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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.