Ask HN: What are you building as a side-project or side-hustle in 2026?

Is it an idea you had for a long time? Is it something totally random and weird?

15 points | by bayeslaw 1 day ago

17 comments

  • ekrapivin 2 hours ago
    I've spent several years developing an ad-free website with over 50 different solitaire/puzzle games:

    https://inSolitaire.com

    I am currently rewriting the engine for the fourth time and plan to add 400 games to the platform next year, as well as social features such as daily challenges, awards and leaderboards.

    My main goal, however, is to make this project the largest collection of free modern solitaire games available for mobile devices and desktop computers.

    So far, the project has been incredibly exciting, and I've learned so much!

  • rmonvfer 13 hours ago
    I’m slowly working on rigel.sh, a next generation Remote Desktop solution. Not AI related, but I got tired of janky desktop streaming / remote management solutions (I use the windows app on my Mac and Raspberry Pi Connect online) so I decided to build my own.

    You install a client on the system you want to manage and enroll it with a single command, just like Tailscale. I’ve built a nice web application were users can manage and access their devices, setup monitoring and configure alerts (for now it only tracks basic stuff like CPU/RAM…)

    The whole thing uses WebRTC for p2p connections and it’s very snappy because all the graphics pipeline is fully custom (all the enconding/decoding is platform-specific too) and I’ve managed to get latency and quality on par with Parsec in many scenarios (I still have some work to do here because it’s not my thing)

    I plan on making the whole thing open source with a permissive license and also offer a paid SaaS early in 2026 (I think early February?). I plan on offering a hobby free tier and then paid business/pro features but time will tell!

    I haven’t event built a landing page yet but if you are interested write me to [email protected]

  • zerodayai 12 hours ago
    https://github.com/zero-day-ai

    I started this as a way to try to get my brain onto paper so I could be a little more systematic about bug bounties (my hobby), and utilize LLMs in a more structured manner and it morphed into this. I have a bunch of ideas for more agents (agents being a loose term), but want to get the framework baked first.

  • raptorraver 1 day ago
    I started developing a SaaS for pasture poultry producers like me. We have laying hens and on summer we raise broilers and keeping records and organizing work was painful last season. We used Google Sheets but it’s easy to forget to update those. I’ve vibe coded it few evenings and gotten much further than I anticipated.

    My goal is to get some revenue from this during next year. But if I don’t I still have one very happy daily user: me!

    App can be found from www.pasturegg.com

    • bilsbie 19 hours ago
      Tangentially relevant, is there any way to buy pasture eggs from hens that have a natural omnivore diet? I just heard about major pasture brands having 20% pufa.
  • techtalksweekly 23 hours ago
    https://techtalksweekly.io/

    I'm building a newsletter called Tech Talks Weekly[1] where my subscribers get one email per week with all the latest Software Engineering conference talks and podcasts[1].

    I originally built it for myself because I was subscribed to too many conference channels on YouTube and things started getting messy, so I wrote a script to fetch the new talks automatically and send myself an email once a week. Eventually, I turned it into a newsletter.

    I currently have over 7,600 subscribers with email open rate consistently between 32%-35%, although I plan to trim the list soon to get into the 40-50% range.

    [1] https://www.techtalksweekly.io/p/what-is-tech-talks-weekly

  • labarilem 1 day ago
    Side project for fun, without profit. I'm building a manually curated catalog of videogames made by the HN community:

    - https://hackernews.games/

    - https://hn-games.marcolabarile.me/

  • dhruv3006 7 hours ago
    I am building https://voiden.md . Off-cloud api client .
  • GhostMentor 20 hours ago
    I’m building a beginner-focused freelancing system.

    Not another “get rich” thing, but something calm and structured. I noticed most beginners don’t fail because of lack of skill, but because of too much noise.

    Too many tools, platforms, AI hype, shortcuts. I struggled with that myself early on.

    So I broke everything down into fundamentals: how freelancing actually works, where beginners realistically fit, and how to learn tools without overwhelm.

    Still validating and improving it step by step.

    • GhostMentor 20 hours ago
      If anyone here has struggled with freelancing overwhelm before, I’d be curious what confused you most at the start.
  • mircerlancerous 1 day ago
    A self-hosting ecosystem with apps and services to do everything from file sharing, to email, and dynamic DNS. It's Javascript based and runs in node, but I've also got it running under Android and in a regular web browser (the web browser one needs requests forwarded to it). The whole goal is to make self-hosting really easy, cheap, but also capable. It's got a long way to go, but I've already posted a few articles on HN that are hosted on it.
  • pasxizeis 23 hours ago
    I plan to continue building the hobby project I started (a Wasm module parser[1]) by implementing version 3 of the WebAssembly specification and eventually implementing the Validation phase.

    [1] https://github.com/agis/wadec

  • codyklimdev 23 hours ago
    My friend uses GarageBand to record her podcasts and says it sucks, I'm trying to build an app that'll make it easier for her (and other non-technical people) to record podcasts. Aiming to make it super simple, fun to use, not serious as a DAW but just enough to hit the ground running.
  • rasmus1610 1 day ago
    https://pdfling.com

    A service to send pdfs to your kindle device through a chrome extension or web app.

  • syrusakbary 21 hours ago
    I'm building two things (that I expect to fully be done within a week or two!)

      * Go runnable in WebAssembly and WASIX 
      * Node.js fully runnable in WebAssembly and WASIX
    
    Already had a prototype of one! ;)
  • fedex_00 1 day ago
    Building an AI Hacker - https://aisafe.io After years of manually reviewing thousands of lines of code, I realized the demand for security expertise is vastly outpacing the supply, and AI-generated code is only accelerating this gap.

    I don't believe "generate secure code by default" is a problem we'll solve anytime soon, if ever. So I'm building an autonomous solution to help restore the balance.

    Planning to launch very soon - keep an eye :)

  • sumeruchat 23 hours ago
    I am finally building an app that will make money!
  • victorymakes 1 day ago
    [dead]
  • antTman 21 hours ago
    https://www.fenra.io/

    AI costs are sneaky.

    In companies we’ve worked at, AI spend crept past $2k/month - not from one place, but scattered across different providers for text, images, audio, and video. Once that happens, it’s hard to tell what’s being used, by whom, and why costs are climbing.

    So we are building Fenra.

    Fenra is a simple tool for tracking AI costs, usage, and events across providers, surfacing patterns the way software teams actually want to see them. One place to understand what’s happening before the bill surprises you.

    We started about 15 days ago and already have our first pilot customer, with three other companies interested.

    If this sounds useful, bump your email in the comments to join the waitlist.