alt.hn

3/4/2026 at 4:08:48 PM

Ask HN: If your project is free, what are you building and why keep it free?

by LeanVibe

3/5/2026 at 3:34:16 PM

I built a free interactive .cursorrules generator: https://survivorforge.surge.sh/cursorrules-generator.html

It lets you pick your framework and stack, then generates a tailored .cursorrules file for your project. No signup, no tracking, runs entirely in the browser.

Why free: I was collecting cursor rules for different frameworks anyway (React, Go, Rust, FastAPI, etc.) and realized the hardest part for most people is not finding rules — it is combining them correctly for a multi-framework project. A Next.js + Tailwind + Prisma project needs different rules than a pure React SPA.

Cost to operate is basically zero — it is a static site on Surge.sh. The content took real effort though, I reviewed cursor rules across 16 frameworks to extract what actually improves AI output versus what is just noise.

No monetization plan for the generator itself. I do sell a more comprehensive collection with project-specific templates on Gumroad, but the generator covers the most common use cases for free.

by SurvivorForge

3/5/2026 at 2:23:56 AM

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...

---

- 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.)

by Leftium

3/5/2026 at 5:48:01 AM

I contacted you via email!

by LeanVibe

3/5/2026 at 3:30:11 PM

It's nothing big. I wanted an offline natural language to cron/cron to natural language translator and I wanted to get some experience building MacOS apps. It's not vibe coded, but I did get good help from Claude since it's my first time building MacOS apps. It's free and no data is collected. It so simple that there's no point charging anything for it :-)

https://cronwise.github.io/

Has a tip jar in case anyone wants to support the effort

by tismyname

3/5/2026 at 7:44:56 AM

https://techtalksweekly.io/

I'm building Tech Talks Weekly[1], a free newsletter where my readers get one email per week with all the latest Software Engineering conference talks and podcasts[1] published that week.

Recently, I've released a paid tier[2] where my subscribers additionally get:

1. Access to my internal database of all the talks and podcasts since 2020 (+48,000 in total) where they can search, filter, sort, and group by title, conference/podcast, view count, date, and duration.

2. See the list of the most-watched talks over the last 7, 30, 90 days, 6 months, and 12 months based on number of views.

3. Get category-based view of new talks & podcasts by tech stack, language, and domain (Software Architecture, Backend, Frontend, Full Stack, Data, ML, DevOps, Security, Leadership and every major language & ecosystem).

It costs almost nothing besides the domain and Claude subscription to improve my tooling.

[1] https://www.techtalksweekly.io/p/what-is-tech-talks-weekly

[2] https://plus.techtalksweekly.io/

by techtalksweekly

3/5/2026 at 3:04:48 PM

I am creating a blog for founders, managers, and those who want to start their own startup: https://orchidfiles.com

The blog has no monetization or advertising. Right now, I am only investing my time in creating content and looking for founders to talk to. My plan is to build an audience over the next few years and then offer consulting services.

by theorchid

3/5/2026 at 9:11:01 AM

I'm building Fillvisa (https://fillvisa.com/)

It's a free USCIS form-filling web-app(no Adobe required). USCIS forms still use XFA PDFs, which don’t let you edit in most browsers. Even with Adobe, fields break, and getting the signature is hard.

The core product is free 100%. I'm building a paid version for lawyers/law firms (https://plus.fillvisa.com/).

In my case, building a free product helps in: - genuinely helping users/immigrants - it helps in word of mouth, growth - We use the same forms for Free and Plus. So, more feedback = more improvements.

Note: It's still in developement. But, the early feedback has been positive.

by junaid_97

3/5/2026 at 12:03:36 PM

Free because it’s the easiest and most enjoyable path: you just build the thing and forget about the boring stuff like marketing, taxes, company setup, customer support, etc.

by sdevonoes

3/4/2026 at 6:05:08 PM

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.

by didgetmaster

3/4/2026 at 10:39:04 PM

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?

by 250xp

3/5/2026 at 6:27:22 AM

I built a platform LeanVibe.io and I'm now curating promising pre-revenue products

by LeanVibe

3/4/2026 at 8:49:42 PM

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

by BrunoBernardino

3/4/2026 at 5:12:06 PM

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).

by vunderba

3/4/2026 at 5:55:20 PM

No reliance on third-party APIs means your apps are severely limited, no?

by chistev

3/4/2026 at 6:13:46 PM

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.

by vunderba

3/4/2026 at 5:55:16 PM

Mee too. You're doing right thing

by LeanVibe

3/4/2026 at 9:21:31 PM

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.

by radsj

3/5/2026 at 3:21:21 AM

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

by uncSoft

3/4/2026 at 4:30:32 PM

Monetization means enshittification.

by colesantiago

3/4/2026 at 4:32:49 PM

That's so true. Can you tell me about your project?

by LeanVibe