u/Mad_Are_You

Hey folks,

Every morning I want to catch up on AI/tech news with my coffee, but I only really get about 10 minutes before the day starts.

I tried the usual free newsletters, but they send the same thing to everyone - and being ad-funded, they can't really personalize without it working against them.

So I built for myself first: pick your topics (10 categories, 90+ vetted sources), get one email a day, and every story has a 👍/👎 that actually nudges what shows up more or less over time - not a static "select your interests" box you fill in once.

Choose the week days, the summary tone and more.

Used it myself for a while before deciding to put it out there.

No ads, no data resale, €10/year - which is basically what it costs to run (email delivery + the AI curation + hosting), closer to a donation than a subscription.

7-day free trial, no card needed to start.

I'm doing a part-time Master's in Human-Centred AI right now, and this turned into a nice real-world version of exactly what I'm studying - building something that adapts to a person instead of optimizing one feed for everyone.

One thing I'm actively working on: -> making sure the digest actually lands at your own local morning, wherever you are - not just Ireland/Europe time. (my location)

I've built and tested the mechanism (it now refreshes the story pool 4x/day instead of once), but I can only fully verify it with real subscribers in different timezones, \*\*especially Asia-Pacific, Middle East, or anywhere meaningfully east of Europe\*\*. (of course others are welcome too)

You can signup free normally through

https://devdigest.io

(No strings attached.)

If that's you and you're up for signing up and just... using it normally for a bit, I'd genuinely value it, no extra steps needed, it detects your timezone automatically at signup.

Drop a comment or DM me and I'll add some extra free days to your trial as a thank you.

Would genuinely appreciate feedback either way, especially if a category feels off or something's missing.

Thanks a lot.

Hi Folks,

Posted here about 7 days ago about the digest itself, thanks to everyone who tried it and to specifically for the thumbs-down feedback (still on my list, not fixed yet, wanted to be upfront about that rather than pretend it's resolved).

Two real things shipped since then:

AI sub-topic filters -> the broad "AI" category was catching everything from model releases to safety papers to random agent tooling news.

You can now narrow it to specific sub-topics (agents, coding tools, research papers, model releases, AI safety) instead of getting the whole bucket.

My Past Digest -> a no-account way to pull up old digests by email if you lose one, instead of archive access being email-link-only.

🙏 Looking for 5-10 people.

- ideally if you already read AI/tech news daily and have felt an "AI" tag/category feel too broad on some other tool - to actually try the sub-topic filters for a few real days and tell me if the narrowing feels right or still misses.

Free 7-day trial, no card needed. Comment or DM and I'll add extra trial days as thanks

Real feedback wanted either way, including "this didn't help."

Thanks a lot.

devdigest.io admin

Hey folks,

Solo-built, real subscribers, real revenue, no team, no funding. Genuinely want the harsh version, not encouragement.

devdigest.io - one AI-curated email a day from 100+ tech/AI sources, with a feedback loop (thumbs up/down per story) that's supposed to reshape what you get shown.

Free 7-day trial, no card required to start.

Go easy on the hero video, I already know it's a little rough 😁

Everything else is fair game - copy, pricing, the actual pitch, whether "personalized daily digest" is even a category anyone wants.

Been running my paid AI/tech newsletter SaaS off a home server since launch. Real subscribers, real revenue, real single point of failure every time my home internet hiccups.

Finally did the migration this week. The actual coding was the easy part - the real obstacles were all boring infrastructure stuff: my target MySQL version wasn't available in the vendor's own apt repo for my Ubuntu release (had to fall back to a different version and verify it wouldn't break anything), and a live API integration I'd just built had a wrong field name in its response parsing that only showed up once I actually had a real API token to test against - the mocked tests didn't catch it.

Did it as a staged rollout: build everything on the new box, test it in isolation while the old one kept serving real traffic, only cut over once I'd verified the full pipeline end-to-end - including timing it around when real subscribers' scheduled sends would land, so nobody got a duplicate or missed digest.

Lesson that stuck: the parts of a migration that actually bite you are rarely the code, they're the boring environment-drift stuff (dependency versions, real API responses vs. what you assumed) that only surfaces under real conditions, not tests.

Tech stack: Python/Flask, MySQL, gunicorn+nginx, all self-managed on a Hetzner VPS now instead of a home box.

Product is devdigest.io if anyone wants the backstory on the whole thing - founder here, disclosing per sub rules.

Building a solo SaaS (AI-curated daily tech digest). Shipped a fix for misaligned buttons in one transactional email, showed it to the person I'm building this for.

Their reaction: "why do these always look like basic bootstrap buttons." Fair - flat single-color fill, default-case bold text, 8px radius - that's literally Bootstrap's own .btn-primary defaults, just recolored.

Redesigned with actual depth: a subtle gradient + shadow on the primary action, tracked-out uppercase type instead of default-case bold, a tighter radius closer to a printed label than a generic app button. Then realized the same generic template was shared across every email the product sends (confirmation, trial notices, receipts) - so the fix became a small reusable component instead of a one-off patch, and got rolled out everywhere at once.

The lesson: a blunt one-line critique ("why does this look cheap") is more useful than vague feedback, because it forces you to name exactly what's generic before you can fix it. "Make it nicer" wouldn't have gotten me anywhere near as fast to an actual diagnosis.

devdigest.io if anyone's curious what it turned into - founder here.

I run a daily digest that pulls from 100+ RSS feeds and uses a strict freshness filter (nothing older than 24h survives) to keep it from turning into a backlog dump.

Today I found a real edge case in my own system: one of my quarantined sources (Google's Project Zero - genuinely excellent security research) had a 0% pass rate over 80 collected stories. My first instinct was "bad fit, reject it." But when I actually read the rejection reasons, every single one was "too old" or "duplicate" - zero were rejected for quality. Only 10 distinct articles existed across the whole 4-week window I was measuring.

Turned out my 24h freshness filter, tuned for daily-cadence blogs, structurally can't feature a source that publishes once every 2-3 days. By the time any collection pass sees it, it's either already stale or already seen. Promoting it out of quarantine wouldn't even fix it, since the same filter applies everywhere.

Anyone else building feed aggregation hit this tension between "freshness" and "low-frequency but high-quality" sources? Curious how others have handled it - a per-source age exception, a separate "deep dives" bucket, or just accepting you can't feature everything.

(Built devdigest.io if anyone's curious how the rest of the pipeline works - founder here, disclosing per usual.)

Been doing organic Reddit distribution for my solo SaaS (a personalized AI/tech newsletter) over the past week. Sharing real numbers since most "I tried Reddit marketing" posts I find are either humble-brags or vague.

What happened: 18 posts across niche/indie subreddits using the same core pitch text via the native repost tool. 5 got removed - 4 attempts in (mod-removed every time), plus one auto-removed by Reddit's own spam filter elsewhere.

The pattern: reposting identical text across many communities reads as spam to both mods and Reddit's own filter, even when each individual subreddit is a legitimate fit.

Separately - explicitly bans AI-generated text in its rules, even lightly edited. Worth knowing if you use AI to help draft and then edit it yourself: the pattern still gets flagged, not just verbatim copy-paste.

What I'm changing: writing a genuinely different angle per subreddit instead of reposting, and reading each community's actual rules before posting instead of assuming "SaaS-adjacent" is enough.

Curious if others doing organic Reddit distribution hit the same wall.

(Building https://devdigest.io if anyone's curious - a personalized daily AI/tech digest, reader-funded.)

Been doing organic Reddit distribution for my solo SaaS (a personalized AI/tech newsletter) over the past week. Sharing real numbers since most "I tried Reddit marketing" posts I find are either humble-brags or vague.

What happened: 18 posts across niche/indie subreddits using the same core pitch text via the native repost tool. 5 got removed - 4 attempts in (mod-removed every time), plus one auto-removed by Reddit's own spam filter elsewhere.

The pattern: reposting identical text across many communities reads as spam to both mods and Reddit's own filter, even when each individual subreddit is a legitimate fit.

Separately - explicitly bans AI-generated text in its rules, even lightly edited. Worth knowing if you use AI to help draft and then edit it yourself: the pattern still gets flagged, not just verbatim copy-paste.

What I'm changing: writing a genuinely different angle per subreddit instead of reposting, and reading each community's actual rules before posting instead of assuming "SaaS-adjacent" is enough.

Curious if others doing organic Reddit distribution hit the same wall.

(Building devdigest.io if anyone's curious - a personalized daily AI/tech digest, reader-funded.)

Hey folks,

Every morning I want to catch up on AI/tech news with my coffee, but I only really get about 10 minutes before the day starts.

I tried the usual free newsletters, but they send the same thing to everyone - and being ad-funded, they can't really personalize without it working against them.

So I built for myself first: pick your topics (10 categories, 70+ vetted sources), get one email a day, and every story has a 👍/👎 that actually nudges what shows up more or less over time - not a static "select your interests" box you fill in once.

Used it myself for a while before deciding to put it out there.

No ads, no data resale, €10/year - which is basically what it costs to run (email delivery + the AI curation + hosting), closer to a donation than a subscription. 7-day free trial, no card needed to start.

I'm doing a part-time Master's in Human-Centred AI right now, and this turned into a nice real-world version of exactly what I'm studying - building something that adapts to a person instead of optimizing one feed for everyone.

One thing I'm actively working on: -> making sure the digest actually lands at your own local morning, wherever you are - not just Ireland/Europe time. (my location)

I've built and tested the mechanism (it now refreshes the story pool 4x/day instead of once), but I can only fully verify it with real subscribers in different timezones, \*\*especially Asia-Pacific, Middle East, or anywhere meaningfully east of Europe\*\*. (of course others are welcome too)

You can signup free normally through:

devdigest.io

(No strings attached.)

**Drop a comment or DM me and I'll add some extra free days to your trial as a thank you.**

Would genuinely appreciate feedback either way, especially if a category feels off or something's missing. Thanks a lot.

Hey folks,

Every morning I want to catch up on AI/tech news with my coffee, but I only really get about 10 minutes before the day starts.

I tried the usual free newsletters, but they send the same thing to everyone - and being ad-funded, they can't really personalize without it working against them.

So I built for myself first: pick your topics (10 categories, 70+ vetted sources), get one email a day, and every story has a 👍/👎 that actually nudges what shows up more or less over time - not a static "select your interests" box you fill in once.

Used it myself for a while before deciding to put it out there.

No ads, no data resale, €10/year - which is basically what it costs to run (email delivery + the AI curation + hosting), closer to a donation than a subscription.

7-day free trial, no card needed to start.

I'm doing a part-time Master's in Human-Centred AI right now, and this turned into a nice real-world version of exactly what I'm studying - building something that adapts to a person instead of optimizing one feed for everyone.

One thing I'm actively working on: -> making sure the digest actually lands at your own local morning, wherever you are - not just Ireland/Europe time. (my location)

I've built and tested the mechanism (it now refreshes the story pool 4x/day instead of once), but I can only fully verify it with real subscribers in different timezones, **especially Asia-Pacific, Middle East, or anywhere meaningfully east of Europe**. (of course others are welcome too)

You can signup free normally through

https://devdigest.io

(No strings attached.)

If that's you and you're up for signing up and just... using it normally for a bit, I'd genuinely value it, no extra steps needed, it detects your timezone automatically at signup.

Drop a comment or DM me and I'll add some extra free days to your trial as a thank you.

Would genuinely appreciate feedback either way, especially if a category feels off or something's missing. Thanks a lot.

Hey folks,

Every morning I want to catch up on AI/tech news with my coffee, but I only really get about 10 minutes before the day starts. I tried the usual free newsletters, but they send the same thing to everyone - and being ad-funded, they can't really personalize without it working against them.

So I built for myself first: pick your topics (10 categories, 70+ vetted sources), get one email a day, and every story has a 👍/👎 that actually nudges what shows up more or less over time - not a static "select your interests" box you fill in once.

Used it myself for a while before deciding to put it out there. No ads, no data resale, €10/year - which is basically what it costs to run (email delivery + the AI curation + hosting), closer to a donation than a subscription. 7-day free trial, no card needed to start.

I'm doing a part-time Master's in Human-Centred AI right now, and this turned into a nice real-world version of exactly what I'm studying - building something that adapts to a person instead of optimizing one feed for everyone.

One thing I'm actively working on: -> making sure the digest actually lands at your own local morning, wherever you are - not just Ireland/Europe time. (my location)

I've built and tested the mechanism (it now refreshes the story pool 4x/day instead of once), but I can only fully verify it with real subscribers in different timezones, especially Asia-Pacific, Middle East, or anywhere meaningfully east of Europe. (of course others are welcome too)

You can signup free normally through devdigest.io

(No strings attached.)

If that's you and you're up for signing up and just... using it normally for a bit, I'd genuinely value it, no extra steps needed, it detects your timezone automatically at signup.

Drop a comment or DM me and I'll add some extra free days to your trial as a thank you.

Would genuinely appreciate feedback either way, especially if a category feels off or something's missing. Thanks a lot.