Ask HN: If your project is free, what are you building and why keep it free?
12 hours ago
I'm curious about projects that are launched and run for free.
What are you building? How much does it cost you to operate? How long do you plan to keep it free?
Do you have a monetization plan later, or is the goal something else (learning, community, portfolio, etc.)?
Would love to hear about your projects and how you think about sustainability.
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...
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- 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.)
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
I have a project that has been in 'perpetual beta' for years so it is a free download (25 MB zip file).
It runs completely on the user's computer so there is no service to maintain.
It is a new kind of data management system that was originally an object store to replace conventional file systems; but the tagging features I designed made it useful for creating, querying, and analyzing relational tables.
It is a hobby, so I like seeing how much faster I can perform operations than regular RDBMSs. It is extremely flexible, so lately I have been testing it out using large data sets. Creating tables with 100,000 columns or doing a pivot table in a 227M row table is fun for me.
See my profile for links.
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?
Published web clipper for apple notes for free: https://avrhut.com/web-clipper-to-apple-notes/
Cost is the VPS instance, which I already had, and apple developer fee per year. I need the clipper for myself, and put it out there without any monetization strategy and many folks are using it now. Have thoughts about adding some features for monetization if users ask for more. So far, it is doing the job for me and haven't heard any burning asks from others, so plan to keep it as is.
I've built bewCloud [1] (a simpler and modern alternative to Nextcloud and ownCloud) for me and my family and it's free because it's open source and you can host it yourself, thus not costing me much to maintain (dealing with issues and requests and emails does take a toll, though).
Because we use it (and depend on it), I am vested in making sure it works and continues to work well, and doesn't get too complex or complicated, unnecessarily.
That being said, I've made some money from donations, grants, and people paying me to manage instances for them, for example.
[1] https://bewcloud.com
Everything I build is free (no ads, no premium subscriptions). A lot of what I create is educational, so if it helps people, that's reward enough.
To keep costs down, I manage my own VPS and limit myself to projects that can run 100% client-side (e.g. no reliance on third-party APIs).
No reliance on third-party APIs means your apps are severely limited, no?
It kind of depends on what you build.
Shah Kur is a chess trainer that lets you set novel types of invisibility to help teach you to learn to play blindfold chess (without a board). It's got VAD + voice recognition (can use on your phone hands-free) alongside a WASM implementation of the chess engine, etc.
Lend Me Your Ears is a free piano game in the style of the old "Simon" toy which presents players with a sequence of musical notes and challenges them to reproduce the sequence using either an on-screen piano or a connected MIDI keyboard. It uses the Web MIDI API and YIN for realtime accurate detection of notes (so you can use a guitar for example).
That's just a few examples, but you'd be surprised how far you can get with nothing more than a client-side application.
Mee too. You're doing right thing
Monetization means enshittification.
That's so true. Can you tell me about your project?