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skwee357
I run a dead-simple, one-time, online fax service called JustFax Online[0]. While I don't have a recurring revenue as I operate one one-time payment, for the past months I have been consistently grossing over €500/mo.
This also brings tears to my eyes, as I remember[1] browsing these threads and being amazed (still am) by all the people who make side projects and make money from them, and at the same time thinking that I will never reach this milestone, and yet, here I am.
[0]: https://justfaxonline.com [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39110194#39141819
IanCal
Thanks for making a service where people can pay for a thing to happen, rather than an account and subscription and …
I often get frustrated at how hard it can be to give someone money to perform a service I want them to do and they want to be paid to do.
skwee357
Thank you very much. I try to focus on making usable software without enshittifying them.
al_borland
I don’t need to send a fax often, but when I do it’s a real pain. I’ll be bookmarking this.
I love that it doesn’t need an account and is a simple straightforward service, as if I was paying to use an actual fax machine somewhere. I wish nearly every service online was built this way.
Fiveplus
This is the coolest thing I've seen on this thread. Single purpose and a very nice, crystal clear homepage.
skwee357
Thank you! I appreciate the feedback!
zandert
That's super cool, how do you run it? Are you using some other service under the hood, and just abstract their annoying pricing model?
pjc50
It used to be possible to do this with a faxmodem; these days telephony is over IP, so there might be telco APIs for it. But, because it's a telco, that will be annoying and hidden.
UK: OFCOM are phasing out the fax support requirement https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/telecoms-infra...
(I slightly balked at the $5 initial price, but then realized: this is a desperation fee and I think for a lot of the users a clear fee for a clear one off service is the best deal. Anyone who wants to send 1,000 faxes will (a) be in the top 1% of fax users in their country if it's not Japan and (b) make their own arrangements. Also patio11's "charge more")
Software wise, if you have a PBX line (which the telco will change for) you can run Asterix and then https://www.asterisk.org/products/add-ons/fax-for-asterisk/ to send as many faxes as you like to the other person in your country with a fax machine.
randallsquared
Why would you need a PBX line to send faxes with Asterix? You'd just need a normal phone line with a plan that includes free ("long distance") calling to the whole country, right?
birdman3131
https://developers.telnyx.com/docs/programmable-fax/send-a-f... I use Telnyx. (Mainly because I also use them for voice.)
skwee357
Yes, I use another service + add a ton of stuff on top related to reliability, payments, and file formats. However, I have toyed with the idea of implementing my own fax sending. Maybe when I will be able to live off my side projects, I will explore this idea further.
brandon272
How do people find your service? It seems like there are a million "send a fax" online services out there so it would be difficult to get in front of potential customers.
skwee357
It's a very tough market. Before I started I found a handful of services, and saw some services appear after I started.
I focus on SEO mainly. Most users come from search engines and LLMs. Some users are returning customers.
jklein11
If you don't need an account to send a fax, how do you comply with law enforcement's requests to identify who sent a specific fax? I would think this would open you up to significant liability
malfist
Safe harbor laws protect you from liability of the content sent.
You can simply respond to law enforcement that you have no data outside of payment data
veverkap
Any thought of adding the ability to receive faxes too? I notice that most of the sending places don't offer that and it might be a difference if it's not too expensive.
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agotterer
A friend and I host a monthly dinner club for people interested in ethnic cuisine. We work with a single restaurant each month to create an 8-12 course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is served family style and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues or Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use the extra business.
Since 2023 we’ve been to 44 restaurants. In 2025 we served 1,099 guests and generated $126k in revenue.
bot347851834
This is so cool! As someone who loves trying out new restaurants I need to ask: why would I go with you guys instead of going to the restaurants myself with a friend or partner? Looking around your website it seems to me that there's very large attendance, which in my mind means generally less focus on the food itself. Do you think one of the main factors is meeting new people/the sense of community? Anyway good job! I'm not sure what your margins are but it's probably more than 500/month! Congrats!
agotterer
I think there’s quite a few reasons people come. I’m just going to bullet some of them out in no particular order:
- We do the work to find the restaurant and curate a menu, story, and theme. E.g., we might go to an Indian restaurant and focus the event on only the southern regional dishes.
- Many times we have dishes that are off menu specially for our event.
- Sense of community. We have quite a few regulars who have gotten to know each other. In 2025, 45 people reached their 20th or 30th event with us. Since we take over the whole restaurant there’s a little more freedom in how the space is used. Lots of new friendships have been forged.
- When you go to a restaurant with a friend or small group, you can only order so much. We’ve had events with upwards of 25 different bites. There’s really no better way to sample everything the restaurant has to offer.
- There’s a few people who say their partner are picky eaters, so they come to our event each month to have the opportunity to be a bit more adventurous. It’s an incredibly diverse group with a lot of different reasons to attend.
suranyami
Just to add my own observation here: some cuisines are really optimized for sharing in larger groups… certainly a lot of the regional Chinese cuisines assume many people at a table, with large (i.e. higher priced) servings. If it’s just 2 or 3 of you, you end up getting only 1 or 2 dishes, often with a lot left over.
So, this is a genius way of optimizing for that!
I totally want something like this here in Sydney.
VoidWhisperer
Out of curiosity, if you don't mind sharing, what is the sort of profit you see on that 126,000 as i'm assuming alot of that goes to paying the restaurants?
agotterer
Most of it goes to paying for the meal. We make around a 20% margin. Our cost to operate the business is quite low, but we do invest a lot of our personal time into it. It’s a labor of love.
Our biggest cost center is when we guarantee a minimum number of seats and come up a little short. Doesn’t happen often, but when it does it eats into the margin fast.
gaws
> we do invest a lot of our personal time into it
What's the process like?
thefolks
Love the communal aspect. Curious about the economics of this, how do you typically split revenue with the restaurant, and what’s the average ticket price per guest?
agotterer
We negotiate a per seat all in cost with the restaurant inclusive of food, one drink, tip, and tax. We sell the tickets directly to our members and add some margin on top. Average ticket is $115.
5 days before the event we lock the head count with the restaurant. At this point the ticket is non refundable (we allow transfers). Then we pay the restaurant one lump sum. At the event the guests are only responsible for their bar tab (outside the one included drink), we don’t get a cut of that.
Sometimes we have seat minimums we need to hit and eat the cost if we are short (that rarely happens). We don’t allow ordering any other food outside of what’s on our menu.
nefrix
I am also curious on that
kilroy123
Wow! I've thought so long about doing the same thing in London. I wouldn't do it to make money persay, but to meet amazing people and connect folks. Would love to chat sometime.
agotterer
We never intended to make money. The first dinner was with 13 of our friends. We just organized the location and menu.
From there people started to tell their friends, who told others, then the local newspaper wrote about us, and people started talking about us on Facebook food groups and posting on Instagram. The community grew very organically, we never spent a penny on marketing. Most of the original 13 don’t come anymore, and we have grown into an incredibly diverse community.
Happy to chat, email is in my profile.
12ian34
I host Supper Clubs in London :)
brazukadev
This is a great project! I'm thinking about doing something similar. Do you have any bad experiences, things you would have done different, or are thinking about improving now?
agotterer
Honestly, I can’t think of anything I would have done differently. Each stage of our growth came with some challenges and lessons. I think we did a pretty good job of internalizing and adapting. We definitely made some mistakes along the way, but nothing I regret doing and wouldn’t do again. Every mistake and lesson taught us something.
Feel free to email me if you run into any challenges. We might have already been through it!
brazukadev
great to hear! I'm getting a bit worried about possible legal issues - although that is because I might not be involved in every meeting so I'm worried about possible risks.
I sent you an email, my email handler is alanmeira. If you are too busy and can't waste time on this there is no problem tho, your post was quite motivating already.
1_over_epsilon
This is awesome, how did you get the word out and market/advertise?
agotterer
We’ve never paid for marketing or advertising.
- We are lucky to have a passionate community who tell others about us.
- Sometimes we do shared reels with the restaurant, which helps drive some of their traffic to our social pages and website.
- There’s a few large local Facebook food groups which have driven membership.
- The largest driver of new membership came from coverage in the region newspaper. We credit that with the transition from 1 or 2 degrees of separation to people we had no connection to.
- There’s been a few influencers who have shown up and documented their experience. We didn’t pay for it. It drove a few members, but the quality of the newspaper and Facebook group members was higher.
KellyCriterion
this actually is a great idea!
nhatcher
I was hesitant to add my own but I think you might find it interesting as we make money not from clients but from grants.
We have IronCalc[1]. We don't make money from customers as we don't have a finalized product yet. But we have an ongoing grant from the NLnet[2]. You can have a look at the kind of projects they are granting money. It's always a source of inspiration.
That being said IronCalc takes a lot of time from me. Way more than a side project should.
tda
The friction to try it out is already really low, I like that! But it could be even lower if instead of an image the interactive version is served right on the landing page. Great project!
nhatcher
Yes, Dani the designer involved in the project, keeps saying that. There are two things that stops me from doing that:
* It would make the landing page a bit heavier * I would need to synchronize deployments somehow
But I guess I should do that sooner rather than later.
Thanks!
RestartKernel
Just my two cents, but:
- In terms of data, this is nothing compared to any site serving a bunch of images. The compute would differ, but loading speed shouldn't be an issue if you can render the HTML first, and hydrate it after page load. This static HTML would then also serve as fallback when Javascript is disabled.
- For a quick demo, I doubt you will lose people by embedding an older version. Serving a version of a few months ago seems like 80% of the work, with 20% of the effort, in terms of deployment.
Anyhow, nice to see government funds put to a good cause!
written-beyond
This is lovely! I'm surprised I had never heard of it before today
haritha-j
This is very cool indeed. Is there anything similar for ppt presentations that you know of?
nhatcher
No, not really.
DANmode
Top-three time-sucks?
Thanks for sharing! Awesome.
jspizziri
An audiobook streaming service that focuses on timeless classic works in the public domain.
I do everything from building the app to the audio engineering.
One thing I'm especially proud of is the restoration I did on the "War of the Worlds" 1938 Radio broadcast. I'm really happy with how it turned out. I've made it temporarily free to listen to [1] in case anyone is curious. You should compare it with the original [2] and let me know what you think.
[1] https://app.soundreads.io/discover/item/war-of-the-worlds [2] https://archive.org/details/WarOfTheWorlds1938RadioBroadcast...
jspizziri
Since there's been a reasonable amount of traffic due to this comment, I thought I'd leave a 50% coupon ($11.75 for yr one) for HN folks in case anyone is interested:
http://app.soundreads.io/purchase/annual?prefilled_promo_cod...
megabless123
You should surface the library of content to public visitors. I would be more likely to convert if I knew that you had the content I wanted.
jspizziri
I just updated the home page (main nav & body content) to add a "Browse All Books" button that takes you into the app to view the current titles. Appreciate the feedback.
jspizziri
Thanks for the feedback!
Do you think adding a button to the homepage/marketing page that says something to the effect of "See all our content" that redirected you here:
Do you think that would do the trick?
rafram
I’m seeing a lot of AI tells in the cover art (like for War of the Worlds) and book descriptions. Didn’t see any discussion of where the narration comes from on the site. Are all your audiobooks restorations of classic readings? Do you hire narrators to record new ones? Or is there AI involved there too?
jspizziri
All the audio is by real humans but I definitely use AI help on the descriptions and images, as graphic design and copywriting are not areas I’m competent in, and as a side gig currently I only have so much time.
A good chunk of the initial audio has been curated and re-engineered/enhanced from librivox, however I’m also working with voice actors to produce originals. For instance I just release A Christmas Carol which is original to our platform (also see Metamorphosis and Alice and Wonderland). More are coming every month but it takes time to develop real audio recordings with humans.
I appreciate your constructive feedback and welcome more!
oakhaven
When I read your first comment, I immediately thought that the audiobooks are voiced by AI. I'm really surprised to learn the opposite.
So you take existing recordings created before 1929 and remaster them? Are recordings (of books published pre-1929) which were created after 1929 in public domain too?
I don't even want to ask about producing and voice actors.. Really nice idea and realization!
rafram
Thanks, this is good to hear!
crobertsbmw
I’m still selling Computer Engineering for Babies. And I just launched a new book called Simple Machines Made Simple on Kickstarter a month or two ago. Both books are basically just simple interactive demos for kids and adults.
arthurjj
It makes me so happy to see this genre taking off. We did "ABCs of Programming" [1] when our son was 2 at least partially because there weren't any real kid's books talking about what "dad does all day". Funnily enough it wasn't selling that well until I posted an article [2] on HN about my experience writing it. Then it did steady business for a few years
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1548489778 [2] https://arthur-johnston.com/hacker_writes_a_childrens_book/
jann
I got gifted Computer Engineering for Babies and big Babies last Christmas in preparation for having our first child :) They are great!
anotherhue
Literally the first book I bought for my hellspawn. We had fun working out the mechanisms.
kelvindegrees
One of my favorites! The baby likes it. The grandparents are confused by it.
tyrust
My kid got a copy of your first book as a gift a couple years ago. It's really fun to have on the shelf. The buttons are so satisfyingly clicky. Thanks!
crobertsbmw
Thanks for buying it!!
laurentiurad
Computer Engineering for Babies is great! I also added on my directory of well-crafted products: https://select.supply/product/computer-engineering-for-big-b...
ludicity
I bought two copies of Computer Engineering For Babies for some close friends! They were absolutely delightful.
matart
Thank you! As it has become popular at baby showers to bring a book I always send my partner with the original 2. We have probably gifted 5 or 6 sets now.
We are excited for the next version.
wonderfuly
Last year, I came across NotebookLM and immediately noticed a pain point: importing the web pages I was browsing into NotebookLM required several steps. So in less than a day, I developed this Chrome extension: NotebookLM Web Importer[1], which allows for one-click importing. As NotebookLM has gained popularity this year, my extension has also seen great growth. So, in July, I added paid premium features to unlock additional features. It exceeded my expectations and quickly went over $500 a month. It now has over 100,000 users and is still growing.
Fiveplus
I really liked your extension having used it in the past. Great job and really useful! If you don't mind me asking, how do you manage the paid features from a technical point of view? Do you give paid users a token to enter in the extension which then activates certain features or is it something else?
wonderfuly
It is account based, and I'm using Clerk for the auth.
gustavoaca1997
That sounds awesome. Can you please talk about which premium options you added?
nanfinitum
Wow, this is awesome. How did you market this? 100,000 users is a lot.
technusm1
Here’s my own side project that’s been earning a bit on the side:
I built DedupX, a macOS app for finding duplicate and visually similar files fast - especially useful for photographers and anyone with big local storage collections.
What it does
- Exact duplicate detection using incremental hashing so it doesn’t have to fully load huge files.
- Perceptual image matching finds similar images even if they’re resized or lightly edited (not just byte-for-byte duplicates).
- Native macOS integration with a Finder right-click scan.
Why I built it: My brother kept running out of space because of tons of photos, and every existing tool I tried either missed similar images or was slow and clunky - so I spent a couple of weekends building something that felt fast, accurate, and native.
Business side
- Free trial (no CC required).
- Paid tiers: ~$5.99/yr or ~$16.99 lifetime.
Got positive feedback and 100+ paying users shortly after launch. Been growing steadily ever since.
istjohn
Please double your prices, at minimum. (And port to Linux, so I can use it. Just CLI would be great.)
technusm1
Making this cross-platform is definitely a goal I wanna work on, but I lack knowledge of desktop app development on Windows and Linux.
I'm glad you think the app is cheap. Honestly I think the pricing is decent for the current set of features. I might revisit the price if I sneak in more features worthy of a higher price tag, but for now, it's good enough.
warangal
How do you market it, through social-media or are there dedicated channels for sharing awareness for such Mac Apps, if you don't mind sharing?
technusm1
I mostly shared the launch post and ran promo campaigns on Reddit, ProductHunt, LinkedIn, Discord and even tried HN (got no replies here -‿-"). Since then, its mostly word of mouth.
Thanks to my customers' feedback, I've made a lot of improvements to the app as well. Feels good getting positive feedback and hearing from people about their use-cases. :)
Links: [1]: Launch Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1ok5zaq/comment/nm... [2]: ProductHunt: https://www.producthunt.com/products/dedupx [3]: Promo campaign on Reddit for Black Friday: https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1paarc2/dedupx_50_... [4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45763117
alsetmusic
Froze at 99% scan completion on M1 Max, 64GB RAM, 14.8.2.
technusm1
Sorry about that - thanks for reporting it.
I haven’t been able to reproduce a freeze at 99% yet. If you’re willing, could you share a bit more detail (approx folder size / number of files, and whether CPU or memory spiked near the end)?
If you’re open to it, I’d also be happy to jump on a quick call or screen share to debug this together — totally optional. You can reach me at my support email mentioned in the About DedupX menu item. I’d really like to track this down and fix it.
tikotus
I started making a daily logic puzzle called Clues by Sam in May and it's been stadily growing since. The number one thing people were asking for was more puzzles, so I started selling puzzle packs instead of monetizing with ads. The reception has been great, and the revenue has been enough for me to decline some consulting gigs and instead focus on improving the game.
insin
I do Clues by Sam every day when I'm walking my dog before I start work, and I was particularly glad to have the daily mental workout this month, as I didn't have time for Advent of Code. Just bought both puzzle packs to support your great work!
tikotus
I don't know how you're able to focus while walking the dog, but good job! And thank you!
DuncanCoffee
Love it, I discovered it last week and bought a supporter pack after two days! Everytime I get stuck I'm 100% sure you made a mistake... Until I find my own mistake
tikotus
Thank you so much! Indeed, it's quite tempting to blame the game, but the algorithm that ensures all valid deductions are enabled hasn't been wrong a single time since it was finished in June. Often I don't believe it myself, but it always turns out to be smarter than me!
tikotus
Oh, and perhaps worth mentioning that today's puzzle is not very representative of a regular puzzle, as usually the grid is filled with different professions and not reindeers!
rkomorn
Is it representative of the regular difficulty because if so it... doesn't bode well for me.
The concept is really cool though. I like it!
tikotus
Thank you!
It's a pretty normal mid week puzzle. They start easy on Monday and get harder towards Sunday. But don't be afraid to use hints to get started with the game! It gets easier with time!
dezmou
I love it, just purchased a pack. I've also found that it is a very great tool to test LLM, like take a screenshot of a half resolved game and feed it to ChatGPT with the rules and ask him to select the next target
tikotus
Thank you so much! Also, you might find this interesting regarding testing LLMs: https://www.nicksypteras.com/blog/cbs-benchmark.html
dezmou
turn out Claude Sonnet 4.5 is far better as resolving those as ChatGPT 5.2
macaskar
Really loved it. Well done. 1000+ organic visits in 6+ months - awesome traction.
Do you want to put your CTA (puzzle packs) somewhere "higher" - closer to gameplay?
prettyblocks
Are the puzzles generated algorithmically or manually?
tikotus
It's a mix of things. For example, there's an algorithm that ensures all valid deductions are allowed (I'm not smart enough to ensure all of them manually!). But a good amount of manual work goes into each daily puzzle.
lucasqueiroz
I love the puzzles, I played once and already got the Pack #1, it's a great game! As soon as I finish #1, I will for sure get #2!
tikotus
Awesome! Thank you so much!
nyhc99
Thank you for the link, I loved today's puzzle and will now be a regular user
upmostly
I’m building DB Pro, a modern desktop database client for developers who want a fast, local-first workflow.
I started in October 2025, launched v1 at the end of November, and just crossed $1k MRR.
I also post devlogs of life building and marketing DB Pro and am about to post devlog #4. The latest one is here if anyone’s curious: https://youtu.be/-T4GcJuV1rM
Still very early, but it’s been fun seeing something fairly “boring” resonate once the UX is treated seriously.
kaizenb
Loved the design, looks better then the most tools I've tried. I'm using Prisma + Supabase in one of my side projects and having constant db issues. Can I integrate DB Pro? Will it replace Prisma or what?
upmostly
So DB Pro is a local desktop database client for managing your databases and data. Prisma ORM it won't replace, but Prisma's browser-based data browser, yes it will absolutely replace that. It's not a replacement for Supabase, it works alongside it, if that answers your question?
I'm planning to extend DB Pro into much more than a database manager though, letting you build dashboards, workflows and workbooks.
kaizenb
I've been trying to connect to Supabase, got help from an agent to but couldn't resolve the issue and connect :/
What’s actually broken
DB Pro:
Enforces strict TLS verification
Uses its own certificate trust bundle
Does not:
read macOS System Keychain reliably
allow custom CA injection
allow “require but don’t verify”
Supabase pooler requires either:
trusting Supabase’s CA, or
allowing non-verified SSL
DB Pro supports neither.
So it fails with:
self signed certificate in certificate chain
This is a product limitation / bug in DB Pro.
devonhk
Any reason why neon isn't supported even though it speaks the postgresql wire protocol?
upmostly
It has some behaviour differences (connection handling, pooling, serverless constraints) that I want to support properly rather than “mostly works”. Right now I'm focused on making the core experience rock solid across the most common setups first. My focus has been UX and DevEx and it's working.
Neon support is on the roadmap though, and once I add it, it’ll be first-class rather than a checkbox integration.
benhurmarcel
For what it’s worth, I think there’s space for such an app for Duckdb databases. It’s growing in popularity and not very widely supported yet.
jamesholden
Hi! When will Windows/Linux be available? I'm growing weary of DB Browser for SQLite.
upmostly
Windows and Linux are both launching next week (just in time for Xmas!)
bgdkbtv
Looks cool and congrats on the $1k MRR! Is the app built with electron?
upmostly
Thanks!
Yep, it’s built with Electron. Performance has been a big focus from day one, and it’s been really performant in all of my testing so far. The goal was a proper desktop-first experience with local performance and direct database access, rather than trying to force it into a web app. Although I do have plans to offer a self-hosted version as well.
macaskar
semrush shows that your organic visits significantly increased this week. Well done. Great product. Succes!
posed
What did you use to build the frontend? It looks cool!
scrivanodev
How do you enforce licensing? Did you build your own solution?
yboris
Occasionally $500/month, but more reliably $300/month in sales of my Video Hub App - lets users browse, search, tag, and organize videos on local / network drives. Aiming to have an 8th anniversary release February 2026.
$5 per copy (Windows, Max, Linux; keep forever) https://videohubapp.com/
MIT open source (build your own copy) https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
huhtenberg
A bit of unsolicited advice -
* Focus on Windows users. Windows desktop share is 10x that of Mac and nowadays Windows users pay almost as willingly as Mac ones.
* Charge several times more.
* Redo the website. In particular get rid of 3D slant and on-hover animations, put larger high-res screenshots, explain each of them well (and not in gray on gray text), put up "Windows / Mac / Linux" in bold friendly and highly-visible letters. Better yet have separate Download buttons for each. Add version and last release date, next to the Download button. Have at-a-glance summary of features closer to the top of the page. Ditto for pricing and trialing details. Ideally, adjust windows chrome in the screenshots based on the web client's OS, i.e. show Windows screenshots to Windows visitors, Mac ones - to those coming from Macs, etc. The last thing you want to show Mac screenshots to Windows people, because it implies that the Windows version was an afterthought.
All in all, the site gives an amateurish/hobby project vibe, and the $5 price cements the impression. If you are to spruce things up a bit, you can potentially live off this app. At the very least and with not much of an effort you can double/triple what you make off it.
yboris
Thank you for all the suggestions! I like them and will try to implement at least a few in the coming year (I end up spending more time towards other exciting projects like writing a sci-fi novel and DIY remodeling my house).
DANmode
Are you open to working with a janitor-like minority partner?
rsanek
Woudln't OP be able to tell what the platform split is just based on his internal download metrics?
huhtenberg
With Mac screenshots on the site they won't tell much. Plus the point is that it's worth to actively cater to Windows users even if you don't have many at the moment.
nohillside
Did you bother to look at the source code? It's Electron-based, so the effort for supporting more than one OS isn't very high.
combyn8tor
Curious how you manage licensing?
yboris
When a person buys, they get the download links in the mail; the installers work without any license keys, so buy once, use forever.
markdown
Intel macs only?
jotaen
Not OP, but it looks like the wording of their downloads page (https://videohubapp.com/en/download/) is slightly confusing:
- Clicking “Demo” (for macOS) points to the 3.2.0 ARM version
- Clicking “Intel Mac” points to the 3.1.0 (!) Intel version
The Github release page appears to list all available versions: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App/releases
To me, it would have been clearer to avoid the “Demo” button label altogether and be explicit about the different versions and OS targets. Also, I think the visual hierarchy of the two respective buttons is too subtle.
markdown
Hey thanks!
laurentiurad
I built and run several SaaS platforms:
- https://dave-bot.com -> a full-stack AI platform where you can generate videos, images, music, code, 3d objects with frontier Gen AI models.
- https://headsnap.io -> a platform that you can generate images of yourself based on 4 selfies.
- https://quantiq.live -> a service providing financial and historical data for stocks, as well as government trades.
- https://aivestor.tech -> an AI agent that picks small/midcap stocks and trades them using Alpaca API. It uses Reddit, news, polymarket, Google Trends and many other data sources to take investment decisions.
- @Polyglot_lingua_bot -> a voice-enabled Telegram-based bot that can help you learn new languages.
- https://select.supply -> a directory of carefully-curated and well-crafted products.
All of those allowed me to quit my day job and live a comfortable and flexible life. I still invest time in maintenance and adding new features, but I love coding, marketing and everything that comes with promoting and selling a SaaS (and I also have a serious addiction for Stripe notifications).
On top of that, I developed my own software agency where I help clients build and scale software (https://bitheap.ch).
rahulmax
Headsnap is such a scammy and/or crappy website. I paid to purchase credits for $5, tried to train a model to generate a headshot. Nothing. It just refreshes and comes back with nothing. Will not recommend.
laurentiurad
When did you do it? The minimum package is $8. If you did this in the past, why didn't you reach out for support? I get more than 100 customers per day and rarely have issues.
laurentiurad
ah now I see you generated your pics 8 minutes ago. You can now see them on your account page. I have a clear disclaimer that says it can take up to 30 mins to generate the photos and that you will get an email once the photos are ready.
dustypotato
you can just do it with nano banana for 1/100 the price
ak9802
Thats true. And using it on https://nanobanana.is can be even cheaper.
laurentiurad
You won't get consistency between pics with nano banana. I tried using it in Headsnap and the results weren't as good. Faces change drastically between pics. Also the cost per pic with nano banana is 0.24 per pic, x 30 pictures that I generate for a pack, you would pay $7 (with big quality issues).
marziply
I find both of your stock apps (API and investment) quite interesting but both websites are eerily absent of any information outside of their respective purposes. Both websites are clean and the designs are nice but struggle on mobile it seems (I'm on Android, Brave browser, horizontal scroll seems to be buggy). I wish there was additional information outside of just what they do - I'd like to know more about the developer that created them, goals/ambitions for the future, that kind of thing. Right now, the investment app looks like a scam from an outside perspective. One page, limited information, nothing personal about it. How can I trust such a website with my hard earned cash? I think an improvement would be to have additional pages on who you are, why I should trust you, and what exactly I might get in return for my subscription. It's also probably important to make it clear that you cannot promise any long term profits from this app and that it is almost akin to gambling so users should be prepared to lose money.
laurentiurad
thanks a lot for the feedback! That's a really good point!
When it comes to QuantiQ, I thought about targeting businesses. I already have 2 major clients and had plenty of demos with others. Usually they are not interested when taking a decision about reading pages on the website. Most of them are concentrated on finding out how you manage incidents, security policy, how do you handle improvement suggestions, SDLC, velocity etc. They anyway do their due diligence when it comes to the founder. But I totally understand your point. For B2C this is really important.
Already fixing the mobile navigation and adding some pages with more info about me.
vintagedave
Do you delete the uploaded photos after you've finished processing? The privacy policy does not make this clear.
Alternately that their presence doesn't grant any rights for other use would be a good clause which I didn't spot.
laurentiurad
I remove the photos only if requested by the user. The photos are removed immediately, as well as the account if that is requested too. I definitely do not use the pics for retraining or any other purpose, but just to serve them on the individual overview page of the user.
eXpl0it3r
What's your source and/or quality of the financial data? How much do you cover? What data fields do you provide?
laurentiurad
I fetch those from 10-Q forms through an internal scraper I built. The response is quite big, you can check it out here: https://www.quantiq.live/docs
akudha
Nice! Makes me wonder how many other businesses are possible to build, on top of govt data.
infecto
Honestly looks like a scam and your description of it makes it even sound more like one. Most of those fields you return in that docs page have nothing to do with k or qs and are equity pricing data you are buying from another third party.
Not a knock just being honest as it looks like you just don’t know so maybe this helps. Here is an example of a real company that scrapes k/q docs.
aembleton
I get 404 when I look for pricing of headsnap - https://headsnap.io/pricing
laurentiurad
thanks a lot for the heads up! That menu shouldn't be available for users that are not logged in. I just pushed a change to hide it. You can check the prices at the bottom of the landing page, before I add a dedicated page for unauthenticated users.
LE: I just added the pricing page for unauthenticated users too.
mft_
Well-meaning feedback: on the front page, there's a pricing section lower down, which only mentions credits and doesn't give a price; the click-though goes to a login screen.
I found this so instantly frustrating that I rage-closed the page and came here to moan!
Reading the comments, I don't believe you're looking to implement a dark pattern and not show the price, but that's what seems to be happening currently.
Now I see the main pricing page, it's worth pointing out that the categories and prices there don't match with those on the front page: 'starter' with 30 headshots vs. 'novice' with 35; 'basic' with 60 headshots vs. 'proficient' with 70, etc.
davenci
Do you think it will become more difficult to make money on such services due to AI getting better and better at coding? Like, wouldn’t that make it easier for people to create competing services?
Or do you think this effect is counteracted with AI also opening up for new opportunities for creating services that would not otherwise be feasible pre AI?
laurentiurad
I agree that development has become easier and the barrier for entry is generally lower due to AI. However, without distribution it's still pretty much impossible to get clients. You also need to have some engineering background since AI cannot solve everything for you.
Important to mention, IMHO not many people are willing to sacrifice their time and energy to start something that doesn't have a clear path to profitability.
davenci
That makes sense. And I guess distribution/marketing is an ever moving target in which those being the most clever and willing to put in the time and energy wins regardless of AI getting better?
Like, say AI makes distribution and marketing easier, now it’s easier for everyone, but they still compete for the same clients. So while your signal is getting stronger, so is the noise (the signal of all the other competitors). So those who put in the hours and smartness to «invent» a more clever marketing strategy are the ones able to break through the noise and reach the clients?
In other words, distribution/marketing is the bottleneck and the target is ever moving?
whatamidoingyo
That headshot project looks completely AI generated. The landing page is a full-fledged AI template.
laurentiurad
You mean the frontend? What makes it entirely AI-generated in your view? Even if it were, would that be a problem for you or you're just envious?
pplonski86
Wow! how do you make marketing for so many projects?
laurentiurad
It's the most difficult part. In my experience paid ads do not work very well so I am not relying too much on those. I usually use social media with UGC videos created either by me or by content creators. I also reach out on Instagram, even dating apps, to users and pay them to use/promote a product.
Recently I started to use n8n automation to post on Twitter/LinkedIn, however I tend to keep those posts short since they are created with LLM's and do not seem authentic.
As for the SEO part, I usually upload search console extracts into Perplexity deep research and ask for actions on how to improve ranking for different keywords.
nationaloil
really inspiring! Any tips on how you manage incidents and customer queries?
laurentiurad
thanks! Most of these projects are hosted on Vercel, and I am extensively using their observability solution to get alerts when something unexpected happens. After some time you get to fix everything and you'll spend less time firefighting.
For customer queries, I usually respond myself. However when I am not available, I have a small team of freelancers that help me just with that. I played with LLMs for responding to questions, but it just didn't work out for me.
mickael-kerjean
I launched Filestash [1] as my response to the infamous “Dropbox should just be FTP” comment. Once I had a decent FTP experience, I kept going: adding support for pretty much every storage protocol, plugins to expose Dropbox (or anything else) over FTP, SFTP, MCP, or S3, and all the features I wished Dropbox had, with plugins to customize everything.
The base product is open-source and I make money from custom builds, additional plugins, paid support, and the occasional extra feature for companies with specific needs. It's a bit more than noodle profitable but quite under a normal salary.
PurpleRamen
Where is the dropbox-part in this? This seems to be a filemanager for remote storages, which is kinda the opposite of dropbox, which is mainly a local service for syncing data. Or did the documentation missed explaining the sync-function?
eleventen
What a blast from the past. I attempted to build a file-sharing tool for my team when we had video and images strewn across the org. I prototyped embedding filestash for the frontend.
It was basically a backend for generating STS credentials on the fly using a more ergonomic interface. It never went anywhere and I haven't thought about it in years, but I still believe it was a good idea that I just didn't have the organizational clout or time to push forward.
Edit: apparently I contributed at some point too? I *barely* remember that. Glad to see the project is still succeeding!
black_puppydog
This could probably be more profitable for you with better tagline/explanation!
I have the context for what "that comment" was, might even be in the target audience, yet from the landing page I'm still not entirely sure what it actually does. Might be worth trying a few "it's like X but with Y" or "imagine if dropbox could Z" and other formulations on uninitiated people in your target audience?
two_handfuls
I found a typo: "Apply fined grained access control to keep your shared content under control." should be "fine-grained access control".
randallsquared
The faux screenshot of HN tickled me.
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It's the time of the year again, so I'd be interested hear what new (and old) ideas have come up. Previously asked on:
2024 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42373343
2023 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38467691
2022 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34190421
2021 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095
2020 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167
2019 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20899863
2018 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17790306
2017 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148804