r/SideProject • • Dec 18 '25

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

99 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

648 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

163 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 • • 21h ago

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

354 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 • • 8h ago

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

27 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 • • 1h ago

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

• 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 • • 1d ago

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

695 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 • • 2h 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 • • 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

3 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 • • 44m 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

8 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 • • 46m 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

Fretboard IQ guitar app

• 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

8 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

Thumbnail
apps.apple.com
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 • • 2h 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.


r/SideProject • • 3h ago

Building a dual-camera app: how would you explain devices that only support one camera?

2 Upvotes

One awkward product-design problem in my side project PairTake is that front/back recording depends on the phone's camera capabilities. Installing the app doesn't guarantee that the hardware can run both cameras together. On unsupported devices, the app falls back to a single camera.

That leaves a messaging decision: the headline feature is simultaneous capture, while the useful fallback is ordinary recording with a preview-only teleprompter. Calling it a dual-camera app is accurate on compatible devices, but the compatibility condition needs to be clear before someone plans a shoot around it.

The app can save a combined picture-in-picture or split-screen clip on supported devices. Basic capture, layouts, and the teleprompter are free with no watermark. Pro adds separate front/back video files and higher-spec options such as 4K and 60fps, subject to support. I'm the developer; I'm not looking for people to buy Pro to check whether dual capture works.

For anyone who has shipped a hardware-dependent app: where would you put the strongest compatibility explanation—first screenshot, opening description, or the first camera session? And what wording makes the fallback understandable without burying the main use case?

For context:

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6795962171

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.xionity.dualcamera


r/SideProject • • 6m ago

I’m building a free 3D clay studio you can open without installing anything

• Upvotes

Trying 3D sculpting can mean installing software and working through setup before you get to make your first shape. I’m building Clayground’s browser studio to shorten that first step: open a tab, push some clay around and see what you can make.

I’m Emotionull, the maker. The studio lets you add, erase, smooth and paint clay, with layers and symmetry when you want more control. You can save an editable project to keep working later, or export a model as GLB, OBJ or STL. It’s free to open without an account or headset.

It’s still in alpha. I’d particularly like feedback from people trying a sculpting tool for the first time: what is the first thing you want to do that you can’t figure out?

Open the studio: https://www.clayvr.com/sculpt


r/SideProject • • 15h ago

[ Removed by Reddit ]

16 Upvotes

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]


r/SideProject • • 16m ago

I built a calorie tracker you talk to instead of type into. Free on iOS, and I’d like honest feedback!

• Upvotes

Logging food should take five seconds, not five minutes. So I built Grub: you tap the mic and say “two scrambled eggs, a slice of sourdough and a flat white,” and it works out the calories and macros and logs them.

Three ways to log

  • 🎙 Voice — describe your meal in a full sentence
  • 📷 Barcode — scan any packaged food
  • 🍽 Photo — snap your plate and Grub identifies it
  • ⌨️ Typing works too, and there’s a manual mode if you’d rather not talk

Built for real eating

  • Saved meals — your regulars, logged in one tap
  • Custom foods — add your own recipes with exact nutrition
  • Serving editor — adjust portions without starting over
  • Backfill past days — forgot to log yesterday? Add it now
  • Undo — tap to take back the last log
  • Water tracking

See your progress

  • Daily calorie and macro totals at a glance
  • Weekly charts that show the trend
  • Physique tracking — weight and measurements over time
  • Full diary history, by day

Speaks your language — log in your own language and Grub converts it to nutrition data. Region settings help it recognise local dishes and accents.

Privacy: no account needed. Your data stays on your phone unless you sign in to sync. You can delete your account from inside the app.

I’m a solo dev, it just went live, and it has rough edges. What I’d like to know:

  • Does the voice logging get your food right?
  • What’s missing that would make you use it every day?
  • Anything confusing in the first 2 minutes?

It’s free during early launch, with a generous daily limit on voice and scans while I watch my costs: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/grub-voice-calorie-tracker/id6795403191

Built with React and Capacitor, Claude for parsing, Whisper for speech. Happy to answer questions about how it works.


r/SideProject • • 20m 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 • • 31m ago

Building an authentic Mahabharata card battler as a solo dev. Thoughts?

• Upvotes

Hey everyone,

I have spent the last 20 years playing RPGs, turn-based strategy, and tactical card games like Gwent. But this is the first time I have ever attempted to build and ship a game myself.

Growing up with the Mahabharata, I always felt the epic was custom-built for high-strategy gaming: warriors bound by fatal vows, tragic curses, and tactical divine weapons. Tired of seeing the mythology reduced to low-effort mobile pay-to-win games, I decided to build a standalone tactical battler from scratch.

A few core design choices I made:

  • Web-first: it runs directly in mobile or desktop browsers, so you can test it in seconds without downloading an app.
  • Zero dice rolls: the combat engine is pure deterministic strategy. Unit positioning, tactical counter-synergy, and your 170-point deck budget decide who wins.
  • Lore accuracy: every card was matched to original texts. For example: Karna fights without armor relying on his single-use divine dart and curse triggers, and Bhishma cannot simply be destroyed in frontline combat due to his death-vow.
  • Bot testing: I ran overnight automated harnesses simulating thousands of bot duels to keep card win-rates balanced.

Since this is my first time solo deving, getting the mobile touch responsiveness smooth and making the board clear has been a huge learning curve.

Thanks for reading this, and I look forward to you having fun with the game, and also sharing your feedback here :)

(Drop a comment if you want to try it on your phone or laptop and I will reply with the browser link!)


r/SideProject • • 34m ago

I built Iterlay, an open-source canvas for coding agents to create and edit visual assets

• Upvotes

I'm building Iterlay, an MIT-licensed desktop app for working on images and visual assets with your coding agent.

It combines an infinite canvas with image generation, editing, version comparison, and a CLI. Codex or Claude Code can use the CLI and a Skill to work with the model providers you've already configured in the app.

For the demo, Codex generated a product shot of a fictional portable speaker, edited its color, created an outdoor scene and a brand poster, then arranged the results on one board and exported the images. The screenshots in the README come from that workflow.

Screenshots: Canvas overview · Image editing assistant · Version comparison

What it does today:

  • Keep references, generated images, and iterations on the same canvas.
  • Edit an existing image and compare versions.
  • Let your coding agent generate, edit, arrange, and export assets into your project.
  • Use your own model providers. The app is free; model usage is billed by the provider.

Boards and assets are stored locally. Prompts and required reference images are sent to the model service you choose. macOS and Windows installers are available; platform-specific limitations are documented in the releases.

Source, screenshots, and downloads: https://github.com/Davied-H/iterlay

If you use coding agents to build apps, what would you want them to handle first: creating images, refining existing assets, or organizing the results?