I built an app called Gistr that captures the gist of web articles. The problem originated when I found myself with so little time to read all the HN articles I was interested in each day. This is my current solution that I use every day.

Using the Chrome extension or web app, a user can upload the URL of the web article and receive a concise summary of that article with tags and estimated reading time. These article summaries with links to the original are then saved to the user's library for later reading and rating. Articles already summarized in the database won't count toward a user's generated summary count.

Currently Gistr is a MVP that does have some rough edges, especially around parsing some websites. Planned features include improving the parsing and adding leaderboards of most saved and top rated articles.

Technology used:

- parsing articles: https://github.com/mozilla/readability

- summarization: Claude Haiku 3.5

- auth and database: Supabase

- fullstack framework: Next.js

- deployed on: Vercel

This is my first attempt at building a product as a solo indie developer. I'd appreciate any honest feedback so I can improve on this journey. Thanks for checking out Gistr!

landing page: https://www.getgistr.com/

demo page (no sign up): https://demo.getgistr.com/

actual app: https://app.getgistr.com/

user:	steph144000
created:	February 6, 2025
karma:	1