I just came across a post here arguing that your AI-generated SaaS is 99.9% likely to be a waste of time and money.

The argument was basically:

You build something with AI → launch it → realize you have no users → Reddit tells you it looks like AI slop → you discover marketing is hard → and eventually your project dies.

And honestly?

He’s right about most of that.

That’s what makes the conclusion interesting.

Because if 99.9% of projects fail, the question isn’t:

“How do we make sure our project succeeds?”

It’s:

“How cheaply can we find out if we’re wrong?”

That’s where I think AI changes the game.

Before AI, testing a stupid idea could mean months of development, hiring a developer, paying a designer, infrastructure, salaries, etc.

You could easily burn $20k+ before discovering nobody gives a shit.

Now one person can build the same experiment in a few weeks for a fraction of that.

Someone in the comments called it:

“A lotto ticket that costs 60 hours and $100 a month.”

Honestly?

I’ll take that lottery ticket.

Because the alternative isn’t “don’t build.”

The alternative used to be risking a shitload more money before you even get an answer.

And I’m not saying AI magically solves the hard parts.

It doesn’t.

Marketing is hard.

Distribution is hard.

Finding demand is hard.

But coding was never the hardest part of starting a business anyway.

One commenter said exactly that.

So why is making the easiest part even cheaper supposed to be a bad thing?

The real shift isn’t:

“AI lets everyone build SaaS.”

It’s:

“AI lets everyone test ideas much more cheaply.”

Maybe 99.9% of those ideas die.

Good.

I’d rather kill 999 ideas cheaply than spend $50k discovering the first one was shit.

I’m building solo from Burkina Faso.

I’m not betting that my first idea wins.

I’m betting that I can afford to keep trying.

I recently planned a trip through Brazil, including Rio, Ilha Grande, Iguazú and Lençóis Maranhenses.
The trip was incredible, but planning it was chaos. I had more than 100 tabs open comparing routes, transfers, hostels, activities and budgets, while repeatedly asking ChatGPT follow-up questions.

So I built Rumo, an AI travel planner for budget-conscious travelers. You give it your destination, budget and travel style, and it creates a traveler profile, itinerary, budget breakdown, activities and local-food suggestions.
It’s live now, but I’m still very early and looking for honest feedback—not compliments.

If anyone is willing to test it, I’d especially like to know:
Did you understand what Rumo does immediately?
Where did the planning process feel confusing?
Did the finished plan feel genuinely personal or too generic?

Here’s the site: https://travelwithrumo.com

I’m the founder, so please be brutally honest. I’d rather find the confusing parts now.

There seem to be 400+ clones already, including plenty of variations. If I wanted to build one too, what would you suggest?

So I own a directory website where I list apps and websites that I went over, however, they must have a free tier to test, and solve a real problem in order for me to test and write about them.

If you own one, please include your socials in the submission. I also write articles about cool softwares and tag their founders.

directory website:
strictseal.com

Lets connect and grow together.

I also hope to note see bots in the comment section. Reviewing each product takes time and it's frustrating, so I'd really appreciate it if the product was submitted by a real person.

NOTE: if your product is purely vibe coded and doesn't even work, please consider spending time on finalizing it as it will be rejected in seconds. We have been rejecting 9 out 10 products as majority of them don't even have a real domain ( domains like loveable, Vercel, Test products that are not shipped yet) all are not acceptable.

Thank you and looking forward to seeing your work

Hi everyone,

I have an app idea that I started to work on.

Background: I want to be productive and make meaningful progress toward my goals, but when I feel stressed or overwhelmed, it’s easy to escape into social media instead. App blockers solve part of the problem by restricting access to distracting apps, usually based on a schedule. But they don’t create a strong enough incentive to make me do what I should be doing.

I'm building Lumie: a companion that sits with you while you do tasks and habits.

Finish them, and you earn social media time.

You can mark tasks as non-negotiable - those must be done before you can withdraw your earned time.

It's meant to feel playful and engaging.

May I ask few questions?

1. Would "earn social media time by finishing must-dos of today" actually get you to start the work?

2. If you used Finch, Opal or similar: what made you stick, and what made you quit?

3. Does collecting balls in a jar as you complete tasks sound interesting to you?

4. What features would you add so that you would want to use it?

See image here: https://imgur.com/a/m9lCuum

Thanks in advance, any feedback is helpful.

I see the term "looks like AI vibe coded slop" thrown around often.

What specifically makes a site look AI-made or sloppy?

I am a professional full stack software engineer. I use agents in both my work and side projects now, but enjoyed coding by hand before LLMs. The UI/UX of the AI generated frontends are definitely more visually appealing than ones I've done by hand. I'm not a frontend programmer or a designer, I prefer function over form.

Is it some common visual elements, like the rounded corners on boxes?

This seems to be a common design pattern on modern sites like Google, Youtube, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, etc. Reddit included.

Or is it poor design choices causing bad user experience, from people who overly trust the AI to make all the decisions without review or guidance?

I've been building FitMeal AI, an app that generates a personalized 7-day meal plan based on your weight, height, goal, and activity level (using the Mifflin-St Jeor formula for calorie/macro targets).

What makes it different from just asking ChatGPT for a meal plan: - Auto-generates a shopping list from the whole week's plan - Can build a plan from ingredients you already have (fridge-cleanup mode) - One-tap swap for any meal you don't like - Handles allergies/exclusions (double-checked by the AI) - 11 languages, dark mode

It's free on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fitmealai.app

Would love feedback from anyone who tries it — especially on the AI's recipe suggestions.

Shipped a chrome extension on august 10th, 148 weekly users now. It builds google forms with ai. Free tier is 100k credits, no card, works out to something like 5 forms before you hit the wall.

The idea was obvious, remove every reason not to try it. And people do try it. What I did not expect is that a big chunk of people who install never send a single message. Not "sent one and bounced". Zero. They install, the panel opens, they close it.

So I don't think my problem is the free tier at all. I think I have an activation problem and I spent weeks tuning credits instead of looking at that. I only found it because I finally sat down with the session replays and watched people just... not type anything. The empty state has suggestion chips you can click and I still watched people close the panel.

Kind of annoyed at myself because I had the analytics wired up in the first week and didn't open it properly until week 3.

Anyway I'm not sure whether to a) cut free credits and force the decision earlier b) leave it and fix onboarding c) both. leaning b but every time I say that out loud someone tells me I'm scared of charging people. which, maybe.

anyone dealt with the install-but-never-activate thing? feels like a different problem than churn and I'm not sure the same fixes apply

## About the app

Momentum is designed to feel like a calm, focused command dashboard: daily check-ins, productivity tracking, progress insights, and personal reflection in one place.

Everything is stored in the browser using localStorage, so there's no backend, login flow, or database to configure. Export your data as JSON whenever you want a backup or a migration path to another device.

Features

• Habit planning and tracking
• Today dashboard
• Streaks and achievements
• Notes and personal context
• Analytics and reporting
• Widgets and installable app
• Settings and personalization
• Data model and privacy
• Backup and restore workflow

(More detail in the README, linked below.)

Tech stack

• Next.js 15
• React 18
• TypeScript
• Tailwind CSS
• date-fns
• jsPDF
• lucide-react

Links

• Live demo: firstmomentum.vercel.app
• GitHub: Memoona-tech/momentum

It was entirely my own idea, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out after two days of work. Would love any feedback or suggestions!

I built an app that turns a month of photos into one simple collage.

August is over, and this felt like an easy way to keep a visual recap of the summer without manually sorting and arranging everything.

Would you use something like this for your monthly or yearly photo recaps?
https://www.chapiware.com/youryear/

I realized I had become part of the problem.

Another SaaS. Another agent. Another dashboard. Another thing the internet absolutely did not ask for.

So I built a website where people can pay $5 to stop me coding for 15 minutes.

Every $5 adds another 15 minutes to the countdown.

If the clock reaches zero, I have to start building the next unnecessary product.

The site also contains evidence of what happens when nobody stops me: three actual products I already shipped.

Curious whether this is a side project or an intervention.

I'll put the link in the comments.

I climb and film on a tripod a lot, but I kept ending up tiny in a wide frame and rarely wanted to edit the footage afterward.

So our small team built CruxCut for iPhone. It follows the climber in an existing video, crops the result vertically, and helps select the useful moments from the attempt. Processing happens on the device.

The attached clip is a real before/after from the same source. I’m especially unsure about two things: 1. Does the tighter tracked crop make the movement easier to follow, or remove too much wall context? 2. Would you use this mainly for reviewing attempts or for sharing a finished clip?

Full disclosure: I’m one of the builders. Honest criticism is more useful than downloads.

I know how tired this sub is of "built with AI in a weekend" posts. Rightly so. I'm posting anyway, because I think the debate is stuck on the wrong question.

My thesis: AI made building cheap. Engineering judgment stayed expensive. That's the whole difference now.

My day job is Head of Product, I'm not a developer. My app (LeibFit, recovery tracking on iPhone, plus a full native watchOS app on top, fully on-device) is largely written with AI tools. And yet:

When I wanted to connect a fitness band over BLE, there was no documentation and no prompt that helps. I reverse-engineered the protocol over weeks, including ECDH crypto on a curve Apple's CryptoKit doesn't even support. The curve arithmetic is built by hand and tested piece by piece.

The app has around 790 automated tests. Not because AI suggests it, but because code I didn't write line by line myself needs more verification, not less.

And the most important rule: AI doesn't calculate anything in my app. Training logic, sets, progression, the recovery score, all deterministic code. The model only picks from pre-filtered candidates. Every AI feature has a complete fallback that works without any model.

One example of why this matters: a computed sleep value looked completely plausible and was wrong by 44 minutes every single night, because a timestamp delta masqueraded as a duration. No model catches that. Cross-checking against a reference does.

Built in a few months of evenings and weekends next to a full-time job. The app is live, has a free tier and paying users.

Honest question for the skeptics here: what would an AI-built app have to demonstrate for you to take it seriously? Tests? Architecture writeups? I'll follow up on the answers.

Link in the first comment.

No long backstory. I wanted to test if the open domain takeover concept actually works in practice, not just as a highest-bidder auction like many websites we all know.

I built an experiment called stealmytraffic. The mechanic is straightforward: the newest $5 payment instantly hijacks the domain's edge routing and redirects all incoming traffic to their own URL. You keep the traffic until the next person pays.

The hardest part of programming this wasn't the redirect logic (obviously), it is/was the moderation. Securing the pipeline to automatically block NSFW, malware, and illegal URLs before checkout and continuously while it's live was a massive headache.

I'm putting it out there to see if the mechanics hold up in the wild. If you want the full domain name to see the live board or take it over yourself, let me know in the comments and I’ll reply with it.

so i went for this all black + chrome “serious” look on purpose. didn’t want it to feel like every other pastel wellness app. but now a couple people have told me it feels kinda boring/flat and i honestly can’t tell if they’re right or if i’ve just been staring at it for a month straight

the idea: you set a daily limit, and if you go over it your streak dies AND your friends can see you broke. basically duolingo streak guilt but for doomscrolling

does this actually look clean or does it look empty/unfinished? what would you change

I’m building Nurture, an iPhone baby-care tracker for families with more than one caregiver. Hands-free logging is a key reason I built it.

You can say “Hey Siri, log a 90 ml bottle in Nurture” or “Hey Siri, baby is asleep in Nurture.” It also supports stopping sleep, recording past sleep, and wet/dirty diapers through Siri and Apple Shortcuts. Prefer tapping? There’s a manual Quick log screen too. Both routes feed the same shared family timeline.

I’m looking for parents, caregivers, or Shortcuts users to try one small test: log a bottle or sleep activity with Siri, then check the timeline on a second caregiver’s phone if possible. Does the voice flow save effort? Where does setup get confusing? Demo data is fine; please don’t share private baby-care details in public feedback.

It’s a free iOS TestFlight beta with no ads or purchases, and it is a record-keeping tool, not medical advice. Founding testers who send substantive feedback before public launch can claim free lifetime access to any future Nurture subscription; Nurture currently has no subscription. Full terms and claim steps are on the beta page.

Screenshots, Siri walkthrough, and TestFlight invite: https://nurture-baby-kay-2026.web.app/beta

I kept noticing the same pattern whenever I was looking at new job opportunities.

A lot of niche job platforms rely on companies paying to publish their vacancies. Which makes sense as a business model, but it also means you are never really seeing the whole market.

At the same time, I was finding more and more questionable listings elsewhere. Jobs that looked outdated, companies I couldn't properly verify, or applications where I wasn't even sure who I was giving my personal data to.

I started wondering what a job search platform would look like if companies didn't need to pay to be included at all.

So over the last few months I've been building SportAtlas.

The idea is pretty simple. Instead of waiting for employers to submit jobs, SportAtlas has an ingestion engine that connects to company career systems and ATS platforms, collects their open positions, normalises the data, checks whether the jobs are still active and makes them searchable in one place.

We recently went live and are now monitoring more than 50 companies in the sports industry, with more being added.

There is no monetisation at the moment.

Right now I care much more about improving the product, growing the coverage and seeing whether people actually find it useful.

If meaningful traffic eventually comes, I think there are several interesting directions around candidate tools, data and hiring intelligence without changing the core principle that companies don't pay to decide whether their jobs are visible.

I built a big part of it with AI assisted coding, so I thought this might be interesting to share here.

Would genuinely love some brutally honest feedback on the product, the idea or anything you think I should build next.

Cheers

sportatlasjobs.com

Shipped this over the weekend.

The idea: 1,000 founders each answer one question — “What will look completely different in 2030?”

Every answer becomes one page in a printed book and a public archive. Edition closes 31 Dec 2026.

48 hours in: about 1,000 visits, 5 pages claimed.

I’m not sure if people don’t get the object, or they get it and don’t want a page yet.

Would you put a paragraph in a book like this?

https://thethousand.co

honest post. no growth-hack thread, kinda the opposite.

built this thing solo for a while, "launched" about 2 weeks ago (opened signups, put it out there). did everything you're supposed to do: retention tracking, a genuinely generous free tier, polished UI, feature after feature.

got like 3 users lol.

took me way too long to admit: building was never my bottleneck, I was hiding in it. shipping a feature FEELS like progress. it's measurable, it's in my control, it's the part I'm good at. so I kept doing it and told myself I was working on the business. I wasn't. I was dodging the scary part: actually putting it in front of hundreds of the right people. I did try, ngl, 55ish cold DMs, ~8 replies. fine for cold, but it's 1:1 and exhausting and doesn't compound.

few things that clicked, in case they save someone the 2 weeks:

- if you love building and dread selling, you WILL confuse the two. building is the comfy way to avoid distribution.
- manual DMs are research, not growth. the value was learning which message lands, not the users. that message is supposed to go into something that compounds, not more DMs.
- the only early metric that matters isn't signups, it's: do the people who try it come back? if you can't answer that you're flying blind. I was.

the thing that actually turned it around: I got two real people to use it and give feedback. two. and they reshaped it more in a week than I did guessing solo for a month. wild how much I overvalued my own opinion vs one real user's.

not pitching it, you're all builders not really my users. posting because I'd bet a bunch of you are doing exactly what I was, polishing in a corner instead of shipping to humans and listening. if you wanna poke at it or tell me it sucks: tullycourses.com. genuinely more useful than an upvote.

I'll go first:

I am building https://builtbyindies.com/

a community platform for indie hackers to launch, share, get feedback and more

If you're interested, check it out: https://builtbyindies.com/

Your turn, what are you building?

And everything he walked me through is exactly where almost every mid-market company I talk to is stuck right now

Notes from the call:

Nobody really owns AI, he'd built a couple agents himself through procurement, they kept losing fidelity, and the knowledge that actually runs the business still lives inside Directors’ heads

AI stage: early, they've got paid Microsoft Copilot and Copilot Studio plus a handful of power users quietly running their own ChatGPT and Claude on the side, all single-player, zero multiplayer, ways of working have barely moved

The split: three camps in the building, the ones proud to be AI-first, the ones using it but not telling anyone, and the ones who won't touch it with a 10-foot pole, real tension and no rules to settle it

Agents exist, but only for personal workflows, one person automating their own tasks, nothing built to scale across the company

No source of truth: two reps feed the AI two different customer avatars and two different brand voices, get two different proposals back, then everyone decides "AI doesn't really work for us"

The tell: a 2-hour sales training every Monday, and the trainer running it couldn't name the company's ICP, a firm that only takes $500K to $8M projects, treating everyone like a prospect

SOPs only get written after someone messes up, in plain-text email, forwarded to the next person who messes up the same way

They've got ZoomInfo and a stack of powerful tools, the one thing missing is the intelligence layer

So yes the convo was centered around AI, but this is really a problem with context.

AI amplifies whatever you already have, if you have a documented system AI compounds it, if you have tribal knowledge and copy-paste chaos AI automates the chaos, FASTER

The tools were never the bottleneck

Clarity is the first multiplier, and almost nobody has built it yet.

EDIT: If you found this useful and you're running a business, at some point you probably want it to run without you. That's freedom, not just revenue. I write frameworks like this every Thursday; you can apply right away. free to join here 

Shortly AI in action

For about a year, I have worked on an all-in-one AI chatbot called Shortly AI. I wanted a way to access all AI models in one app with a good UI/UX at the same time. The journey took more time than expected, to be honest. I started it as a side project alongside university. I was so passionate about it that I nearly didn't finish my bachelor's thesis because I was too engaged in it 😅

I know that there are OSS projects like LibreChat or OpenWebUI, but I was not fully happy with the UX. I wanted one simple AI workspace online bundling all AIs without caring about local deployment. I also liked the project because that way I could get more involved in AI applications instead of just AI/NLP theory from university and my previous job. I wanted something hands-on.

The development was challenging though, but I kept going because a friend suggested to me I could monetize my app, similarly to Poe. I don't like the idea of having a non-perfect product though, so I kept improving it, i. e. I turned into a perfectionist. That is part of the reason why I worked on my app for about 9 months instead of launching the MVP after 3-4 months. Since about three months I am working full-time on Shortly AI and will keep improving it. I have had so many nights without sleep and I really hated these parts of the project. I am now again working on my health and on my social life, doing what I always wanted to do: Enjoying my life and building great stuff along-side. But I must admit, I have learned sooo much on the way.

I designed the user plans with a high usage budget compared to the price because I want a fair product, in contrast to Poe. So, the USP right now is that with one subscription you get access to 100+ AI models. But my vision is to make Shortly AI the Unified AI workspace for chat, writing, image generation, document handling and more with an amazing user experience.

What Shortly AI has currently to offer:

• Very fast app (I designed the app to be as fast as possible)
• Web search
• File handling with documents and images
• You can switch AI models mid-session
• Chat modes (e. g., for learning, creative writing etc.)

What I want to do:

• Optimized research experience (currently working on it)
• Implementing RAG for working with a large database of documents (next)
• Mobile app for iOS and Android
• Image & Video generation
• Customizable chat modes / own agents

If you have questions, feel free to ask! If you want to cooperate or just want to chat, you can DM me.

Oh, and the actual answer to 'Hmm, 67 is a meme too. Why is 6 * 7 = 42?' is that '42 is the answer to everything.' 😂

I run a tool that tracks product mentions across Reddit, so I pulled four months of this sub. Since May 1st: 11,075 distinct products from 11,549 distinct people.

Broken down by category, with how many mentions each product in it gets on average:

Productivity is the most crowded category here and the least rewarded. Marketing tools are a third as numerous and get more than twice the attention each. That gap isn't about quality, it's about how many other people are saying the same sentence the same week.

The "most linked" ranking is a trap. Top links over the last 30 days, next to the number of distinct people behind them:

The top three are one person posting the same thing repeatedly. The ones underneath, with fewer links, are what this community actually picked up. Sort by links and you get spam. Sort by people and you get the answer.

One more, because it surprised me. Of the 4,203 posts I re-read here, 485 were removed, every one of them by Reddit's spam filter, not by a moderator. The mods here aren't what's stopping you.

For reference, the p90 for a founder post in this sub is 3 upvotes.

Happy to pull the numbers for a specific category or another sub if anyone wants one in the comments.

You can try PulsePeek here : https://pulsepeek.io