Ask HN: What are you building as a side-project or side-hustle in 2026?
18 points by bayeslaw 3 days ago
Is it an idea you had for a long time? Is it something totally random and weird?
18 points by bayeslaw 3 days ago
Is it an idea you had for a long time? Is it something totally random and weird?
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 ramon@rigel.sh
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
It's a server side AI SDK, embeddable analytics tool with zero trust architecture. It abstracts away the AI/LLM complexity and helps you add text to visualisation to your dashboards. It's a side hustle right now, i've already spent couple of month on it, and if i can get 4-5 customers in early 2026, i will be able to move in FTE.
I've spent several years developing an ad-free website with over 50 different solitaire/puzzle games:
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!
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.
giving agents persistent long term memory, and ingesting business data (pdf's , gong calls, slack messages) to build up strong context of your org / account
Building https://valuehq.org to simplify my life as a sales engineer and sales engineering manager.
Experimental right now, consider yourselves warned if you sign up.
A service to send pdfs to your kindle device through a chrome extension or web app.
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
Side project for fun, without profit. I'm building a manually curated catalog of videogames made by the HN community:
Nice one, digging into it now! Could you add mine: https://inSolitaire.com
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.
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.
After few years of work, I have launched https://gethly.com this year, so I will keep on working on it. It is a platform for content creators to sell their digital content or build paid membership communities. In essence it is a paywall. Main idea was to give creators a single place for selling digital content, so no need to put their e-books or music on other platforms, or to use third party chat and forum servers to run their community. They can sell access via membership or make one-time sales of digital content or access to hosted content, receive donations, etc... best part is that no one else is able to offer a minimum sale price of 1 cent, as no payment processors are involved. So no fees and minimum are imposed. Which incentivises users to make purchases.
Albeit it is more about maintenance than adding some new features right now. I implemented almost all I wanted already. The only thing I would like to work on is support for live video streaming, as that involves video ingress, video encoding and video distribution. It is a solid piece of work to take a swing at. But it makes no financial sense at this time as video is the most expensive thing to tackle on the web. Hopefully next year I'll get more exposition with time and more customers to make it financially viable.
As for other projects, I was thinking about making yet another reverse proxy, with a twist(which I won't reveal). That could make it something people would be willing to pay a few bucks for over the open sourced ones. I am not fully on board with it, as the time investment here will likely be at least half a year, so I am still just toying with the idea and whether to go ahead.
And lastly, I am kinda thinking about making a game. My first. I am doing research and found out Go can totally handle it, which surprised me as I am a Gopher and really LOVE working with Go. Most games today are "made" in C#, which is also a language with GC and Go beats it in every aspect in performance. Plust next year, Go will have the new Greentea GC as default, so it will be even more performant. Knowing this made me excited about the idea of making a game without the need to learn a completely new language, ecosystem and rewire my brain to think differently(memory management and whatnot). I tried some things with Raylib already and that got me REALLY excited about the possibilities. I am not sure about the game just yet. So far I know I want it to be heavy storytelling game, not combat or strategy, as I am a good writer. Right now I am enticed either by victorian era setting or middle ages and the main purpose is to take the player on an adventure.
>Most games today are "made" in C#, which is also a language with GC and Go beats it in every aspect in performance.
That is just nonsense. Go may beat C# in memory consumption, but even that is a close call if you use AOT. C# is arguably the fastest GC based language there is: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... This was already so before .NET10, which brought many more optimizations: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/performance-improvemen...
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.
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.
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
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 :)
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.
https://with.audio/
One time payment text to speech reader application for Mac and Windows. Not a subscription because it runs 100% on your device!
I've been doing this in most of 2025 in my free time. It went way way better than I thought in 2025 and I'm gonna focus more on this in 2026 as well. I've actually sold licenses and I'm gonna try to find out new ways to promote it. It recently had a moment on Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1pseqsy/thank_you_...