Ask HN: If your project is free, what are you building and why keep it free? 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. |
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://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.)
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.
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.
It has been a very educational journey and remains interesting to me 18 years later - longer than any other project I've worked on. I've had thoughts about commercializing it over the years, but as has been mentioned, navigating online payment services, making a fancy portal, testing it with several browsers, etc. is not that interesting to me: the programming details are the interesting part.
HashBackup has always had a quarterly expiration date built in to the backup portion in case I did decide to commercialize it or a company wanted to acquire it, but recently I decided to ditch that idea and removed the expiration date. I've recently had some health issues that are going to cost society a not-insignificant amount, so letting HashBackup remain free is a way for me to feel like, in a small way, I'm paying it back a little.
It solved a problem I had, but it's a very small problem that few people share and the efforts spent selling it would be a poor use of my time given how niche it is. The few extra minutes to hit npm publish is worth the couple hits of dopamine I receive whenever it's downloaded.
It's just nice to know I saved someone an hour or so of their life. No need to reinvent this wheel.
Has a tip jar in case anyone wants to support the effort
https://devpadapp.com/anubis-oss.html
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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