u/KB1313x

Loss aversion works in a psychology lab. It works for about three weeks of your actual life. Then it destroys everything.

I've been wrestling with this while building Cairn - a tiny Mac menu-bar app that asks one question a day - and the obvious play was a streak counter. Every habit app ships one. They demo beautifully. They take five minutes to build. I almost fell for it.

Here's the brutal truth: streaks only work for the small slice of users wired for that mechanic. Everyone else churns silently and blames themselves. Those 5-star reviews ("I haven't missed a day in 312 days!") are pure survivorship bias - you never hear from the 95% who tried for three weeks, missed a Tuesday, watched their counter hit zero at their lowest moment, and uninstalled with quiet shame.

A counter is the wrong shape for human commitment.

So I'm building a decay curve instead. Miss a day, momentum drops to ~70%, never to zero. Two good days back and you're at 90%. The shape weather has. The shape mood has. Hard to quit on something that never free things I've discovered designing this, before a single user has touched it:

1. A decay curve is brutally harder to design than a streak. A streak is if (didIt) count++ else count = 0. Five minutes. A decay is a model of you - how much does a single miss matter, how fast does it recover, what counts as a partial day. No clean academic answer exists. I'm on my fourth version and still hunting edge cases.

2. The shareable demo gets worse. "312-day streak" is a flex. "My momentum is 84%" is not a screenshot anyone says. I've made peace with this. The TikTok-able number and the metric that drives retention are different problems, and you can only optimize one.

3. The honest unit of a productivity app is retention, not engagement. A user who quits in week three has been failed by the product, no matter how many weeks felt. Longevity is the entire shape of the business, and a mechanic that punishes a single miss is borrowing engagement from your future retention curve.

Cairn's still in build - waitlist's at cairnday.com if you want to see where the curve lands once it's real.

Im also building in public on x handle is madebypetr

https://reddit.com/link/1tkeq8d/video/cqig640jzn2h1/player

https://reddit.com/link/1tkeq8d/video/9vx458ylzn2h1/player

Real question: has anyone else killed a "best practice" mechanic in pre-launch because the evidence turned out thinner than the conventional wisdom? Or shipped one and regretted it? What else falls apart under a hard look?

i'm a solo dev. i kept ending the day with 40+ tabs across 3 windows,

half of them half-read articles, a quarter of them "i'll get back to this," and the rest from whatever rabbit hole i fell into at 2am.

every "tab manager" i tried felt wrong:

• onetab: dumps everything into one giant list. great for closing tabs, useless for actually getting back into work.
• toby: too much. drag-and-drop boards, accounts, sync, the whole thing. i wanted a keyboard shortcut, not a dashboard.
• chrome tab groups: tied to one window, vanish if chrome crashes, no search.

so i built stack. the mental model is `git stash` for your browser:

• cmd+shift+s saves your current window as a named workspace
• cmd+shift+o opens the popup, fuzzy-search any saved stack, hit enter to restore it (closes current tabs, opens the saved set)
• everything is keyboard-first. arrow keys, enter, esc. no mouse needed.

the part i'm most proud of is the diff view. before you restore a stack, it shows you which tabs changed since you saved it. so if you saved "client work" last Tuesday and you're about to restore it, you see what's new vs what was already there. it's a small thing but it's the thing i use most.

https://preview.redd.it/d4z1ju4mtn1h1.png?width=1406&format=png&auto=webp&s=8f93b9632ad1828737fa61cae99f2490d2850e5b

free tier: 5 stacks, unlimited tabs per stack, all the keyboard stuff.

paid tier: $29 lifetime (first 100 supporters, then $49). no subscription.

i pivoted away from $9/mo, $72/year a week ago because i asked myself "would i pay $9/mo or even $72/year for this?" and the answer was no.

tech: manifest v3, vanilla js (no react in the extension itself, the popup is ~42kb of dom manipulation). sync is e2e encrypted, key derived from your password client-side. i never see your tabs.

link is builtbypetr.com/stack if anyone wants to try it. happy to answer questions about the build, the pricing pivot, or why mv3 made me want to throw my laptop.

How do you guys go about getting ratings and reviews for your extension?

I only launched mine recently and wanting to know what works best for you?

Made an extension called Stack. Here's the idea:

You're working on something a side project, online shopping, research, whatever with a bunch of tabs open. Instead of leaving them open forever (or losing them when you close the window), Stack lets you:

1. Save all tabs as a named group (e.g., "work")
2. Close the window (saves memory)
3. Later, open the switcher → start typing a few letters → it finds your group → everything comes back exactly where you left it

What makes it different from bookmarks / tab groups:

- Restores scroll position, form data, and navigation history

- Start typing to search across all your saved groups it finds what you need fast

- Delete individual tabs from a group or rearrange them before restoring

- Shows you what's changed since you last opened a group (Pro)

- Pauses tabs you're not using to save memory (Pro)

Free: 5 saved groups, smart search, light & dark mode, single device. 7-day free Pro trial included.

Pro ($9/mo): Unlimited groups, encrypted cloud sync (nobody can see your data not even us), change tracking, memory saving, and more.

Lifetime ($149): Everything in Pro, one-time payment.

Lightweight extension, minimal permissions, doesn't access any of your page content.

https://reddit.com/link/1t5ad54/video/ukqocke48izg1/player

Chrome Web Store

Stack Website

Just launched this built it for myself and figured others might find it useful. Would love feedback.

Made an extension called Stack. Here's the idea:

You're working on something a side project, online shopping, research, whatever with a bunch of tabs open. Instead of leaving them open forever (or losing them when you close the window), Stack lets you:

1. Save all tabs as a named group (e.g., "work")
2. Close the window (saves memory)
3. Later, open the switcher → start typing a few letters → it finds your group → everything comes back exactly where you left it

What makes it different from bookmarks / tab groups:

- Restores scroll position, form data, and navigation history

- Start typing to search across all your saved groups it finds what you need fast

- Delete individual tabs from a group or rearrange them before restoring

- Shows you what's changed since you last opened a group (Pro)

- Pauses tabs you're not using to save memory (Pro)

Free: 5 saved groups, smart search, light & dark mode, single device. 7-day free Pro trial included.

Pro ($9/mo): Unlimited groups, encrypted cloud sync (nobody can see your data not even us), change tracking, memory saving, and more.

Lifetime ($149): Everything in Pro, one-time payment.

Lightweight extension, minimal permissions, doesn't access any of your page content.

https://reddit.com/link/1t5abho/video/jq6w586r7izg1/player

Chrome Web Store

Stack Website

Just launched this built it for myself and figured others might find it useful. Would love feedback.

Every browser has a clipboard. None of them remember anything. You copy something, copy something else 5 seconds later, and the first thing is gone forever. It's been like this since browsers existed.

I tried a bunch of clipboard manager extensions and most of them either felt clunky, sent my data to some server I've never heard of, or both. So I built one for myself and ended up shipping it.

It's called Pouch. Quick rundown:

• saves everything you copy (text, links, code, images, colors) into a searchable history
• auto-detects and skips passwords, credit card numbers, and other sensitive patterns so they never get stored
• 100% local — nothing leaves your browser, no account, no tracking
• works silently in the background, no setup

https://preview.redd.it/8c9ezx9xbtyg1.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=2458bf9497b9dc1ef2625e15faa9685deb84e579

Free version is fully usable on its own. There's a Pro option for unlimited history and cross-device sync but honestly the free tier is what most people will need.

Curious what other people use for this — is anyone actually happy with their clipboard manager? Or have you just accepted that copy-paste is broken forever lol

[link in comments]