games, movies, and craft supplies are sitting in people’s homes, no longer being used, while someone else might really appreciate them.

So I decided to build something.

It’s called We Pass It On.

The concept is pretty straightforward:
Anyone can register and donate items.

People facing cancer can browse and receive those items.

Donated items are free. Recipients ordinarily pay shipping and a small $2 platform support fee.

I’m developing a sponsorship-funded shipping assistance program for people who need help covering those costs.

I’m building the entire platform myself using Next.js, Supabase, Stripe, Shippo, and Vercel.

It’s still early in development, but I’ve made some encouraging progress on the actual functionality.

I’m not trying to build the next billion-dollar startup. I want to create something useful, sustainable, and capable of bringing a little happiness to people dealing with cancer.

One of my biggest challenges is figuring out how to get the word out without making it feel like another charity solicitation or startup advertisement.

I’d love some feedback from other builders.
How would you approach growing a community like this from absolutely nothing?

If you’re curious, the project is at https://wepassiton.com. Right now it’s just an introduction and a way to follow development progress.

Thanks for reading.


r/SideProject • • 9h ago

Built a mushroom-hunting app for myself. Somehow got 2,500+ downloads in the first week

29 Upvotes

I have a problem. My family has been returning to the same mushroom spots for 20 years, but put me in a new forest and suddenly every tree looks the same.

This year I started exploring new forests in western Ukraine and realized that finding mushrooms is only half the adventure. The other half is remembering where the hell you found them and where you parked your car.

So, naturally, instead of using a notebook like a normal person, I built an entire iPhone app.

It's called Lisovychok (roughly "Little Forest Spirit"). You can save mushroom spots, record routes, mark your car, and keep a journal of your finds. Offline maps included, because forests aren't famous for their mobile coverage.

No accounts, no public maps. Your secret spots stay on your phone.

I launched it on October 6, shared it on Ukrainian Threads, and somehow got 2,500+ downloads in the first week.

Turns out I'm not the only person who can't find the same tree twice.

Now I'm curious whether mushroom hunters outside Ukraine would find it useful too.

It's free on iPhone. Would love your feedback!

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lisovychok/id6818311944


r/SideProject • • 28m ago

We’re reviving a park map I built with my brother years ago

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• Upvotes

Hey everyone! I’m Oskar, and a few years ago my brother Kacper and I built TravelerMap.net, an interactive map for discovering parks. He later got busy with his other project, Veloplanner, and TravelerMap sat untouched for quite a while.

Now I’ve teamed up with Lukas, and we’re working on it every day. It’s 100% free to use and includes national parks worldwide, plus other parks in the US, Canada, the UK, and Poland.

We’re currently focusing on the US. We’ve added campground and parking locations and are rewriting park descriptions to make them more practical. Our next big feature is a trip planner for choosing parks, finding nearby stops, and saving itineraries.

It feels good to bring an old project back to life. I’d love your honest feedback on the map, especially what’s confusing or missing. Would you use something like this to plan a park trip?


r/SideProject • • 44m ago

I built a music library app for people who still buy CDs and own their music

• Upvotes

r/SideProject • • 1d ago

I built a little interactive globe for my two boys. Somehow, they became my entire dev team.

709 Upvotes

I'm just a dad with two curious boys, aged 9 and 6, and absolutely no coding background.

A little while ago, I decided to try vibe coding using Claude Code Opus 5.5. Partly to learn something new, but mostly because I wanted to make my kids' screen time a bit more meaningful.

So I started building an interactive 3D globe where they could explore the world, discover animals, countries, landmarks, and learn a few things along the way.

Honestly, I thought I'd be lucky if they played with it for 15 minutes.
Turns out, I underestimated them.

They started exploring everything, asking questions, and then the feature requests came.
"Dad, why isn't this in the game?"
"Can you make it do this?"
"This would be SO much better if..."

So now, my two boys are basically the lead testers, and I've been adding features and fixing things based on their feedback almost every day.

It's still very much a work in progress. Plenty of bugs, missing features, and things I want to improve.

But watching them genuinely enjoy exploring the world, rather than just mindlessly staring at a screen, has been pretty rewarding.

And it got me thinking. If my kids enjoy it this much, maybe other kids would too.

So I decided to share it with everyone.

It's called My Earth Toy, and it's completely free.

https://myearthtoy.com/

You can try it without an account, or sign up for the full experience.

If you have curious little ones (physically or internally), I'd love for you to try it together. Please share your feedback; I'd appreciate hearing it.

Thank you for checking it out!


r/SideProject • • 3h ago

I finger pointed AI until it did what was in my brain.

4 Upvotes

Now that the obvious is out of the way..

I made this for the people who's flow state gets interrupted by switching tabs.

People who work with others remotely that wish they could work together live.

People with followers who wish there was a way to give them all a 1-on-1 style experience/lesson.

Teams who hate each-other's communication skills. (Share a canvas, see each-others progress, no waiting on emails, texts, slacks..)

People learning how to manage teams of AI agents.

Marketing teams that are planning campaigns for the quarter.

Agentic Engineers, Vibecoders, and Developers with multiple projects and no way to manage them all visually in one place.

My vision is that people can take this and use the SDK to make their own integrations or enhance the ones that are in there already.

There's a marketplace for agents and modules, all free to use, all welcome community contributors.

There's draw your own racetrack games, asteroid, office suite, lead finder powered by tavily and claude, compatable with ollama, etc etc etc. I think I've made 50 so far.

There's literally too much for me to put in this post. If any of the above sounds cool, give it a pull, docker it up and let me hear your thoughts.

Please forgive the 14 minute video attached, I can assure you if i tried editing it, it would be 10x worse.

Skip to :43 to save 43 seconds of your life that would otherwise be spent watching me click a button that didn't work.

If someone does like it, and is better at videos, by all means be my guest.

TL;DR

oogalieboogalie/CensaiOS is the repo. Thanks for looking.

https://reddit.com/link/1x824wa/video/kz4umzm0myvh1/player


r/SideProject • • 2h ago

An app that turns your identity into a digital business card and helps you grow your network

4 Upvotes

Hey all,

We made an app that lets you create your digital business card, share your details, capture people you meet, remember conversations, follow up, and book meetings.

Think of it as a personal CRM you can carry in your pocket.

Start building your network. Grow your net worth!

Here's a quick video showing how it works. Would really appreciate your honest feedback!

https://pana.space/olai


r/SideProject • • 26m ago

Made a retro-style note taking app available in microsoft store

• Upvotes

Hi! I made an app for notes and more on your pc. While working on it, I added more popups for different purposes because why stop at notes? It has all sorts of stuff, and I will add more in the future(any suggestions are welcomed). Now it has a pdf editor, word, radio, zip opener/maker, video recorder, qr code maker and many more. I am still working on it, but i posted it here because the most of it is ready. I didn't want to charge money on it, but I want to post it on app store too and apple is greedy like...always. If you want to try it, I offer a 7 day free trial, let me know what you think of it.

Here is the link.


r/SideProject • • 31m ago

I made Tabby: one place per project for your tabs, with a checkmark on the ones you've already saved (free, no account)

• Upvotes

Hi all, I'm the developer. Tabby replaces your new tab page with a calm view of what you have open and what you saved.
• Spaces for projects, collections inside them. Save a whole window as a collection in one click, or drag a tab onto one.
• A checkmark on open tabs that are already saved, so closing is a quick decision.
• Close the copies: a page open three times? One click, with Undo.
• Tidy up: one tab at a time, one key each (K keep, X close, S save, Z undo).
• Search everything with Cmd+K (Ctrl+K): open tabs, saved links, collections.
• Sleep tabs you aren't using and see how much memory came back, measured before and after.
• Closed windows and tabs kept for 14 days.
Permissions, since people here care: it reads your tabs' titles and addresses to save them, and asks for no access to any website, so it can't read page content. No account, no analytics, data stays on your device.
Free, with an optional Pro plan for extra themes and power features. Imports from Toby, OneTab and bookmarks.
Feedback welcome, especially on what feels confusing.


r/SideProject • • 38m ago

I built Modo: A local-first, distraction-free note app with 215 artisan widgets & 100% on-device AI (iOS & Android)

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• Upvotes

Hi 👋

I'm an indie developer, and I built Modo—a minimalist, private note and productivity app designed to capture thoughts without the mental clutter.

I’ve always felt overwhelmed by modern note apps: forced account sign-ups, slow loading screens, expensive monthly subscriptions, and complicated folder systems that require more time organizing than actually writing.

So I built Modo around a simple philosophy: Nothing to organize. Just write. Find anything.

Modo is now officially available on both iOS and Android!

🎬 15s Quick Demos

✨ What Makes Modo Different?

  1. ⚡ Instant 0.1s Capture
    • Opens instantly with zero loading delay. No login screens or popups getting in your way.
    • Type / anywhere while writing to quickly insert headings, checklists, quotes, or timestamps.
    • Link related notes effortlessly using [[Note Title]].
  2. 🎙️ Private Voice-to-Text (Completely Offline)
    • Transcribe your speech to text in real time across 20 languages.
    • Runs 100% on your device—your voice audio is never sent to external servers or cloud AI.
    • Smart background noise filtering for clean, clear recordings.
    • Read notes aloud with natural, relaxing speech.
  3. 🎨 200+ Aesthetic Home Screen Widgets
    • Turn your home screen into a personal gallery with vintage clock frames, sticky notes, calendars, and D-Day countdowns.
    • 1-tap quick capture dock right from your home screen.
    • Optimized to run smoothly with zero background battery drain.
  4. 🔒 100% Private & Secure
    • All your notes, photos, and voice recordings live strictly on your device.
    • Lock the app with Face ID, Fingerprint, or a PIN code.
    • Optional backup to your personal Google Drive (direct connection, no middleman servers).
  5. 📸 Instant Photo & Document Scanner
    • Snap a photo of a book page, document, or receipt to extract text right away—all processed locally on your phone.
  6. 📅 Visual Schedule & Habit Hub
    • Clean calendar views, annual habit rhythm bars, and multi-country holiday support to keep your days on track.

📱 Download Links

💬 Looking for Honest Feedback!

As a solo developer, building and polishing both iOS and Android versions has been a labor of love.

  • How does the widget styling look on your home screen?
  • Is there any small feature you always wished your default note app had?

r/SideProject • • 5h ago

I built a tool to check your website for AI readiness

5 Upvotes

Hello fellow side project builders! 👋

I'm a solo founder with a number of small side projects and I often wonder what I could do to improve my websites for better LLM visibility.

So naturally, I rolled up my sleeves and built yet another tool. 😂

I read everything I could find about what makes an LLM quote a website source, and combined all the different theories into one solid list of signals; domain age, content freshness, citations, etc.

Then I built a SaaS product that verifies them. CitableReport currently checks 40 different elements of websites, to ensure they are in the best readiness to be mentioned by AI.

You can run a free check now, which will give you some valuable insights and an overall score. If you'd like, you can pay to unlock to the whole report.

Would love any feedback from you all. What are your first impressions, etc? I'd be happy to return the favour with a product or website of yours, if you like. Thanks in advance!

https://citablereport.com


r/SideProject • • 4h ago

Plain text apps

4 Upvotes

that work. Repairs and changes shouldn’t wreck the apps either. Throw some ideas in an I’ll approve some in the morning and see what we get. Beta.looptlab.ai


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

I wanted my chats to be more than just messages, so I built this

• Upvotes

I’ve been building nook., an independent messaging app for iOS and Android, and I’d love some honest feedback from people outside my own circle.

The idea is simple: chat is great for conversations, but useful things tend to get buried in the history.
So every nook. space has two views: Chat and Canvas.

Chat works like a normal messaging app, with messages, replies, reactions, photos, GIFs, voice notes, stickers and calls.

Canvas is a shared wall where everyone can pin messages, leave notes, add photos, draw, create checklists and arrange everything freely. It’s a place for things you want to keep visible instead of scrolling back through hundreds of messages to find them.
I imagined friends using it to plan a trip, couples keeping little memories in one place, or families sharing everyday things.

I’ve built the app from scratch, including the UI, animations and real-time features. It’s grown much bigger than I initially planned, and I’m now trying to figure out whether
the central idea is genuinely useful to other people.

The thing I’m most curious about: Would you actually use a shared canvas alongside your chats, or would you end up using chat alone?

I’m happy to answer any questions about how it works or why I built it, and I’d appreciate any honest feedback.

nook. is currently in TestFlight, and I can share access with anyone who wants to give it a try.

Thanks!


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

Tao Te Ching & quotes app, released for ios recently!

• Upvotes

Hey all! ♥

I recently made some updtaes to my app and released to ios after 2-3 years of it published just for android.

If you want to check it out:

(Android)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=wisdomLabs.dailyandrandomtao

(Apple):
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/daily-random-tao/id6742077534

The idea here was that the Tao Te Ching is a book you can open randomly anywhere for some wisdom and insight. I built a website and a friend told me why don't you make an app! And I started on this journey. It was just when chatGPT came out.

It evolved and changed and adapted, and was and still is a fantastic journey of app development and product ownership, zero to publish.

It now has daily quotes and much more 🌻

I learned some important things along the way. Especially in the area of design and ux/ui.

Anyway! Feel free to check it out, give me feedback if you want. Yeah anything really.

This is so much fun haha.

Much blessings 💜💜💜


r/SideProject • • 8h ago

I built WonderRoll, an iPhone camera app that brings back the wait for a roll of film

9 Upvotes

I'm the developer of WonderRoll, a film and instant camera app for iPhone.

The idea is to bring back a little of the anticipation of film: choosing a roll, being more deliberate with each frame, and seeing what you captured later. I wanted the process to matter as much as the final look.

There are two ways to use it:

- Film mode: finite rolls and delayed reveals, for a trip or a walk you want to remember as a collection.

- Instant mode: paper-style photos for small, everyday moments.

The thought behind it is simple: some memories take time. Shoot now. Discover later.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6788199897

I'd love feedback on the idea: would waiting to see your photos make you more thoughtful about what you shoot, or would it just get in the way?


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

I made my security agent less willing to say a fix worked

• Upvotes

I build Ship Safe, an open-source security agent for AI-written software. It combines deterministic checks with an investigation layer so you can inspect why a finding was considered real, uncertain or refuted.

One of the more important changes I've made recently was removing confidence from the output.

The old fix comparison could interpret ‘the detector no longer reports this’ as a verified fix. That sounds reasonable until you consider a rewrite that hides the pattern, a later edit that reopens an earlier issue, or a rescan where one of the checks failed.

We tightened the behavior so the tool makes a narrower claim:

• No matching finding: inconclusive, not proof of remediation.

• Static investigation refutes the finding: say that, without calling it an independent retest.

• An old refuted finding becomes confirmed or likely: report a regression.

• Final scan fails: don't retain earlier success marks.

The implementation passed 1,200 local tests, and all six PR CI jobs passed. Those results test the implementation, not whether arbitrary applications are secure.

This is merged on main, not released to npm yet. The published package is still 11.0.0. We're also documenting the permission boundaries for future connected-agent operations, but those controls aren't implemented yet.

The CLI is MIT-licensed: https://github.com/asamassekou10/ship-safe

For people building developer tools: have you had to make an output look less reassuring to make it more accurate? I'd be interested in how you explained that change to users.


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

I made a little playground where you can arrange 3D liquorice allsorts and save your own wallpaper

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• Upvotes

Hi everyone,

I’m a designer/developer based in Sheffield (from Barnsley) and have been for 9+ years. Liquorice allsorts were invented here, and I’ve had this idea for a while. I’m hoping it brings some joy and nostalgia to people.

You can arrange the sweets however you like, switch between a few different styles, and save it as a wallpaper for free. If you want a print of what you’ve made, you can order one too.

Would love any feedback, especially on how it runs on your device. Thanks for letting me share!


r/SideProject • • 2h ago

Fretboard IQ guitar app

2 Upvotes

I built an app to help guitarists actually learn the fretboard

I’m a guitarist and developer, and I made Fretboard IQ because I was tired of only knowing notes on the low E string. It’s built around quick drills that train you to find notes, intervals and positions across the whole neck, plus a built-in tuner and metronome.

It’s on iOS, Android and Windows: https://fretboardiq.app/

I’d genuinely love feedback on what’s useful, what’s annoying, and what you’d want added.


r/SideProject • • 10h ago

I built a free leaderboard where side projects are ranked by real clicks

9 Upvotes

Hi all. I built BuildShipper, a simple leaderboard for indie projects. You list your project for free and it gets ranked by how many people actually click through to it.

It is early and not public-wide yet, so I am looking for the first projects to list. If you have something shipped, I would love to have it on there: https://buildshipper.com

Honest feedback on the idea or the site is very welcome too.

Thank you 😄


r/SideProject • • 2h ago

I built image tools that work with your Wi-Fi turned off, so nothing gets uploaded

2 Upvotes

Most "free" image sites (compress, remove background, HEIC → JPG) upload your photo to their server. I didn't love that for ID photos and personal pics, so I built one where everything runs inside your browser.

Try it: open the compress or resize tool, turn on airplane mode, drop a photo. It still works.

What it does:
- Compress to an exact size (e.g. under 50 KB for forms)
- Resize for Instagram / YouTube / WhatsApp / passport photos
- Convert iPhone HEIC → JPG (plus PNG, WebP, AVIF)
- Remove backgrounds with an AI model that runs on your device (it downloads once, then your photo never leaves the device)
- Show and remove hidden photo data like location

Free, no signup, no ads right now. It costs me almost nothing to run because your device does the work.

I made this — feedback very welcome, especially if something breaks on your phone.


r/SideProject • • 6h ago

Made A Different Restroom Rating App

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5 Upvotes

Check out my new app. It allows users to rate restrooms. It’s not like the other apps. This app only focuses on gas stations because most people stop at Gas stations when traveling. It helps find feminine and hygiene products for women. It also has a Compass mode that only shows gas stations in the direction that you are traveling. Let me know if some changes that I can make to it.


r/SideProject • • 3h ago

I built an open-source Gmail cleanup app that runs AI locally on a Mac

2 Upvotes

I wanted help sorting through Gmail without sending my email content to cloud AI services, so I built a local app for Apple Silicon Macs. It groups similar emails and uses local models to recommend Keep, Cleanup, or Needs Review. You can inspect the results before choosing what to move to Trash—nothing is automatically deleted. It uses Laya for classification, Qwen through Ollama for further review, and optionally Winnow as an alternative classifier. It’s free, open source, and still a public alpha. Setup is from source and requires local model downloads and your own Google Desktop OAuth client. You can start with a read-only test of up to 10 emails. The README walks through setup, and there’s an AGENTS.md guide if you want a coding agent to help. GitHub: https://github.com/karan19/LocalFirstGmailIntelligence Sharing it for anyone who wants to run it, experiment, or look through the code. The recommendations can be wrong, so it’s built around reviewing and confirming actions yourself.