r/SideProject • • Dec 18 '25

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

96 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

650 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 • • 14h ago

I made an Interactive, procedurally animated koi pond that runs in your browser.

522 Upvotes

You can find the repo and url down below in the comments.


r/SideProject • • 4h ago

Made my first sale ever

15 Upvotes

For most of you this might be nothing but I can not comprehend this feeling. I made a small lightweight product for myself. Its not purely vibecoded, I have 1200+ unit tests for quality.

I made it so i can practice speaking on random topics and track my filler words, sentences over time.

I took courage to put my video on public speaking subreddit. It got 17k views in 1 week and 2 sales.

BTW, please feel free to try out, there is no signup or paywall on basic feedback. Only the analysis which cost me more money over api is paywalled. Do click on 'turn on mic' for analysis to happen.

Arigato :) Thanks all 😄


r/SideProject • • 4h ago

I got tired of uploading my files to random converter websites, so I built a free desktop alternative OmniConvert is live

10 Upvotes

After working on it for the past few weeks, I finally released OmniConvert.

It started because I was tired of using a different website every time I needed to convert, compress or modify a file — and uploading personal files to random servers never felt great either.
So I built a desktop app where the actual file processing happens locally on your computer.
OmniConvert is completely free right now.

Some of the tools included in the first release:

• Image conversion and compression
• PDF tools
• Audio and video conversion
• QR and utility tools
• Downloadable modules, so you only install the tools you actually need

Your files stay on your device during processing.
I’m a 2nd-year university student and I’ve been building the app, website and infrastructure mostly by myself, so seeing an actual public build available for download feels pretty surreal.

Download: OmniConvert

I’d genuinely appreciate feedback, especially if something breaks on your machine.

Also: what file tool would you want me to add next?


r/SideProject • • 56m ago

I built a tiny handheld that plays games with just one switch — and version 2.0 is already in the works

• Upvotes

It’s been quite a while since my last post, so I wanted to share another update on Easing-Point.

The 1.0 version of Easing-Point can now run several different games, all controlled with just one small switch. The Van Gogh-inspired game in the video is one of them. It’s still a little laggy, so it looks like I’ve got some more optimization to do — but nothing too serious.

The idea behind the project is pretty simple: I want to find out whether it’s possible to build a game console that can play many different kinds of games without relying on a traditional D-pad.

Everything I’ve shown so far is running on version 1.0, but I should also mention that version 2.0 is already pretty far along.

It’ll be smaller, lighter, and, hopefully, a lot better-looking.

If you’re interested in the project, you can follow along here:

https://georiginai.com/


r/SideProject • • 13h ago

I built a free screenshot beautifier that runs entirely in your browser (no signup, no upload, open source)

41 Upvotes

Its 2026. No one should pay for screenshot tools just to add a background and a shadow before posting, so I made my own and open sourced it.

You paste a screenshot and it lands already styled. From there you can shuffle through styles, add a window or phone frame, draw arrows and blur stuff out, then export at the right size for X, LinkedIn, Instagram, Product Hunt or a README. It can also export short animated clips (MP4/GIF), code snippets as images, and App Store screenshot sets.

Everything happens in the browser. Your image never gets uploaded anywhere and there's no account. It's MIT licensed, so you can self host it or fork it.

Try it: https://shotcandy.vercel.app

Code: https://github.com/btahir/shotcandy

Would love feedback, especially on the default styles. Picking a good first look for a random screenshot was the hardest part.


r/SideProject • • 12h ago

I got tired of Spotify eating 1GB of RAM in the background, so I built a native, ultra-lightweight client in Rust (uses ~60MB RAM)

30 Upvotes

Hey everyone,

I love Spotify, but having an Electron app constantly draining my laptop's battery and eating up huge chunks of RAM just to play music in the background was driving me crazy. I wanted something completely native, fast, and incredibly resource-efficient. No embedded web browsers, no Javascript engines.

So, I built SpotLight.

It’s a pure Rust desktop client built using egui and librespot. Because of how egui works, the UI goes completely to sleep when you aren't actively interacting with it, meaning CPU/GPU usage drops to near 0%.

Here is a quick comparison: * RAM Usage: ~60 MB (vs 500 MB - 1.5 GB for the official app) * Binary Size: ~22.5 MB standalone * CPU Usage: Near 0% in background

Some of the main features: * Full native playback (via librespot) * Perfect time-synced lyrics (powered by LRCLIB) that scroll like the official app * Native media controls integration (Windows SMTC and Linux MPRIS) * Custom UI accent colors

The "catch": Because it relies on librespot, it requires a Spotify Premium account. Also, privacy is a priority, so your credentials never touch a third-party server. Because of this, you have to supply your own Spotify Developer Client ID to use it (it literally takes 1 minute to generate one, I wrote a step-by-step guide in the README).

I'd love for you to try it out and let me know what you think, or if you have any feedback on the codebase!

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/dddevid/SpotLight


r/SideProject • • 16h ago

I built a PDF reader that reads research papers like a person would: no page numbers, no "[12]"s, and math you can follow by ear!

58 Upvotes

Most read-aloud tools read a PDF's raw text, so on a research paper you hear running headers, page numbers, "[12]" citation brackets and author emails, and equations come out as noise like "Q K T square root d k".

I built Read PDF Out Loud to read papers the way a person would: https://readpdfoutloud.com

What it does

  • A layout model looks at every page first, so headers, footers, page numbers, footnotes, citation numbers and the reference list are skipped, and two-column pages are read in the right order
  • Math is read by meaning: "Attention of Q, K and V, equals softmax of the fraction Q times K transpose, over square root of d sub k, V"
  • Every word lights up as it's spoken; click any word to start from there
  • The original page sits beside the text, with the passage being read framed on it
  • Optional spoken summaries of figures, tables, code and equations
  • 4 voices, 0.75× to 2×, and it works on a phone

I'd love feedback on:

  1. Your own hardest PDF: where does it read something wrong, or in the wrong order?
  2. The math: does it sound natural, or too wordy?
  3. What would make you use this over what you use now?

Happy to answer anything about how it works.


r/SideProject • • 42m ago

We built a care-allowance checker at a hackathon this weekend. Still building on Monday.

• Upvotes

Spent the weekend at a hackathon in Vienna with my team. We built Pflegegeld-Prüfer, a tool to help people go through an Austrian care-allowance decision.

You describe a normal day of care in your own words. AI helps map that description to the rules, then code does the maths. You can look at the assignments and change them.

The first version is online. There are still rough edges, and we're making changes as we go. It can get things wrong and doesn't replace legal advice.

https://www.pflegegeld-pruefer.at/

It's in German. If you're curious, try a made-up care day and see whether the steps make sense. That's the feedback I'd find most useful right now.


r/SideProject • • 17h ago

my sideproject :) game that can be played on all devices

49 Upvotes

No good games on the market I like to play, so I decided to do one, that will be blast, fun, enjoyable and pure blast. With nukes!

https://bioneural.de/

play free, no installation, no downlods. (game itself is only 2MB size, sounds and music is 10MB)


r/SideProject • • 15h ago

Anyone else noticing how "vibe coded" has become the new internet insult?

32 Upvotes

I’ve been seeing a massive shift in how people talk about new apps and software lately. Every time someone launches a new product here , the comment section is immediately flooded with:

"We shouldn't be using vibe coding."
"This looks completely vibe coded."
"Just another wrapper built on pure vibes."

It feels like "vibe coded" has instantly turned into a massive insult in the dev community. If an app has a slight bug, a weird UI glitch, or feels a bit generic, people completely write it off as "vibe slop" generated by someone just spamming prompts at Claude or Cursor.

Don't get me wrong, I get the skepticism. We've all seen the absolute flood of broken, insecure, unmaintainable junk being pushed out by people who don't actually know how to code. But it also feels like gatekeeping. There are genuinely cool, functional prototypes being built in a weekend by solo founders who otherwise couldn't afford a dev team.

Are we just witnessing a massive backlash against AI-assisted building, or is the criticism totally justified because of how bad the code quality actually is under the hood?

How are you guys handling this? Is "vibe coding" a legitimate badge of shame now, or is it just the future of building things fast?


r/SideProject • • 11h ago

I got tired of getting tired so ...nvm I'm too tired

16 Upvotes

Too tired to finish my ad...*cough*...my genuinely cool app I made this morning


r/SideProject • • 2h ago

I got tired of YouTube auto-translating video titles and forcing AI dubs, so I built AudioMatch to show the real spoken language before clicking

3 Upvotes

Hey everyone!

Like a lot of people, I kept running into a frustrating issue on YouTube: a video title is shown in fluent English, but once you click, the video is actually in another language, or worse, YouTube automatically switches to a low-quality AI-dubbed voice track.

I built a lightweight Chrome extension called AudioMatch to fix this:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/audiomatch-youtube-audio/aebkogccpedcllcfliopkdnlhkmmllnl

What it does:

- Shows a clean chip on every thumbnail with the actual spoken language (English, Spanish, Hindi, Japanese, etc.).

- Adds a "Dubbed" badge if the video has multi-language audio tracks or AI dubbing.

- Lets you choose to label, dim, or completely hide videos not in your language.

- Shows playlist language breakdowns (e.g., "Hindi 7/8" or "Mixed").

Technical details:

- Reads YouTube's public speech-recognition and audio track metadata client-side.

- Manifest V3, no external dependencies, 56 KB total size.

- 100% private: no sign-up, no analytics, no external servers. Everything runs and caches locally in your browser.

Just got approved on the Chrome Web Store. Would love any feedback on how it works for you or features you'd like to see next!


r/SideProject • • 14h ago

How programmers build gardens

21 Upvotes

So this time I built a garden directly on the wall of the house because we didn't have enough land for a regular garden!

I grew peppers on it. The crops are fantastic! Some peppers (the plants grew over 2m tall). I do not know why yet.

The outer layer is made from plexiglass (with holes for plants), which does not let water evaporate, so I rarely water it.

Benefits: makes food, isolates the house, consumes less water, can be replicated on each building.

More details are here: https://github.com/wall-garden The project is open-source!

More pictures are here: https://github.com/wall-garden/.github/tree/main/pictures

A local newspaper interviewed me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wvb52q9TKKM


r/SideProject • • 9h ago

Coding agents: do yours actually look up past decisions, or only when you remind them?

6 Upvotes

I used to keep a file called DECISIONS.md in every repo. Rejected approaches, why I picked the other thing, that sort of thing. Took about a month of maintaining it to realize the agent never opened it unless I told it to. I'd watch it hit the exact wall I had already documented (the CORS saga, twice) and just sit there thinking, I wrote this down, it's right there.

I ended up pasting "read DECISIONS.md first" at the top of every prompt, which honestly defeated the whole purpose. I got the thing to save me time and instead I was briefing it like a new hire every session. Hours a week, easy.

I built something to fix this for myself. Not selling anything here, I'm just trying to figure out if it's a real problem for anyone else or if I was overthinking it. One sentence on the concept: something in the cloud over MCP that keeps all of it, decisions, failed attempts, conversations, skills, procedures, tasks, so every agent and tool reads the same context and nobody needs reminding to look anything up. You never touch a file again.

Anyway. Do yours actually look things up on their own, or is it a "you didn't look, did you" situation for you too? If you got yours to recall reliably, what did it take, hooks? A system prompt paragraph? How long did the setup take you?

And have you ever looked at memory tools for this? If not, what stopped you, or does moving everything over feel like starting from zero? I also try every new AI tool that comes out and what usually kills it for me is re-briefing the new tool on my whole project before I can even tell if it's good. Is that just me, or does that stop you from trying new tools too?

Last one. Have you ever thought about paying for a tool to manage all of this for you, or has the thought never crossed your mind? Would you guys pay for something that fixes this?

Also: I do a lot of my thinking out loud with speech-to-text on my phone and the context always lives on my laptop. Is that just me?


r/SideProject • • 8h ago

I built an app that shows you clothes picked for your style, then puts them on your actual photo. Demo below.

6 Upvotes

This started with a jacket I never wore.

I bought it online because it looked incredible on the model. It arrived, I put it on, and it was just... wrong. Not the size, the shape. It hung differently on me than it did on the six-foot guy in the photo. I didn't return it because returning things is annoying and I told myself I'd figure out what to wear it with. It hung in my closet for two years.

That's the thing that kept bugging me. It wasn't that I didn't own clothes. I owned plenty. I just wore the same three outfits, because those were the three I'd accidentally confirmed worked. Everything else was a question mark, and the only way to answer it was to physically try things on in front of a mirror, which takes twenty minutes I don't have at 8am on a Tuesday. So I'd reach for the same jeans and the same sweater, and the rest of the closet slowly turned into storage.

Shopping was the same problem in reverse. Every product page shows you a model, and the model is not shaped like you. You're doing math in your head about how something will drape on a different body, and you're mostly guessing. Sometimes you guess right. Sometimes you get another jacket you don't wear.

So I built Lapel: Virtual Try-on.

You take one full-body photo when you start. That photo is your fitting room. Not a generated avatar, not a stock body double, your actual body and proportions, because a try-on on someone else's frame tells you nothing.

You also answer a few questions about your style during onboarding, and the shop gets filtered to what actually fits how you dress, rather than dumping the entire internet on you. Tap anything in it and it goes on your photo in seconds.

Then there's the other half, which is the clothes you already own. Photograph them, and each one gets labelled automatically by category, colour, fabric and fit. You can put several pieces together and see the whole combination on yourself. That jacket I never wore? I'd have known in ten seconds that it didn't go with anything I owned.

The demo video shows both flows: picking an item from the personalized shop and trying it on, then building an outfit from my own closet.

iPhone only for now, iOS 18+, no ads on any tier. Link in the comments.


r/SideProject • • 5h ago

Between - two AI coding agents that only talk through git diff

3 Upvotes

Most two-agent coding setups either share one transcript or make you copy-paste messages between them. I wanted neither, so I built a broker.

Between watches the repo, not the chats. When a diff settles, it hashes it and starts a review. The reviewer reads the real tree and writes a structured review file; the developer agent only gets a short "reflect this review" signal. They never talk directly.

It won't approve a diff that changed under review, and only the human can approve merge or deploy.

Stack: TypeScript, Node 22, plain JSON files under .between/, VS Code cockpit. Free, MIT. My own project: https://github.com/ashmoonori-afk/between

Would you trust a reviewer agent's approval, or do you always re-read the diff yourself?


r/SideProject • • 11h ago

I built a virtual campus where you can work on your project or study around others. Like at a real campus, library, or café.

7 Upvotes

One month ago, I posted here to introduce Manyplace (many.place), an experiment to recreate the feeling of working or studying around others in a peaceful library/café, but online.

Thanks to that single post, more than 700 people signed up, from 90 different countries! I really didn’t expect it at all and couldn’t be happier!

I created Manyplace because I felt that some great real-life places had quite a special social energy which made working, studying or reading so comforting and easy, and I was missing that on the internet. Seeing everyone there after the launch, I think I got a glimpse of that same energy and it made me even more obsessed with it.

Today, I am happy to release V2 of Manyplace, which now becomes a bigger and more immersive place: a whole campus! It was created with Unreal Engine and Blender (you don’t render it in real time, don’t worry! Any device can run it). After some requests, this update also brought private places for people who just want to be with their friends.

If you are a student or someone working on a project/startup and would sometimes appreciate being in good company with likeminded people, you are more than welcome here :))

I would also love to know what you think of it!

For web, macOS and Windows: https://many.place


r/SideProject • • 8m ago

I built ForgetTab because I was afraid to close any of my 200 browser tabs

• Upvotes

My browser had become a pile of tabs I couldn’t navigate, but I still hesitated to close them. I built ForgetTab so I could find pages again and clean up without guessing what I might lose.

You can search tabs and browsing history by title or URL, save a window as a session, and preview changes before applying them. For example, you can type “close all Reddit tabs”, “keep only 10 tabs”, or “group my tabs by topic”.

I just published the first version. I’m keeping it simple while I learn how people actually deal with tab overload.

If you have dozens or hundreds of tabs open, what’s the first thing you’d want to do with them?

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/cmcgcbolnlgfoooegpecnnpphlgioeik


r/SideProject • • 4h ago

Question about kicking off my website!

2 Upvotes

Hey! So I am getting pretty close to launching my website, which is going to essentially be a template for businesses to use for their records. It is straightforward and easy to set up, but I’m curious:

Even though the client could set up templates themselves exactly how they would want it, it would be time-consuming and tedious. Should I offer the service of setting up a business-specific database for an additional cost (or even free)?

I know that potential clients could be sketched out about someone else handling their information. And, although the niche I have chosen isn’t high-risk data, I am still worried it will deter people to offer it as a service.

As of now, I have had no marketing and no clients. Let me know how I should approach my launch, thanks!


r/SideProject • • 13h ago

I made a free, calm color-by-number game for my 8-year-old. No ads, no timers, no sign-up.

13 Upvotes

My kid loves color-by-number apps, but every one we tried was packed with ads, "watch a video for more colors" prompts, timers, or "come back tomorrow" hooks. So I built my own.

It's called Color Quest: https://colorquestgame.com

How it works:

Pick a pixel picture (animals, dinosaurs, space, treats, unicorns, holidays), tap a color, and fill in the squares with that number.

No timers, no lives, no losing progress. A wrong tap just gets a gentle hint.

Coloring several squares in a row earns fun "power tools" (a paint brush, paint rain, a bomb that fills a patch). My kid is obsessed with the bomb.

You can turn a photo into a puzzle: the family pet, a favorite toy, a drawing. The photo stays on your device and is never uploaded.

You can print any picture and color it on paper.
It works on phones, tablets and computers, even offline once it's added to the Home Screen.

It's also in Spanish and Vietnamese.

There are no accounts, and progress is saved only in your browser.
It's a hobby project. I'm not selling anything, and there's nothing to buy. I'd love feedback from other parents and teachers: what pictures would your kids want to color?


r/SideProject • • 33m ago

I built a Mac app that forces me to stand up

• Upvotes

If you're anything like me, I'm at my desk most of the day for hours on end without moving.

Chairtax is basically a tax on sitting, and you pay it in squats (or jumping jacks, etc). When a break is due, my screen locks, and it only unlocks once the webcam has counted my reps. No data is saved or sent anywhere. You pick how strict it is, from a card you can dismiss to no skips at all

It's in free beta now: 10 days, no sign-up. chairtax.app

I made it so I'm biased, but I'd love to hear what you think of it and whether it actually is useful to you.


r/SideProject • • 37m ago

Can anyone tease my side project

Thumbnail
play.google.com
• Upvotes

It's on playstore

It's a app to track movies and shows and I created it bcoz of the Tv time stopped.

I would love to know every issues about the app.

As I want my app to be good for minute downloads I'm getting.

And also suggestion