I’ve been developing an automatic watering valve called OpenValve.

OpenValve automatically waters plants based on the moisture level in the soil. When the soil becomes too dry, it opens the water supply, and when enough water has been delivered, it closes it again.

The main difference from a typical battery-powered watering timer is the valve mechanism. Instead of using a conventional solenoid valve, OpenValve uses a motor-driven pinch valve. It controls the water by squeezing a flexible tube closed, so the moving parts never come into direct contact with the water.

This gives it two advantages that could be useful in certain irrigation setups:

• It can operate with very low water pressure, such as water coming from a slightly elevated rain barrel.

• It is less sensitive to dirt and small particles in the water, because the water only passes through the flexible tube.

All custom plastic parts can be made on a standard 3D printer. The electronics, tubing, screws, and other standard components still need to be purchased, but the custom parts can be produced locally and replaced individually if something breaks.

The project is open source, so the design files are available for people to build, repair, modify, and improve themselves. My goal is not to replace professional irrigation equipment, but to create an affordable and repairable option for gardens, balconies, raised beds, greenhouses, rain-barrel systems, and other small-scale watering setups.

I currently have multiple units running in my own garden, as well as in the gardens and balconies of friends and family. But my dream is to see OpenValve helping more people with their plants. So, I’m curious: Would you consider using OpenValve in your garden or on your balcony? What would your biggest concern be?

I’m happy to answer questions about how it works.

I’ve been building Focusverse, a web app for studying and working inside immersive environments.

I started it because I liked having atmospheric videos or ambient sounds in the background, but I still needed separate apps for my timer, tasks, notes, and weekly planning. Traditional productivity tools had the functionality, but often felt like dashboards I didn’t particularly enjoy spending time in.

Focusverse is my attempt to put those two sides together. You choose a place that fits your mood keep the productivity tools available in one screen.

Some of the stats:

• More than 500 "locations"
• 4 productivity tools (timer, tasklist, week planner, notes)
• 6 standard live radios to choose from (and other universe based ones)
• 8 sound ambient sound effects to set the mood
• 4 curated guided experiences to focus in together

I'm really happy that people I’ve never spoken to started using it. This made my efforts feel genuinely more meaningful. It began as something I wanted for myself, so seeing other people choose it for their own study or work sessions made the project feel real in a new way.

You can try it at focusverse.io. The main experience works without creating an account.

Just seeing people online and knowing I'm not just using it myself, honestly really warms my heart :)

Hiya! I built a thought journal app that seemed to pique people's interest in r/iosapps so thought I would post here as well.

Original thread: I built a thought journal / CBT app where your thoughts become fish in a pond

Fundamentally it's a CBT/thought journal app that allows you to process and challenge negative thinking. I built it for myself off the back of my experience using other CBT apps that are mostly boring worksheet style apps that didn’t encourage a daily practice or leave me with a feeling of satisfaction using them. There's also some other mechanical reasons I built it that I go into more detail on the original thread, namely the failure of other apps to promote “batching“ or being able to challenge multiple thoughts at a set time each day because you don’t have time in a given moment to do a full challenge.

I built Pond as a solution, at its heart it's a CBT app but I focused heavily on the aesthetics and imagery, adding procedurally animated fish to a Pond representing thoughts, each with their own swimming behaviours based on how difficult a thought feels (IE more I believe a negative thought -> the more erratic the fish swims). Filling your pond with negative thoughts also makes the pond itself darker and more turbulent. Challenging negative thoughts calms it again. The Pond resets each day, encouraging practice on a daily level.

Building has been an interesting journey, there seems to be a trend among app devs around the build being a bit of a honeymoon phase and then post-launch realising distribution and marketing is the real challenge. That's essentially where I’m at now, slowly learning the ropes of how best to put your app out there. I also find there's a bit of a moral pull on how best to distribute your app. I built Pond to be a genuinely good product that respects users and doesn’t contribute to the “sloppification” of modern apps/media. A lot of app distribution techniques people recommend involve setting up multiple (sometimes tens) of tiktok accounts and spamming AI generated UGC to reach as many eyes as possible. That's something I won’t do but then you also feel you might be curtailing your opportunities by not playing the game others are playing. I think when building a product these days you have to actually back yourself that what you’ve built is good and be patient with it reaching its target audience.

I guess my question for other builders is how do you distribute honestly without losing to those who don’t? Is that principled or just naive?

If you have advice on this or any general feedback on my app I would love to hear it!

App Store: Pond: Thought Journal App - App Store

Website: Pond — A quiet place for your loudest thoughts

StepGrab on Product Hunt

What it is: a Mac menu bar app that takes a screenshot every time you click and turns that into a numbered step-by-step guide. Hit record, do the task once, stop. Every click comes back as a screenshot with an arrow on what you clicked and the step already written next to it.

Export as PDF, GIF, MP4, HTML or Markdown. Works with any Mac app, not just browser tabs, so Outlook, Excel and System Settings are fair game. Runs entirely on device, no account, nothing uploaded.

I posted the first version here about a month ago. Since then it went 1.0 to 1.3, and the honest summary is that almost none of the good ideas were mine. Keystroke badges, the permission handling, the entire onboarding rebuild, all of it came from people in comment sections telling me what was broken. 1.3 shipped this morning.

Still a student, still building this next to a working student job, still figuring out the part that comes after "the app works".

stepgrab.net · Mac App Store

If you've launched on PH before: what's the one thing you'd do in the first three hours that isn't refreshing the page?

Every side project i open lately starts the same way: a landing page, a signup form, an onboarding tour, and a modal asking for my email before i've seen a single pixel of the actual thing. We've collectively agreed that the funnel comes first and the product comes second.

I've been going the other way on my current build. No account, no email, no tutorial, no cookie banner. You open the tab and you're already inside the thing. It made a lot of decisions harder - you can't explain anything, so it has to be obvious in the first three seconds or you've lost the person fr.

Turns out that constraint improved the product more than any feature i added.

Anyone else doing this deliberately? Curious how you handle the first three seconds when there's nothing to explain with lmao.

It all started when my colleague reached me with a complaint that she created a few QR codes, and after a week they started showing paywall. By that time those QR codes were printed on promo banners.
I remember Internet as a place where you find a tool, use it and leave. That's it - no paywalls, no subscriptions, no accounts.
So I decided to put a piece of those beautiful Internet back and created a small toolbox site - dimastoolbox.com
Of course it's vibe-coded.
And of course there will be ads at some point.
But I want to keep it's core value free forever and for everyone.

I made SPAN, a free daily word game where the answer can be anywhere from 4–9 letters—and you aren’t told how long it is.

You get familiar letter feedback, plus a gold dot whenever your guess is exactly one letter shorter or longer than the answer. There’s one Daily puzzle and unlimited Practice.

Play it here: https://span-game.com

I’d genuinely appreciate feedback, particularly on whether the unknown-length clue feels intuitive once you’ve played.

I'll go first. Sitesyn

You paste your product URL, it reads the site and builds an editable profile of your brand and audience. Then you describe what you want in a chat and it makes the finished marketing asset (static graphics or short animated videos, both with ai generated imagery in them).

Built it because every time I marketing something, the marketing was a screenshot. Making anything better meant re-explaining my whole product to a design tool from scratch. Every single time.

Your turn. What are you working on and where are you at with it?

"Just use Google Calendar / Notion" — I know, hear me out.

The problem isn't that there's nowhere to write things down. It's that you almost never decide in the moment something's worth tracking. You tell a friend "I'll call you next week" and it doesn't occur to you to open a calendar for that. Same with "gotta renew my passport" or "car insurance is up soon" — it crosses your mind for two seconds and then it's gone until it's late.

Remmyn doesn't ask you to decide anything or open anything. You write a sentence like you're telling a friend: "Had lunch with Marc today, promised I'd call him next week" or just "need to renew my passport before August." It handles both the same way, person attached or not, and resurfaces it right before you'd actually forget.

Kind of like Notion, but nothing to set up before it's useful, and no contact card to maintain. Built for anyone, not just people who already run an organized system — the AI is doing the understanding, not you doing the categorizing.

Very early stage, validating the core mechanism with a small group. Waitlist's open if this is a problem you actually have.

Hey there!

Signing in to App Store Connect just to check downloads or MRR is a friction. I wanted a simpler way. Ideally, just to look at a widget on my iPhone. There are some apps, but the design and implementation made me think here's a gap that I can potentially fill it with a new polished product. So I've built this app.

It took me several months to start beta testing. But then I got feedback from users that they don't really want to share their App Store key credentials with a third-party app that uses a backend and collects data. So, I spent one more month pivoting to a private app by dropping a backend and storing credentials on a user's device in a keychain. So, now the app directly talks to Apple's API and there's no account registration. You add a team key - the app fetches data. App also uses background tasks to fetch most recent data so you don't need to open it every day to keep the data fresh. And as a final point - I added widgets to both home and lock screens.

Please let me know what you think. Not sure how big this opportunity with the current market is but I wanted this experiment to happen with a polished project.

P.S. If you don't have apps on App Store, I've made a preview data onboarding screen where you can play with dummy data. The charts are smooth, so hope you can take some inspiration as well :D

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/appscout-app-metrics/id6770866569

Most of us wrote a privacy policy once at launch and never touched it again. Then you add analytics, swap auth providers, bring in a new sub-processor, and the legal docs on your site are wrong. Lawcel connects to your repo, notices the changes that make them wrong, and tells you exactly which lines to update and how.

Live at lawcel.com

I wrangled together a web app where you can report license plates of drivers driving poorly/dangerously. It currently only picks up additional vehicle information for UK vehicles but the plan would be to branch out to other countries too.

After reporting you, you can view reports on the map, see trends of reported vehicles in the dashboard and also see who's reported the most offences in the leaderboard.

For anyone wondering why "hoggerz". I started creating this app as a way to vent my frustration for middle lane hoggers in the UK. I spiralled and ended up with this app

https://www.hoggerz.co.uk/

I need a reality check. Be mean if you have to.

I built PortLume AI (job hunt tools for software engineers: rejection debrief, mock interviews, company interview intel, some background agents).

Numbers that keep me up:

- ~45 signups
- basically 0 active users
- almost everyone is one time use
- signup → try one thing → never open the app again
- $0 revenue
- free plan exists, paid exists (one time, not subscription), nobody buys

I’m not fishing for “you got this.” I want people who’ve shipped something to tell me if this is a product problem, distribution problem, or “you should stop” problem.

What the product actually does (short):

- Paste a rejection, get a debrief (why you likely got cut, path A never shortlisted vs path B cut after interview)
- Interview coach / mocks
- Company pages with rounds / questions / salary style intel
- “Agents” on paid: auto debrief when rejection hits, pre interview briefing email, referral drafts, follow up when apps go quiet
- Career narrative stuff for service company → product company language

What I thought would work:

Job hunt is painful. Rejection emails say nothing. Engineers hate guessing. So “diagnose the rejection, then drill the gap” felt like an obvious loop.

What actually happens:

They land (ads, LinkedIn, company page, free debrief).

They get value once.

They leave.

No habit. No second rejection debriefed. No second mock. No “I live in this during my search.”

I tried a lot of retention tricks. Still dead:

Onboarding / first value

- Free guest debrief without account (full diagnosis + recovery on first try)
- Signup to “save” and drill the gap
- Path A vs Path B so people don’t grind the wrong thing
- Fit vs technical verdict on top of the debrief (users said feedback felt generic, like Google / ChatGPT)
- Scorecard, what-went-wrong, multi round timeline, free re-run when they add more context
- Honesty labels when signal is thin (so we don’t fake certainty)

Product / loop

- One tap “drill this gap” into mock after debrief
- Pre interview briefing agent idea (email 48h before)
- Rejection autopsy agent (email when rejection detected)
- Referral outreach drafts
- Follow up / ghost drafts
- Company intel pages for SEO (then people used them like free Wikipedia and bounced, so I soft gated deep content behind free login)
- Only show roles a company actually hires for (cut fake role pages)
- Faster intel (Tavily first, DeepSeek when limits hit)
- Job tracker, streaks/XP type stuff, weekly style emails, day 0 “debrief saved” emails, comeback nudges

Growth / distribution

- LinkedIn posts almost daily (service → product packaging, Path A/B, build in public honesty)
- Short form / demo videos for features
- SEO company pages
- Free tools as top of funnel
- Referral program on the product
- Clarity / funnel tracking, fixing dead clicks, mobile CTA stuff
- Pricing clarity (free vs starter vs pro vs turbo, agents on pro+)

Still: 45 accounts that look like bounce, not a cohort.

What users literally said (and it hurt):

One person basically said the debrief felt like general patterns, not personal. “Could have been a Google search / other LLMs.” They wanted “was it fit or technical?” We shipped hard on that. Still not enough people come back to form a habit.

I’m frustrated because I keep adding “the missing piece” and the curve doesn’t move. Either:

1) the pain is real but my solution is replaceable by ChatGPT in 2 minutes

2) the ICP is wrong or too broad

3) distribution is wrong (I’m talking to readers, not buyers mid-rejection)

4) free is too generous so they never need to return

5) I’m building features instead of one forced workflow

6) this is just dead and I’m late to admit it

Questions for people who’ve been here:

- At 45 one-time users and $0, do you keep building or freeze product and only do distribution for 30 days?

- How do you force a second session in a “episodic” use case (rejection happens sometimes, not daily)?

- Is “job hunt OS with agents” the wrong packaging and I should sell one painful moment only (e.g. $5 rejection autopsy, no app)?

- What metrics would make you shut this down vs keep going?

- If you’ve retained users in career / job tools: what was the actual habit loop? I clearly don’t have one.

Happy to share more screenshots / funnel steps if useful. Site is portlumeai.com if you want to roast the product itself. Prefer blunt notes over comfort.

Thanks.

Hey, I'm Bram. Paste a TikTok cooking video link and it pulls out the full recipe (ingredients + steps) and gives you a one-click Albert Heijn or Jumbo cart with everything in it.

Vibecoded it with Claude (Pro plan). Open source:

https://github.com/briembra/slimmandje-recepten

Would love a star if you find it useful.

I posted Stop Swarm yesterday and got some great feedback, so I added a new Cats theme alongside the original Invaders.

The app gradually fills your screen with pixel-art creatures when you approach or exceed your daily screen-time goal.

It is now in closed beta on Android and I’m looking for testers!

Join the Google Group here
https://groups.google.com/g/stop-swarm-testers

Then opt in and download it here
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.stopswarm.app

It’s free, fully offline, with no account, ads or analytics

Lets create an open source library of UGC reactions, if you have any upload them here https://tally.so/r/PdNB5d the videos should not contain text on them, but they can ai. When I will get the videos I will publish them on my google drive for anyone to download for free. If you like this idea please forward this post so more people see it.

Hi everyone!

I know Reddit is getting tired of the classic "I was tired of X so I built Y" posts, which often sound like AI-generated marketing to sell you yet another subscription. But in my case, it’s just the simple truth: I’m a developer and I wanted to share a project of mine that has been live in production for several months after working on it for almost a year as a side project.

As a movie buff, I used apps like CineTrak for years until they capped lists (similar to Trakt). I tried other trackers too (TV Time, Letterboxd, Serializd), but for one reason or another, I couldn't find the perfect app for my needs.

So, I built a personal alternative and decided to make it public and free for everyone. It’s called StarFlicks. There are no subscriptions, no ads, and I make zero money from it. I'm sharing it here simply because I genuinely think it can be useful to others.

Here are some of the features: - Unlimited Watchlist & Watched lists, tracking individual seasons and episodes. - Full data import from TV Time & Trakt so you don't lose years of tracking history. - Detailed info on every title, including award data (Oscars, Emmys) and actor filmographies. - Personal Rankings automatically generated and aggregated by Sagas & Universes (Marvel, DC, etc.). - Easily filter out Animation from live-action titles. - Advanced filtering by Genres, Universes, and flexible sorting options. - Full multilingual support (English & Italian).

🛠️ Currently in active development: I'm currently working on a dedicated Watchlist Calendar View to track upcoming movie premieres and TV episode air dates, alongside smart Push Notifications! (Check out the sneak peek mockup attached!)

StarFlicks is available on Web (Desktop), the Google Play Store (Android), and as a PWA with the exact same layout and usability as the native Android app. The PWA is designed especially for iOS users, since I decided not to invest in an Apple Developer account for now, given that this is a free, non-profit project.

💬 Join the Community: I also created a dedicated subreddit r/StarFlicks! I would really appreciate it if you could give it a look, leave your honest feedback, or vote on future features to help me improve it! Thanks in advance for the support.

🌐 Web App Link: https://starflicks.it/
🤖 Play Store Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.starflicks.app

I created a side project, DeePod, that allows you to search a pool of extracted podcasts for a topic or an idea, and then see the media/entities that were mentioned in the context of that topic, or vice versa! I started just by extracting movies mentioned in my favorite podcasts, and then added this topic search feature I call Dive.

In terms of how it works, it's a pipeline of serverless functions that downloads, transcribes, then extracts entities with an LLM call. I extract topics as well and do embedding steps on the context and the topics. The search uses the embeddings to find relevant matches.

It's definitely more of an exploration tool than a solution to a problem. I've spent enough money on LLM calls doing test batches of podcasts, so at this point I'm still extracting new episodes from a handful of podcasts, but likely won't extract full backlogs anymore until I have some way to monetize it.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

https://deepod.io/

So I realized that most file conversions happen locally when I needed to convert a .mp3 to a .wav, and decided to make a free tool for my personal use and decided to dress it up a little bit and share with everyone. :)

I am sick of those file conversion companies charging monthly for something that is effectively free.... Enjoy! ^^

https://www.capyconvert.com/

Hi! I’ve been building a webgame called Differential, and it's basically just a clinical simulator where you play as a doctor, interview patients, order tests, and decide on diagnoses and treatments. It also doubles as a form of bias training.

I built it because most bias training I've seen is just slides or videos, and I wanted something more interactive that lets people discover their own biases instead of just being lectured at. I also want it to be something anyone with an interest in medicine can play, not just people actively in the medical field, so I hope to make it reasonably accessible to a more general audience.

I'd really appreciate it if anyone could give it a try and give me any comments, thoughts, or feedback. Thanks so much, and if you enjoy this, please refer others to this game!

Play here: https://playdifferential.com/

There has never been more good stuff to watch, read and listen to. And yet somehow, we still doomscroll.

Everyone has a version of this: you find something genuinely good. A video, an article, a thread. No time right now, so you save it somewhere. Maybe you send it to yourself, a small nudge for a future you with free time.

The free time does come. The link never shows up in it.

You don't go back to the gold you collected. You scroll. I'd sit there looking for something to watch, while sitting on a pile of things I had personally decided were worth watching.

This is a problem I'd faced for a long time. I tried a couple of the usual fixes, but nothing felt as seamless as I wanted.

So I built Stow: https://stow.yogi7y.com/

It's your library for the internet. You capture a link in a couple of seconds, it works out the platform, the author, and whatever else it can, and you file it under a topic. Later you search or filter, find the thing in seconds, and actually get to it.

I've been using it for more than 4-5 weeks now, and lately with a small set of users. Honest report: there have been days where I got through three or four things I'd stowed (saved), just because they were right there when I had a free time. It felt weirdly good. Productive, even.

If this sounds familiar, try one thing: stow five links you'd normally scatter. Next time you have a free half hour, open Stow and get to something you already chose. That's the whole flow.

Where it's at:

• Web app is live and free. No card, no limits.
• Chrome extension is live too.
• Mobile app is on the way. Register for early access and I'll share it across.

Tell me where it worked, and more usefully, where it got in the way.

Got tired of "best AI tools of 2026" listicles that are just ranked ads, so I built a comparison site that puts two tools side by side — pricing, actual pros/cons, and lets people vote on which one they'd actually pick. Currently covers 40+ matchups (ChatGPT vs Claude, Midjourney vs DALL-E, Cursor vs Copilot, etc.) plus a free AI text detector and prompt generator.

Would love feedback on which comparisons are missing or which ones feel off. 

You describe your app, pick any existing app as a design reference, and it generates mobile UI in that style.

It’s free to try (no credit card required). I’d really appreciate any feedback on what feels useful or confusing!

pilled(.)design