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

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

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

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_...

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.

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

- https://hackernews.games/

- https://hn-games.marcolabarile.me/

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

I am also planning to "vibe-code" a piano-learning game: https://ultimidi.com (placeholder landing page for now), mostly because I need it for myself. It won't be 100% vibe-coding, because I like optimizing the code, but I want to iterate quickly and make it free for everyone.

https://inSolitaire.com

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!

Spend 1 year to polish my personal tool into commercial product, I’ve just released macOS shortcut customization app. Satisfied with app itself but realizing my marketing skill is so poor. I really wonder how people are dealing with this… So 2026 going to be the year to improve that.

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 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 :)

I am selfhosting a few applications at home and found managing redirects always a little cumbersome. There are lots of SaaS solutions out there, but no FOSS selfhosting ones.

So I wrote one myself.

Felt good to publish and share something :)

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.

[1] https://github.com/agis/wadec

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

Experimental right now, consider yourselves warned if you sign up.

  * Go runnable in WebAssembly and WASIX 
  * Node.js fully runnable in WebAssembly and WASIX

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.

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.