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

antTman |next [-]

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.

techtalksweekly |next |previous [-]

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

GhostMentor |next |previous [-]

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 |root |parent [-]

If anyone here has struggled with freelancing overwhelm before, I’d be curious what confused you most at the start.

syrusakbary |next |previous [-]

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! ;)

codyklimdev |next |previous [-]

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.

pasxizeis |next |previous [-]

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

fedex_00 |next |previous [-]

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 :)

labarilem |next |previous [-]

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/

raptorraver |next |previous [-]

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 |root |parent [-]

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.

mircerlancerous |next |previous [-]

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.

sumeruchat |next |previous [-]

I am finally building an app that will make money!

rasmus1610 |next |previous [-]

https://pdfling.com

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

victorymakes |previous [-]

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