u/Downtown-Donkey1197

So I built this bedtime story app for my 3yo — HuggleTales. It makes personalized stories in 5 languages (EN, DE, ES, FR, IT) with AI illustrations every day.

Thought it'd just be a fun project for us. Then other parents started using it too. 50+ families now, 500+ stories generated. Which is wild bc I literally just wanted something that could buy me 10 minutes of peace before bed.

The daily story thing kinda took off. New story every day across all 5 languages. Kids can pick characters and settings.

But the feature I'm most proud of — parents can record their voice once and the AI clones it. Every story after that is narrated in their actual voice. In all 5 languages. So when the app reads a German story, it's still mum or dad telling it. No robot voice.

Built with Flutter. AI for stories, illustrations, and voice cloning. No funding, no team, just me vibing at night.

huggletales.com

My 3 year old boy struggles sometimes with going to bed and I am curious if this is normal?

How does you bedtime routine look like?

Hi people,

I was FaceTiming my 3-year-old from another goddamn hotel room last year. Again. Third trip that month. And there he was, in his dinosaur pajamas, trying to listen to me read him a story through my phone screen while I squinted at his little face from 800 miles away. The connection was garbage. He couldn't really see me. I couldn't really see him. I just... kept thinking, this isn't how it's supposed to be.

He hung up sad. I sat on that hotel bed and felt like the worst parent in the world.

That night I couldn't sleep. I kept thinking — what if he could still hear MY voice? Even when I'm not there. Not some random narrator with a radio voice. ME. Reading to him. Every night.

So I started building.

I called it HuggleTales because I missed hugging him at bedtime. (Yeah, I know, cheesy as hell, but it's true.)

The messy truth:

• Been coding this nights and weekends for 6 months while working my actual job
• About 300 families have downloaded it and thats nice for 1 month in the App Store I guess
• Kids are creating roughly 300 stories a week now
• The stories are INSANE — had a grandma octopus racing sports cars last week, and a sad piece of toast finding friendship. I screenshot the weird ones.
• MRR is around $450 — so no, I'm not buying a yacht, but it's real money from something I built.

What I didn’t expect:

• Voice cloning took me 1 month to sound good… longer than I thought. Accents break it. Background noise breaks it. And kids keep trying to record their OWN voices which is adorable but technically makes me want to scream.
• Apple rejected me 7 or 8 times… I wanted to throw my laptop.
• Firebase and AI costs spiked and still haven’t received the first App Store payment on my bank account yet.

But here's why I'm still doing it:

I tested it first with my son and he loves it.. He almost always chooses the app instead of books for bedtime thats nice and makes me proud :D

A friend messaged me a few days ago. He's a pilot, gone 4 days a week. He said his daughter listens to "him" reading her a new story every night he's away. She picks the characters, she makes the choices, and she falls asleep to his voice. I almost started crying reading it.

That's why I'm still fixing bugs at 1am. That's why I'm learning marketing even though I hate it. That's why I keep going even when mommy bloggers want $500 for one Instagram post and I feel like it’s too much?!

Because I know what that hotel room felt like.

Anyway. If you're a parent who travels, or works nights, or just sometimes needs to be two places at once — I built this for us.

Happy about every feedback and I am here to talk about Flutter, AI nightmares, or just vent about app store review hell.