u/nhrtrix

I built a clipboard manager extension for Chrome, a while back. it's a blind clipboard manager, means it can't see any clipboard history you're syncing across your devices.

genuinely proud of it. zero-knowledge, AES-256-GCM encryption, encryption/decryption happens client-side, it literally can't see what you sync even if i wanted to.

launched it. did a proper launch push too - Product Hunt, Peerlist, PeerPush, the works.

7 months later: 24 users on the chrome web store. closed source the whole time.

that number didn't move for months. i tried more marketing, more posts, nothing worked. eventually i had to actually sit with why, instead of just posting harder.

Here's what i landed on, and it stung a bit to admit: you can't build a "trust me, i can't see your data" product and then ask people to trust that claim from a total stranger, with code they can't even look at. "trust me" isn't a security model. it's just a sentence.

So, about a month ago, i made the extension's source code public. not fully open source, used PolyForm Noncommercial so nobody can just fork it and resell it. But, anyone can read it, verify the encryption actually does what i say it does, build it themselves if they want.

posted about it here, on X, on reddit. didn't expect much honestly.

A month after: 52 users. up from 24. more than doubled, after sitting completely flat for 7 months straight.

being fully honest about the numbers since that's the whole point of this sub - 2 stars on the repo (both mine, not pretending otherwise 😅), zero issues opened by strangers who've actually dug into the code yet.

so, it's not like the dev community suddenly showed up to audit it. what changed was just... people trusting it enough to install it. that's it. that's the whole shift.

the lesson, as best i can tell: for anything that's selling trust as the actual product (security tools, privacy tools, anything where the pitch is "we can't see your data"), closed source isn't neutral. it's actively working against you, because the entire value prop depends on something the user has no way to check. opening it up didn't make the product better. it made the same product finally believable.

still tiny numbers. still a long way from anything that pays the bills. but it's the first time this thing has grown instead of just sitting there, and i wanted to write it down here while it's fresh, mistakes and all.

repo's here if anyone wants to poke around: https://github.com/encryptedclipboard/chrome-extension

it's been 8 months I launched this extension, the reason was to solve my own problem and also to make a SaaS product that will solve the same problem as mine for other people

it's my 2nd product, I invested a lot of time, money, and love into it, but while my first product crossed 100 users within 6 months, this being a more polished and better daily life problem solving tool was barely able to cross 20 users

I lost hope on it finally, but...still gave it a last chance by making it's source code public on GitHub, as it's a privacy first tool that syncs clipboard history across devices with end-to-end encryption, so, just claiming it on the website wasn't enough I think, that's why I took that big step, made the extension's source code public

made posts on social media, but, though I was expecting a lot of hype, actually ended up being in void, so, I stopped working on this product entirely, didn't want to waste more of my time and money on a product that literally gave me nothing back

and today, after 24 days of posting this on reddit, I opened my chrome webstore dashboard, and, Alhamdulillaah, I saw 49 users on this extension, it's really un-expected to me, I literally thought the product I made has lost it's need and so is a useless entity now bloating the chrome webstore... but, my users proved me wrong

maybe it was a distribution problem, maybe earlier I failed to present it to the people who actually needed this tool, in a way that they can understand that this will solve their problem

so guys, sometimes, things goes VEEERY slow, that we loose hope, but, then Allah gives us something that we literally wasn't expecting, Alhamdulillaah

built a privacy focused yet productive clipboard manager few months back. zero-knowledge encryption, so even i can't see what people copy/paste. genuinely proud of it, thought it solved a real problem.

7 months later, less than 25 users on the chrome store. closed source the whole time.

took me a while to admit the actual issue. you can't ask people to trust a security tool from some random solo dev they've never heard of, with code they can't even look at. "trust me" isn't really a pitch when the whole product is about not having to trust anyone.

so, last week i made the extension's source code public. not open source technically, it's under Polyform Noncommercial 1.0.0, so nobody can fork it and resell it as their own, but anyone can read the code, verify the encryption does what it says, build it themselves if they want.

no idea if this fixes anything tbh. but felt like the honest move after building something people had no real reason to trust yet.

repo's here if anyone wants to poke around: https://github.com/encryptedclipboard/chrome-extension

not trying to sell anything, just wanted to put this out there since this sub gets the "built a thing, nobody came" feeling better than most places.

it's my 3rd product, thought I could make money from it, but, found there's a lot of giants in the market, many of them are open source, some are closed source, and I'm a solo founder with 0 marketing budget trying to get into this crowded market, so, I shifted the path

as it's a devtool, and works with APIs (it has both API mocking + API testing), so, making it open source will definitely make it one of the safest and trusted option for developers and testers in terms of their data privacy

so, I made that completely free and open source, it's a tiny giving back to the open source world I'm depending on my whole tech career

btw, I announced that on LinkedIn, that post reached 20k+ impressions and around 150+ likes within 2 days or 3 days maybe, got a lot of good vibe from the community, and now, after 6 days, it reached 52 users on CWS

sorry for not adding post flairs for this long time, but now we have them, add proper post flairs for better audience targeting :D

our sub is 6 months old, and we reached 524 members milestone 🔥, thanks everyone who joined and shared their journey with us 💚

3 months ago I launched API Pilot as a commercial product. today I'm removing every paywall, every subscription tier, every account requirement and open sourcing the whole thing under Apache 2.0.

here's why 👇

the space already has Postman, Bruno, Hoppscotch, Requestly - massive, well-funded, trusted tools that developers already use daily.

As a solo founder with zero budget, competing against them on marketing and distribution is just not realistic. I kept shipping features, the product kept getting better, but the growth wasn't there.

so, instead of chasing subscription revenue in a market dominated by free and open source giants, I decided to just make it free. completely. no "free tier with limits", no "pro plan", no telemetry, no feature gates. every single feature, available to everyone, forever.

What API Pilot actually does, that I think still makes it worth your attention:

It is the only chrome extension I found that combines a full API client with browser-level request interception in a single sidebar. no proxy setup, no docker, no switching between tools.

practically that means:

• intercept any fetch or XHR request your browser makes and return a custom response, without touching your codebase
• dynamic mocking - intercept the real API response and conditionally modify specific fields based on their values, not just replace the whole thing
• redirect production API calls to your local dev server with one rule
• full API tester with curl import, code generation in JS, Python, Go, Rust, PHP, Java, C#
• load testing with configurable concurrent requests and real time latency charts
• environment variables with {{variable}} syntax across URLs, headers and body
• everything runs locally, offline capable, no external servers, no data collection

Postman and the others are excellent API clients. Requestly is a great interceptor. none of them do both in one place for free.

CWS: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/mkmdmmlijcgakbkbpkpcekomlochkcko

GitHub: https://github.com/nowshad-hossain-rahat/apipilot.git

contributions are very welcome. the open source ecosystem gave me a lot over the years, this is a small way of giving something back.

my Instagram account under which the threads account was, is still active, but the threads account shows this screen, showed appeal option before, i gave my selfie for that, then shows this fully disabled screen with no option to appeal at all

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as far as I understood that rule they're mistakenly saying that I've violated is that i have multiple account on threads of that same identity or something like that, though literally that's my only threads account there 😕

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what can I do to recover that account? please guide me

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I've been building a privacy first clipboard manager chrome extension for a while (Encrypted Clipboard Manager). recently shipped a snippets feature where you type /keyword in any text field and it expands to whatever you saved

i use it for:

- my product pitch so i dont rewrite it every time

- boilerplate comments on github or pr reviews

- pasting my product link into discussions

- common replies i send over and over

it supports two types - rich text with formatting for things like emails, and code with syntax highlighting if you need it. the expansion works through a content script on all websites.

comes with a management page where you can search filter by type or language and edit your snippets. everything is saved locally only on your device, currently these are not synced, let's see if user needs the sync facility for these or not.

NOTE: currently figuring out how to make this feature work on Google Docs and MS Word

I built a clipboard manager that syncs across devices with encryption. Recently a few people (maybe not users yet) suggested to add clipboard item sharing feature, maybe it will be helpful for teams or similar cases.

so, I added it, you pick an item, set an expiry time, optionally add a password, and get a link to send. The person opening the link sees the content in their browser, no account needed.

A couple of things I had to figure out:

Passwords are optional, but not equal: if you set a password, the content gets scrambled before it even leaves your computer, the server never sees the real data. If you don't set a password, the server does see it (it has to, so the recipient can view it). I was uneasy about this at first, but it comes down to: if you want end-to-end encryption, use a password. If convenience matters more, skip it.

The "password in the link" shortcut: people want to send a single link their recipient can just click. so, I added an option to bake the password into the link itself. The catch: that means the password is hidden in the URL in a scrambled form, but not truly encrypted, someone determined could extract it. the truly safe way is to share the password separately. I put a note about this in the UI but I wonder how many people actually notice it.

Expiry cleanup: I set up two systems to clean up expired shares, one automatic (the database handles it), one as a backup running every 15 minutes. Probably over-engineered but I'd rather be safe.

The link ID length: the share link uses a random 12-character code. It's public, anyone who guesses it can view the content (if no password). I spent way too long debating whether 12 characters is enough. I think it is for now, but it nags at me.

Still figuring out a few things:

- when someone enables "include password in link", should I auto-set a short expiry (like 72 hours) since it's less secure? Or let them choose whatever they want?

- should the person who shared an item get a notification when someone views it? I'm already counting views but haven't built alerts.

- images are trickier than text, they get stored in cloud storage and displayed inline on the share page. I'm worried about hotlinking but don't want to put a login wall on a public share page.

curious what you all think about any of these, especially the password-in-link expiry question?

I'm working with software development, chrome extensions and open source niche

my plan is to grow my personal brand and to promote my own SaaS products

Finally I released Encrypted Clipboard Manager v4.0.0 🔥

It's definitely a BIG release for Encrypted Clipboard! 🎉

What this new version includes:

• Rich content support
• Share clipboard item
• Advanced filtering
• Significant performance improvements
• More memory efficient

Why Rich Content support is added now? - cause I really forgot about this critical feature 😞, but now Encrypted Clipboard will preserve the exact formatting of any rich content you will copy.

Now let's talk about the performance and memory efficiency improvements:

Before the sidepanel was giving around 1-3 seconds of delay to load the clipboard history each time you open it, found that there was a useless logging that was literally fetching the entire clipboard history into the memory just to log them, it's my bad that I didn't check and remove that earlier.

Then added workers with a worker-pool system for encryption/decryption, this way these CPU bound tasks will be performed inside actual threads out of the main thread, so, both encryption and decryption got significant speed improvement.

Another issue was in our search and lock/unlock system where we were still fetching all the items from IndexedDB into the memory and then performing other actions, these can cause significant memory consumption when user will have a few thousands of items, but now we're using IndexedDB Cursor so that we don't need to fetch everything at once, and instead we're performing action on one item at a time, this lowered the memory usage significantly, and the speed compromise is negligible.

There's even more new productivity features and UX improvements, I'll share them one by one with videos

Use it for FREE: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/encrypted-clipboard-manag/hplfhaecbalimhnmlacdbmecldhpjgli

No signup required!