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A comment on Ask HN: If your project is free, what are you building and why keep it free?.

Re:Ask HN: If your project is free, what are you building an... by vunderba on Wednesday March 04, 2026 @12:12PM (#47250611)
Everything I build is free (no ads, no premium subscriptions). A lot of what I create is educational, so if it helps people, that's reward enough.

To keep costs down, I manage my own VPS and limit myself to projects that can run 100% client-side (e.g. no reliance on third-party APIs).

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: If your project is free, what are you building an... by LeanVibe on Wednesday March 04, 2026 @12:55PM (#47251242)
Mee too. You're doing right thing
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: If your project is free, what are you building an... by chistev on Wednesday March 04, 2026 @12:55PM (#47251244)
No reliance on third-party APIs means your apps are severely limited, no?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: If your project is free, what are you building an... by vunderba on Wednesday March 04, 2026 @01:13PM (#47251500)
It kind of depends on what you build.

Shah Kur is a chess trainer that lets you set novel types of invisibility to help teach you to learn to play blindfold chess (without a board). It's got VAD + voice recognition (can use on your phone hands-free) alongside a WASM implementation of the chess engine, etc.

Lend Me Your Ears is a free piano game in the style of the old "Simon" toy which presents players with a sequence of musical notes and challenges them to reproduce the sequence using either an on-screen piano or a connected MIDI keyboard. It uses the Web MIDI API and YIN for realtime accurate detection of notes (so you can use a guitar for example).

That's just a few examples, but you'd be surprised how far you can get with nothing more than a client-side application.

[ Parent | on HN ]