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Ask HN: If your project is free, what are you building and why keep it free?

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Re: Ask HN: If your project is free, what are you building and why keep it free?

#11

Post by 250xp »

Building a dozen projects for myself if I cannot find anything suitable in 5h search (lang learning, shortcuts optimization, E2E web testing), perfecting until I'm ok with the result (perfectionist here, haha)

Suddenly, a few of them have some friend requests, and then it grows. Until I see the numbers that could change the way I work, it's just a help for like-minded people, who like using sthing that goes beyond "this is vibecoded MVP". At the same time I really like going beyond that MVP bar, which is kinda de facto standard rn. So it's just a hobby of creating something cool

Though costs are low for me — few subscriptions (Supabase, GH) and $50 on LLM calls

Btw, why are you asking?

Re: Ask HN: If your project is free, what are you building and why keep it free?

#12

Post by Leftium »

Built this to display the weather forecast exactly as I want: https://weather-sense.leftium.com

Same thing for hacker news: https://hn.leftium.com

Same thing for bookmarks/start page: https://multi-launch.leftium.com

This one allows (dancer) friends to create/manage a web site without any programming knowledge: https://veneer.leftium.com Samples:

- https://www.vivimil.com

- https://veneer.leftium.com/s.1RoVLit_cAJPZBeFYzSwHc7vADV_fYL...

---

- All my projects are hosted on Vercel (and/or Cloudflare), within their free/hobby tiers.

- No plans to monetize any of them.

- I find it more interesting to work on projects that are used by someone, whether that is myself or others.

- These projects are for learning. I would love to make a living developing novel UX like these projects. Perhaps a future project, or through someone I meet via these projects. (I did get a GitHub sponsorship, which was partially made possible by my work on these projects.)

Re: Ask HN: If your project is free, what are you building and why keep it free?

#13

Post by uncSoft »

I build anubis-oss because my friends and I are always trying to see how local LLMs run on our different Macs with different configs. So I build a benchmarker for us with a bunch of tools like exportable benchmark reports and arena mode, then I said hey, I can add public leaderboards with the full dataset of submissions open sourced, and give that to my ML and model tuning friends to gauge performance across broad configs. Yes it cost me money, but it's a fun project and I'm trying to get it into homebrew. Just need a few more stars.

https://devpadapp.com/anubis-oss.html

https://github.com/uncSoft/anubis-oss

https://imgur.com/a/X64WsWY

Re: Ask HN: If your project is free, what are you building and why keep it free?

#14

Post by LeanVibe »

Leftium wrote: post #12

Built this to display the weather forecast exactly as I want: https://weather-sense.leftium.com Same thing for hacker news: https://hn.leftium.com Same thing for bookmarks/start page: https://multi-launch.leftium.com This one allows (dancer) friends to create/manage a web site without any programming knowledge: https://veneer.leftium.com Samples: - https://www.vivimil.com - https://veneer.leftium.com/s.1RoVLit_cAJPZB…

I contacted you via email!

Re: Ask HN: If your project is free, what are you building and why keep it free?

#15

Post by LeanVibe »

250xp wrote: post #11

Building a dozen projects for myself if I cannot find anything suitable in 5h search (lang learning, shortcuts optimization, E2E web testing), perfecting until I'm ok with the result (perfectionist here, haha) Suddenly, a few of them have some friend requests, and then it grows. Until I see the numbers that could change the way I work, it's just a help for like-minded people, who like using sthing that goes beyond "t…

I built a platform LeanVibe.io and I'm now curating promising pre-revenue products

Re: Ask HN: If your project is free, what are you building and why keep it free?

#16

Post by techtalksweekly »

https://techtalksweekly.io/

I'm building Tech Talks Weekly[1], a free newsletter where my readers get one email per week with all the latest Software Engineering conference talks and podcasts[1] published that week.

Recently, I've released a paid tier[2] where my subscribers additionally get:

1. Access to my internal database of all the talks and podcasts since 2020 (+48,000 in total) where they can search, filter, sort, and group by title, conference/podcast, view count, date, and duration.

2. See the list of the most-watched talks over the last 7, 30, 90 days, 6 months, and 12 months based on number of views.

3. Get category-based view of new talks & podcasts by tech stack, language, and domain (Software Architecture, Backend, Frontend, Full Stack, Data, ML, DevOps, Security, Leadership and every major language & ecosystem).

It costs almost nothing besides the domain and Claude subscription to improve my tooling.

[1] https://www.techtalksweekly.io/p/what-is-tech-talks-weekly

[2] https://plus.techtalksweekly.io/

Re: Ask HN: If your project is free, what are you building and why keep it free?

#17

Post by junaid_97 »

I'm building Fillvisa (https://fillvisa.com/)

It's a free USCIS form-filling web-app(no Adobe required). USCIS forms still use XFA PDFs, which don’t let you edit in most browsers. Even with Adobe, fields break, and getting the signature is hard.

The core product is free 100%. I'm building a paid version for lawyers/law firms (https://plus.fillvisa.com/).

In my case, building a free product helps in: - genuinely helping users/immigrants - it helps in word of mouth, growth - We use the same forms for Free and Plus. So, more feedback = more improvements.

Note: It's still in developement. But, the early feedback has been positive.

Re: Ask HN: If your project is free, what are you building and why keep it free?

#20

Post by theorchid »

I am creating a blog for founders, managers, and those who want to start their own startup: https://orchidfiles.com

The blog has no monetization or advertising. Right now, I am only investing my time in creating content and looking for founders to talk to. My plan is to build an audience over the next few years and then offer consulting services.

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