r/indiehackers

Pitch your product in 1-2 lines - and drop a link here.

I'm building a community where makers can share what they’re building and get fair visibility. Here's the link: https://vibecodedit.com/

A few months ago, I started building a simple GDPR scanner.

The idea was straightforward: enter a website URL, scan it, and get a simple report showing potential GDPR and privacy risks.

I wanted something much simpler than the typical compliance tools.

No huge dashboards. No complicated setup.

Just:

“Here’s what we found. Here’s why it might be a problem. Here’s what you can do about it.”

I launched GetGDPRScan and started getting people to try it.

Then the product started evolving.

As I worked on the scanner, I kept finding things that didn't really fit into a narrow “GDPR scanner” box.

So I added cookie and tracking detection, consent banner analysis, privacy policy checks, and eventually started expanding into other areas.

Today, the platform also covers AI Act, accessibility and website security checks.

At some point I realized I wasn't really building a GDPR scanner anymore.

I was building a website compliance platform.

And interestingly, this wasn't really planned.

It happened by following the problems I was seeing and the feedback I was getting.

There have been some humbling lessons along the way too.

One post in a Slovenian developer community resulted in around 150 scans.

Paid conversions?

Zero.

Google Ads have brought traffic and people actually using the scanner, but I'm still figuring out how to turn that into a sustainable acquisition channel.

I've also changed some of the checks after people challenged whether certain things should be flagged as actual “issues” or just potential risks.

That was an important lesson.

Compliance isn't always black and white, and I don't want the product pretending that it is.

So for now, I'm experimenting with a broader idea:

A simple compliance checkup for your website.

I'm still very early, still figuring out the business model, and definitely haven't “figured it out”.

But that's probably the most interesting part of building this.

The product I have today is quite different from what I thought I was going to build when I started.

You can check it out here if you're interested: getgdprscan.com

I'm curious how other indie hackers experienced this.

Did your product also slowly evolve into something completely different from the original idea?

And how did you decide whether to follow that evolution or stay focused on the original niche?

Hey IH,

I posted Qevo here about 3 months ago, the inbox-style task manager where tasks get pushed directly to people's queues instead of getting buried in Slack threads.

Figured I'd share an update because the main thing that happened wasn't growth, it was a masterclass in getting rejected by Slack.

The Slack Marketplace review process is brutal

When I posted, the Slack integration was "pending approval." What followed was 4 rounds of rejections over 3 months. Every round had 4-5 specific issues to fix, then a 3-4 week wait to find out you missed something else.

Things I had to fix across the rounds:

The bot was named "Queue" but the app was named "Qevo." Confusing users apparently. Simple fix, but you only find out after a full review cycle.

My landing page showed /qevo as a command that grabs the last channel message. Reviewers tested it, it failed. Turns out the bot needs to be a member of the channel first. (Was not a requirement in their earlier versions). Had to auto join public channels, add a proper error message for private ones, and update the landing page copy.

They rejected im:history and mpim:history as user token scopes, "too much access to workspace data." So DM support via bare `/qevo` had to be dropped entirely.

My app listed Spanish as a supported language. They asked for proof. The bot responses were actually translated (using the user_locale field Slack sends in the slash command payload) but I had to explain how.

A typo in the long description: "Start using GQevo today." Only caught in review round 3.

The whole process took longer than building the original integration.

Where things actually stand

The Slack app is now what I am hoping is about to be approved as per my last messaging with them. Slack app is now approved and live

Email to task is still the feature that gets the best reaction. People immediately get it. Slack is taking months to ship.

What I'd do differently

Don't list a feature as "coming soon" or "pending approval" in your launch post. Just launch when it's ready. The Slack integration being in-progress for 3 months after my original post made updates awkward.

Read the Slack app review guidelines obsessively before submitting. The checklist they publish covers maybe 30% of what they actually check.

Still free for individuals, $3/seat/month for teams: getqevo.com

Happy to answer questions about the Slack review process specifically. It's not well documented and I wish someone had written this post when I was going through it.

I've also seen a few other founders here going through the same Slack approval battle. Would be curious if anyone else has tips or horror stories, mine was apparently a rough one

Every founder I know has done the awkward backlink dance: you find someone in your niche, DM them, agree to link to each other… and now you both have a reciprocal link pattern that Google's spam policies literally name, from a "partners" page nobody reads.

I've been building LaunchPact (founders backing each other's Product Hunt launches, with verification) and just shipped the thing users kept asking for: the same mutual-support model, applied to backlinks. It went live this week, so consider this equal parts launch post and "tell me what's broken."

How it works:

• You claim your domain and it gets quality-scored into a tier (1–5).
• Matching runs in loops of 3–5 founders, never pairs. You place a one-sentence do-follow link for founder B; founder C places one for you. The site you link to is never the site linking back — no reciprocal footprint.
• Loops only match sites within 2 tiers of each other and in the same or an adjacent niche. An automated relevance screen rejects bad fits before a human ever sees them.
• Every insertion is approved and placed by hand by the site owner. Then crawls check it at day 7, 30, and 90 — if someone quietly removes a link, their credits get clawed back and their trust score drops.
• Credits are earned by giving links, never bought. Giving is free; requesting links is the paid part ($29/mo, 14-day trial on your first claim).

Full honesty: it's days old, so the pool is small — early claimers are matching with other early claimers. If you join now you're a founding member of the network, not a customer of a mature one. That's the trade.

The design decisions I'm least sure about: credits expiring after 6 months (keeps the network active vs. feels punitive?), and paywalling requesting while giving stays free.

What would make you trust — or refuse to trust — a system like this with your domain?

Hi all,

As i'm working on growing launchpact.io i'm seeing a lot of unprepped launches and as the day unfold they don't get much visibility and end up with a failed launch.

This is one of the reasons i build launchpact.io, if you have an upcoming launch do check it out and prep ahead of time, i also added this checklist that can give some hints too, have a read.

Good luck everyone!

Solo dev here. I kept owning things and forgetting where I put them, so I built Store & Forget.

The whole point is zero effort to catalog: you don't type or tag anything. Snap a photo and it auto-fills what the item is (the photo scan uses a cloud AI service). Later you find it by searching names, descriptions, or which box or room it's in, or tap "Smart Find" to search by meaning.

Local-first: everything sits in an on-device database, no account, no sign-up. Optional backup to your own Google Drive.

It's free, Android only. Would love feedback from other builders.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dev.koalalab.storeandforget

I keep hitting the same thing: find a tool, looks right, and then it wants your email before it'll do anything. Not to save your work, just to use it once.

So I started keeping a list of tools that don't do that. It's at 21 so far, and I put it online. The site is mine.

Rules I'm sticking to:

no account, no email, no "continue with Google"

free means free, not 14 days

nothing watermarked

ads are fine, I just note them, something has to pay for it

 

Here's the list

 

These are some of the tools that are included: Photopea, Squoosh, CyberChef, PairDrop, Mailinator, regex101, PDF24, Excalidraw, Wormhole, transform.tools, diagrams.net and some others. Each one has a line on what it does and what its catch is.

If you know something that belongs, reply. If you built it, say so, doesn't matter as long as it clears the bar. It's a new page so I'm not going to pretend it'll send you traffic, but you get a real writeup rather than a scraped title. I'll check and reply either way.

Fair warning that I'll turn things down. I'd rather have 50 that someone can vouch for than 300 scraped off other lists.

The one I keep going back and forth on: tools that only need an account if you want to save your work. Right now they're in, with a note. It doesn't stop you using the thing, which feels like the right side of the line, but I could see the argument that it's the same trick one step later.

The Habit App that calls you back is finally here! Gamified Lives has been through the ringer the last few weeks, as many of you likely saw I had 3 Apple rejections, I missed my launch day of June 1st, I was trying to figure out when to stop building features and to just launch the app. I appreciate all the support and feedback i got from everyone. A little more about the app for those interested in checking it out; I built this because most habit apps tend to fail the same way, you miss a day and the streak resets to zero. The screen turns red and then you quit. I feel like the shame spiral ruins your ability to truly form a habit and actually achieve your goals. Two things make me standout in the crowd of habit apps: 1. An Ai coach personalized to every users which calls to check in and make sure you stay on track with the goals you have set, not in an annoying way but as if it were your friend that you agreed to go to the gym with everyday that will keep you accountable to doing so, 2. I built the app in a forgiveness first angle where you have a resilience score which tracks how fast you come back after breaking a streak not just that binary streak number which doesn’t actually tell you anything, the hardest part of starting something new is staying on track and missing a day is always going to happen so there’s no reason to punish you for losing the streak instead Gamified Lives rewards you. Let me know if you have any questions I can answer for you, I’d love for you guys to check it out and give me some feedback! Thanks for all the support I’ve gotten here and the road to the first 100 users without any paid ads begins now!!

Link: govauctions.app/research/open-dataset

I run a site that aggregates government auctions (govauctions.app), and I make the US federal auction data from GSA available for free.

You can see things like sold prices, locations, bid counts and so on. It's available in a csv, JSON or via a public github repo.

Hope you find it useful; let me know if you do anything interesting with it.

Hi all! I built a Mac app that provides in-context answers, can draft things for you, and also supports normal dictation. You hold a button and speak, instead of copy-pasting your thing into a chatbot and dealing with the back-and-forth friction that comes with that.

You can ask anything about what is on your screen or even things that are not on your screen.

- "Find and kill process using this port" → gives you the command that you can insert directly
- "Reply that I can't make it" → drafts an email following your specific email instructions
- "How to pronounce this thing" → it sees your selected text and gives guidance on pronunciation
- "Translate this" → translates what is on your screen or any selected text to your language immediately

And many more use cases!

It takes a still image of the foremost (active) app only when you press the hotkey, sends it to a zero-data-retention provider, and then discards it. Nothing is saved on any cloud server or database. It also sees any selected text and knows what app you are currently working on, and uses all of that as context to provide the most optimal and concise answer.

It is $12/month with a free 7-day trial. No credit card required.

Works on Apple Silicon (M1+) and macOS 15+.

If you try it, I would love to hear about your experience. Happy to answer any questions.

https://www.prelto.com/

Reddit has been a major growth channel for most of my side projects, every single day i spend 2-3 hours at different times to do marketing and outreach on Reddit, it's a gold mine, 75% of all my revenue comes from it, but as a soloprenuer i'm getting overwhelmed and obviously i can't cover all leads manually and by myself, so i finally got to building a tool to automate this whole thing for me.

ReplyHey - I just launced it and have delegated all my reddit marketing and outreach to it and boy is it a relief.

- 30 secs to set up, just enter your domain.

- It finds leads for you, you can reach out to them yourself (comment or DM) or you can use the tailored human-sounding draft that's ready for you via a copy and comment or copy and DM button.

- The best part now: the Automation - there's 2 ways you can use this: 1. connect ReplHey's MCP and copy/paste a prompt to your agent which will run an automated session and does all the outreach and 2. via a chrome extension, pick whatever you're comfortable with, i do both.

- Note that leads includes the free promo threads too, those are great to build SEO and get visibility too.

- It has a posts calendar so you can schedule and track your content distribution + an auto generation flow.

- It has brand sentiment and keywords monitoring too.

- Ofcourse the MCP, which i already mentioned, you can use it in more ways than just 'pull leads and start automation', you can ask it to give you a roadmap of what to post and where and when, you can also just set up your site through it and in general run the whole reddit marketing from your claude/cursor or whatever tool you're on.

- Now regarding safety and bans and blocks and all that: the interactions are throttled, it's not blindly blasting comments and DMs right and left, it is throttled which means it can take a bit of time to run outreach to like 150 leads for example, but you don't care, let it run and go do your other work lol.

That's about it, pls do check it out, there will be comments about 'AI tools like this is blasphemy bla bla' pls note that the goal here is to automate what you already manually do, and also note you're in full control, you're not comfortable with automation? np, get the leads and contact them yourself, you're not comfortable with finding leads? np, just don't try to run a SaaS or a product anymore, go run a charity instead..

Thanks all

A few months ago, I was trying to stay consistent with tracking my macros, but every major app felt like a hostile cash grab. The moment you try to scan a barcode or read a label, you are hit with a paywall asking for an expensive yearly subscription. On top of that, half the local products in my grocery store were completely missing from their databases anyway.

I decided to build Visibite to fix both issues. My philosophy was simple: core tracking, including barcode scanning, packaging OCR, and manual logging, should be 100% free and completely ad-free forever.

To monetize sustainably without ruining the core user experience, I added an optional AI assistant that handles plate photo scanning, meal feedback, and healthier food swaps. Free users can use all AI features with ads, while an optional Pro tier ($1.99/month or $9/year) removes ads entirely, enables cloud sync, and supports up to four profiles.

Before launching publicly on Google Play, I gave early builds to a group of friends and family. Watching non-tech friends and family members actually stick to logging their meals daily, without complaining about paywalls or missing regional products, was the exact validation I needed to finish the project.

Now that it is officially live on Android (and with the iOS version currently under active development), I am looking to get feedback from fellow indie builders.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the product, the monetization model, or what features you would like to see next. You can check it out directly on Google Play!

Hey everybody! For the last few months my wife and I have been building Scinta - a small macOS app that lives in your menu bar.

The idea came from a simple but almost daily problem - the number of screenshots lying around on my filesystem got so big that it was impossible to even remember what they were about. A message about a meeting, an email signature, someone's messenger profile, an error from a build - all of this was waiting for "some later time" to be processed. And some later time never arrived.

This is the exact problem Scinta solves, and this is how it works - you press a shortcut (like any other screenshot app), select part of the screen, and it proposes the top 3 things it can do with what it sees. We call them smart actions. For example:

• screenshot an error - get it explained or create an issue directly from Scinta
• screenshot a message like "dinner Saturday at 7:00 PM" - Scinta proposes the actual event details and creates it in your Calendar
• screenshot an email signature - the person's contact info is saved to your Contacts
• it can also blur private and sensitive info before you share a screenshot, extract code or tables, translate text, decode different code formats (including QR and Bar codes) - and more actions are coming

There is also an Ask AI feature - if you just have a question about what is on the screen, you ask it right there in the app and get the answer back immediately.

Expecting a common question - why not just paste the screenshot into ChatGPT or Claude? That is exactly what I did before, and it is the reason Scinta exists. There you switch apps, upload the screenshot, write a prompt, then copy the result back and still create the event or contact yourself. With Scinta you skip all of this - it understands what can be done with the screenshot and one click gets the result and performs the action - saving to Calendar or Contacts, creating an issue, getting an instant explanation and so on.

The demo video shows 3 different smart actions and runs at real speed - nothing is sped up.

We are planning to release within the next 1-2 weeks, and this is the stage where honest feedback helps the most. So a few things I would genuinely love critique on:

• Does the "suggests 3 actions" approach feel useful or would you prefer to pick from a full list yourself?
• We are thinking $8/month with a free tier (local features free forever, AI actions metered) - fair or would you expect something else for a tool like this?
• What smart actions are missing? What would you want a screenshot to turn into?

There is a waitlist on our site - https://scinta.app, and if you would like to try it before release - comment or DM and we will send you a build as soon as it is ready.

Hi everyone,

I use session replays a lot in my role but not all recordings are equal and I think the tools could be better. A lot of the existing tools have grown into huge 1,000 feature bloatware imo and replays are treated as optional add ons, and even then they don't feel native to modern day workflows e.g. how are users exploiting these sessions with Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini?

So I built https://UserTapes.com as a session replay tool for both humans & machines. It still captures a video for you to watch, but also provides a clean text transcript for your AI agents.

You can watch your tapes, chat with them in the browser, or connect to the MCP server and ask your agent of choice to watch, review, and investigate based on whatever you tell it.

You can ask questions about your entire site or specific videos, like:

"Did any users fail to complete sign up today?"

Your agent instantly reads the transcript and replies:

"Yes, User #3829 hesitated for 30 seconds, typed an expired discount code, hit a validation error, and quit. Watch the exact 5 seconds of the tape here: [Link]"

I would love to get your feedback on the concept. There’s a free tier to try out if anyone’s interested. Thanks!