Side-project ideas with receipts.

In Jan 2026 curl, tldraw, and Ghostty all instituted hard bans on AI-generated contributions because LLM-spam PRs and fake CVE reports are now a primary maintainer-burnout vector. Daniel Stenberg (curl): 'Fake and otherwise made up security problems effectively prevent us from doing real project work and waste time and resources.' GitHub provides zero native filtering.

Procore charges a $15K floor and raises 150% with no negotiation. From p_H_044: 'They raised their price 150% with no negotiation. We had to migrate to another software within two months.' p_H_036 (CRO, 11-50 employees): 'Procore management will strong arm you... misrepresented their product capability, costing $2k for software you can't use.' p_H_040: 'It's a sledgehammer for smaller projects and is a pain to onboard new subcontractors.' p_H_043: 'Procore is pretty much the only competent option and the minimum to pay for it is just unrealistic for smaller-mid sized GCs.'

When Notion shipped API version 2025-09-03 and Zapier didn't catch up, hundreds of solo-operator businesses went dark for days. From VatcheM: 'My entire business automation array is at a manual standstill.' From alvinliang: 'Many of my old automations have stopped working and I'm completely unable to build new ones, with clients depending on these integrations.' Beyond breakage, Airtable users hit '3 requests per second is nonsense' API limits and Notion's 100-writes/day cap.

Mixpanel's pricing is 'the most obscure pricing model of any SAAS i've ever tried to integrate with' (jordo, HN). Multiple founders explicitly said 'I wish Mixpanel wasn't this expensive for a few 1000 users' (nojvek). Mixpanel + Amplitude both bill on MTU/events in ways that punish growth before revenue. PostHog exists but is Kubernetes-heavy if self-hosted and not cheap if hosted.

Supabase users repeatedly hit a wall where local supabase/migrations stops matching what's actually applied in the remote Postgres. The tool then refuses to push, refuses to pull cleanly, and offers no first-party 'baseline + reconcile' path. Users end up doing manual SQL surgery on prod or abandoning the migration system entirely. From farmhutsoftwareteam: 'We cannot sync existing production databases when local migration files don't match the 141 migrations already applied remotely.'

u/TadpoleRemarkable828 (r/SaaS, 2 upvotes / 5 comments): 'I spent 2 weeks manually scraping Reddit, Twitter, and HN for posts with phrases like I wish there was..., I would pay for..., so frustrated that... Found some legit problems with real engagement. But the process was brutal — took hours.' u/HopefulBread5119 hit 771 upvotes doing this manually for 6 months and processing 9,363 posts. Multiple builders in this corpus (p_G_034, p_G_038, p_G_068, p_G_076) are independently building toy versions of exactly this product.

The Stripe trust collapse is the strongest convergent signal in the corpus. averick (HN): 'Stripe froze our account and held onto $20,000 of our funds, promising to return it in 120 days. Now at 180 days, there's still no sign of our money.' Ashish T (Capterra, verified): account closed Feb 28 2025, balance still held a year later. Vanessa H: 'Has frozen funds without explanation, and several hidden fees appear over time.' Merchant Maverick aggregating hundreds of reviews: 'merchants wake up to find their account frozen with no warning.' Cases ranging from $3K to $800K.

SimplePractice and Practice Better are VC-funded, raising prices, and dropping support quality. p_H_031 (G2): 'SimplePractice increased the monthly price for basic features astronomically, causing clients to lose appointment reminders.' p_H_049 (LPCC practitioner): 'It's hard to support EHRs funded by venture capital money where growth is their top priority.' p_H_028 (Capterra, MD of medical practice): 'Stuck in frustrating cycle... each response takes a day or more... two-week waiting time.' p_H_032 (PT, APTA-cited): 'Prior authorization is a huge time drain that may be partially by design because it wears us down.' Crucially, no EHR surfaces PA status in the scheduling view, causing rescheduled appointments and denied claims.

Mailgun doubled its Flex rate overnight ($1→$2 per 1k emails, no warning). SendGrid's deliverability is collapsing per multiple IndieHackers reports ('Sendgrid started going to spam for some of our users, so we decided to move away' — adamfortuna). Solo senders have no visibility into where their email actually lands ('it's a black box for me where they end up' — TurboLogicTom) and Gmail/Outlook's 5000-msg/day rule is being applied to anyone, killing legitimate small senders ('Google states that the new requirements are mandatory only when you send at least 5000 messages per day. This is a lie.' — adrian_b, 89 upvotes).

The hard-cap gap is one of the most consistent complaints in the corpus, dating back 7+ years and still unresolved as of Oct 2025. From MaxBarraclough (HN): 'AWS does not support a pre-pay model, and to my knowledge there's no water-tight way of capping your costs.' From capybara_2020: 'An old account got hacked... bill of $50k-$70k.' fabian2k: 'I would not use AWS for private stuff because of this, it is simply not worth it to risk huge bills to me personally.' Also covers Vercel pricing surprises in the corpus and the new dimension of model API spend.

Solo founders track MRR religiously and have no idea what their actual profit is. Stripe + Vercel + AI API + email + ads + contractor invoices live in 6 different dashboards. A real founder built a hackathon tool for exactly this and got 18 upvotes / 44 comments on Indie Hackers from peers saying 'I have no idea what mine is either.' Saveyond ([p_G_109]) is the closest thing and is pre-monetisation.

u/TeddyH30 (r/SideProject, 60 upvotes / 56 comments): 'My brother and I have been lifting for years and kept running into the same problem: we're progression-focused and always get our best results when we actually track everything, but there's no good way to do it all in one place. We'd use one app for workouts, another for nutrition, then have random training questions pop up that would be perfect for a coach but not worth paying someone full-time for.' Top reply (90 upvotes): 'Finally, a 10,000th fitness tracker.' — sceptical but engaged.

Developers often struggle with the 'marketing math' and feel intimidated by the complexity of ad platforms like Reddit Ads. This fear leads to low user acquisition and a reliance on manual analytics refreshing.

Founders waste weeks building features that users don't want because they lack a fast way to get 'transaction volume' as real validation. Traffic metrics are often misleading compared to actual payments.

Indie hackers and knowledge workers juggle five or more AI tools (Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Cursor, Gemini) and each one forgets everything the others know. One founder described how chat history, saved prompts, and integrations never carry over between apps, forcing constant re-explaining of project context.

Developers and AI power users complain that AI coding assistants and chat tools lose context between sessions, forcing them to re-explain projects, re-paste files, and rebuild context repeatedly. One builder said they got tired of AI coding sessions forgetting what the project had already learned, and others note that chat history in one app doesn't carry over to the others.

Solo founders suffer from launch anxiety, feeling the need to constantly monitor their product overnight and during weekends to ensure nothing broke. This disrupts personal time and causes burnout.

Shopify merchants repeatedly leave money on the table through fixable theme-level issues: collection pages sorted by 'Newest' instead of best sellers, review stars installed but missing from templates, no urgency signals, and email capture only at checkout. Multiple store teardown posts show the same pattern across thousands of stores, and merchants get distracted redesigning instead of selling.

Solo founders experience mental fatigue and burnout due to excessive context-switching between coding, marketing, support, and design roles. Switching roles multiple times an evening 'fries the brain' and reduces productivity.

E-commerce founders manually hack Shopify URLs (appending best-selling sort parameters or sitemap.xml) to spy on competitors' top products and hidden pages. Multiple posts share bookmarklet workarounds, showing demand for a proper tool that tracks competitor catalogs, pricing, and best sellers over time.

Teams are passing unreviewed AI-generated decks, copy, and code to colleagues, creating what one executive called a 'slop grenade' — the recipient has to verify, untangle, and correct the work. Separately, developers report missing critical business-logic changes made by AI coding agents due to auto-accept edits and limited output windows.

E-commerce founders and market researchers struggle to identify which products actually sell on competitor Shopify stores, resorting to manual URL tricks like appending sort parameters to collection pages. One founder shared a bookmarklet script just to one-click sort any store by best-selling, showing how underserved this workflow is. Existing research is slow, manual, and gives no historical or cross-store view.

Founders repeatedly say they're tired of guessing what to build, feel like every idea is already taken, and waste months building products nobody wants — one founder lost 14 months and $12,000 on a micro-SaaS with no market fit.

Solopreneurs report spending 40-60% of their week on $15/hour admin work — invoicing, scheduling, follow-ups, proposals, lead tracking, expense reports — while billing at $150/hour and being unable to afford a virtual assistant. One consultant described 14-hour days running a $400K/year business alone, drowning in admin.

Users juggling multiple AI subscriptions (Claude, Grok, ChatGPT) report running out of tokens unexpectedly and having to leave their IDE to check usage limits. One developer built a Chrome extension just to see how much Claude quota remained, and others complain about managing multiple active AI subscriptions.

Teams struggle to centralize requests scattered across GitHub issues, Discord messages, and Slack threads into one task system, causing duplicated effort and missed handoffs. One builder extended their tool with GitHub/Discord sync precisely because transferring requests to a single place was a recurring pain.

Sellers running stores across Amazon, Shopify, Walmart, and eBay lack a unified real-time view of revenue, cash flow, and profit margins. Founders also admit they work hard but can't track where the money goes, and freelancers lack visibility into their numbers.

Solopreneurs report spending 40-60% of their week on low-value admin: invoicing, scheduling, client follow-ups, lead tracking, proposals, and expense reports. One consultant was described working 14-hour days running a $400K/year business alone, unable to afford a virtual assistant. The result is burnout and a drastically reduced effective hourly rate.

Users report they cannot export or transfer chat conversations from tools like Grok because copy/paste and DOM copying fail, forcing reliance on subpar third-party extensions. Others complain that Notion integrations fail to save AI conversation context, causing information loss.

Many task management apps create anxiety by showing an overwhelming list of pending items, making users feel behind before they even start. This 'noise' hinders focus and efficiency.

Builders report that connecting AI agents to real SaaS apps is the painful part — not calling one API, but auth, action naming, app objects, and glue code between tools. Agents also stall at login screens and at systems with no API at all, like government portals and banking sites.

AI-driven traffic to Shopify stores is reportedly up 8x year-over-year with AI-search orders up ~13x, yet most product catalogs aren't optimized for AI agents to read and purchase. Store owners also face generic AI-generated product copy that fails to convert human buyers. Merchants have no tooling to audit or fix their agent-readiness.

Indie hackers collecting product feedback on social media have no seamless way to turn tweets into actionable development tasks; one developer explicitly wished for a tool to convert tweets into GitHub issues. Feedback ends up scattered across DMs, replies, and screenshots, and feature requests get lost.

Solopreneurs warn that building audiences on social platforms is 'building on rented land' since algorithm changes can wipe out reach overnight. Many struggle with stalled follower growth and inconsistent impressions, yet lack an easy bridge to convert social followers into an owned email list.

Indie mobile developers describe wrestling with App Store uploads, back-to-back rejections, notification setup, and store compliance as one of the most frustrating parts of shipping. Many web/low-code builders get stuck entirely at 'how do I get it on the App Store.'

One store owner discovered more than half of their Shopify 'traffic' in a week was bots — 228 bots versus 172 humans — skewing every growth decision. Separately, founders note that 'direct' traffic attribution is misleading because referrer headers get stripped by mobile apps, email clients, Slack, and Discord. Merchants can't trust their own analytics.

AI tools have made building cheap, but the last mile of publishing — hosting, DNS, SSL — still eats nights for non-expert builders, as one founder noted while building a folder-to-live-URL tool. Separately, builders complain that nobody is making maintaining AI-built projects effortless, which is where most of the pain lives after the code works.

Builders report business disruption when critical third-party tools shut down with weeks of notice, APIs get killed silently, or accounts get terminated for automation use. One founder's merchants discovered a returns app's API was dead only when return flows stopped working.

Build-in-public founders and creators have no way to know who unfollowed them or when, and one user explicitly wished for an app that reports unfollows so they could respond. Creators also struggle to recognize contacts as follower counts grow and display names don't match real names. X provides no native tooling for either.