▲ 35 points

Ask HN: What niche task/tool websites have you built?

by xk3·3y ago·65 comments·view on hn ↗

For example, I made a website which helps to find good cities for visa-free international meetings by estimating the cost of many people with different passports traveling from different places.

I will not link to it here suffice to say that it only got 1 HN vote likely because it is not useful for 99% of people.

What niche task-oriented / decision making websites have you built to completion? Especially, if you shared it previously but it didn't do well.

65 comments

https://groupreceipt.com

Solves problem of being out at a group dinner and figuring out how much you owe the one person who inevitably put their card down. Take a photo of your receipt, it digitizes it in seconds, and gives a link to text to your friends/acquaintances. They open, click what they ordered, it proportionally adds tax and tip. No APP required, nor an account. That would be friction.

This is brilliant. The scanning part solves the biggest pain point of expense sharing apps

https://paperquik.com

I still take notes on paper sometimes and most "paper" sites are just a bunch of pre-created PDF files. Mine creates a SVG on the fly and then can print it out from the page.

While I really loved creating it and still use it myself, I wish printer support in the browsers was better. I don't have to deal with garbage like IE anymore, but nobody gives me a chance to remove automatic margins and stuff that gets printed in those margins. I can tell the user to do it manually, but much better would be a chance to prompt the user and offer to remove all of that if they OK it.

Wow! This is just bl**dy brilliant. I needed this. I love scribbling and think by writing a lot. I even made an Affinity Publisher template but I knew that was using a sledgehammer to kill a fly.

Is this source open? Can I tinker with it?

For those looking for well-done printables, especially with web/app development/design, you should check out https://www.sketchize.com

Did you also deal with the Safari margin issues? I can't make a proper DIN 5008 template because of it.

SVG is super fun to tinker with. Great site!

Very neat John! Bookmarked.

Recently I've built a tool to explore Inflation data in Canada ( https://maplecpi.ca/ ). Certainly not interesting to everyone, but still gave me some insights on the current situation of the economy.

Love it! I built a site to track grocery prices/inflation in Canada - http://grocerytracker.ca/

Yes! This is the kind of stuff I'm talking about. I have absolutely no use for this (but I'm sure there are a few people out in the world who would love this) and I thank you for posting

I create little tools to help with German bureaucracy. It's a nice break from writing content, and scratches my programming itch.

I built a bot to help you find a citizens office appointment, a few tax calculators, and a letter generator for specific bureaucratic tasks.

https://allaboutberlin.com/tools

https://allaboutberlin.com/docs/resignation-letter

These tools are embedded in the content wherever relevant. They remove the tedium and uncertainty from some tasks.

I'm currently working on a form filler for two of my most downloaded forms. In the future, I'd like to "close the loop" by faxing the forms through an API and catching the response through a mail scanning service. Instead of mailing printed forms, you could fill a form online and get your response by email later, in plain English.

If the government won't go digital, I will do it for them.

> If the government won't go digital, I will do it for them.

You are a kind human being. Your passion is overwhelming and I wish you great success. Time to abolish the tyranny of paperwork.

https://www.open-elevation.com/

I know it always feels like it is "abandoned", but it isn't (it's serving millions of requests every day, especially for major iOS and Android apps!). The truth is I rarely have the time to improve upon it, especially because I've been (deep) in the red for so long it kinda affects my RoI to work on it.

Nonetheless, a couple of months go I completely rebuilt the backend and managed to triple the load we can handle. Still, we're constantly overloaded and I can't upgrade the machine due to the aforementioned lack of funds.

However, I am hoping to revamp the service over the next months, keeping it free, updating the docker image to a much more recent one, closing up PRs and perhaps finding ways to monetize it (again, while never making the free offer worse -- I hope to make it better, instead)

(I've been saying this for years but this time I think the right conditions are there)

Please describe what your service is for. I had to click on the Google Elevation API on your „What is Open Elevation“ page to finally understand what your service is for.

In my industry there's no standard if a position should be latitude,longitude or vice versa. Every tool wants them different, it's easy to have them mixed.

https://flipcoords.com/

I also do a lot of GIS stuff and I might actually use this in the future.

I agree it is pretty niche. It might be nice to support non-WGS84 coordinates

https://wake.lol/

Uses the screen wake lock API if available (or falls back to a hidden video file if unavailable) to keep your screen awake. It's cross platform, zero-install tool with offline support which I use to keep my work laptop awake all day.

I built a website to republish arrests/mugshots for my county. It's the best option for our area, and people actually use it.

The county's option is really bad and doesn't show any old records, just a live "roster" at the jail.

I'm not going to link it because I like to pretend I have some pseudo-anonymity here and it would pinpoint me.

The stack is python workers/scrapers, postgres, and a very basic PHP template. Two views.

In the past I built a lot of small poker tools, like a HUSNG push/fold calculator and a nash equilibrium calculator, that I published on free Heroku dynos, but I was pretty much the only user.

What is the benefit of that?

https://wetrockpolice.com/redrock

Rock climbing is really popular here Las Vegas, but due to the sandstone being brittle it's both dangerous and "bad ethics" to climb after rain and risk breaking popular climbing routes. I wrote a tool that checks precipitation information from the rain gauge at the park's visitor center and displays it in an easy-to-understand manner.

Nowadays the site supports a couple other rain-sensitive areas, but Red Rock is primary the reason people visit this site.

I love this! Most important information at the top and more detailed information when scrolling down. Perfect :)

I don't know if you have seen this, but perhaps not as useless as you think:

Conferences are inadvertently excluding many attendees from foreign countries

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37206052

This seems to be your Show HN from 3 or 4 months ago. Seems to not have the best title, which may be a factor in its lack of attention.

Show HN: Plan international rendezvous with different passport holders

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35911110

Well if you want it, it will always be available right here:

https://unli.xyz/city/honeymoon/

The passport compatibility information is automatically refreshed on a daily basis.

There are some UI quirks which take a minute or two to figure out and I'm not going to change it. The search box is somewhat unconventional because making a list of tens of thousands of cities is not performant or easily navigable so you have to search and then filter the results.

Dealing with the steep costs of internet services in my country and being an avid podcast listener myself, me and a couple of friends came up with a solution. We developed a website that works as a mirror for users' selected podcast feeds and converts the episodes into opus format, slashing the mobile data consumption that's a real concern for internet access here: https://easypodcasts.live

It's FOSS and free as in beer.

Wow I like this idea at least for many conversation based podcasts. I try to download mine at home but data isn't as expensive for the times I don't. Still there are reasons to use this.

I need to look into how the mirroring works, for some time I have wanted a way to subscribe to a podcast with a timeshifted start. Say from the beginning up to the date I start, or a range between 2 dates. For podcasts that have existed for a long time I find it hard to work through the back catalog in any consistent way.

That's a great design and idea. Thanks for sharing!

I build a minimal site that shows the current time in UTC. The goal was to create an effect like a "wall of clocks" that you see on TV and in movies.

https://currenttimeutc.com/

I also made a site that lets you schedule a Google Calendar meeting in 1-click:

https://carvemeetings.com/

https://www.sheetmonitor.com/

Tracks historical changes on google sheets. A lot of small businesses use sheets as a DB, editing/adding/removing rows & cells in realtime (eg orders, customers, tickets etc). The tool records change, like how average order value or backlog size is trending.

This is great! I actually made another sheet in the same file to track historical changes in one of the values by manually checking based on Google's own version history. Of course, I would probably use this but the price tag isn't a match to how I'm going to use it (just for personal expenses)

https://github.com/hbcondo/revenut-app

I built this web + mobile app (PWA) written in React Native + TypeScript that does simple revenue forecasting for a SaaS that uses Stripe.

Stripe's mobile app and others kinda do this already but some of their numbers can be inaccurate (as detailed in the repo's readme) so that made me open-source + solve an issue my own SaaS[1] has with Stripe.

As mentioned in the challenge section, getting data from Stripe is slow so I've been reluctant to put this app in front of others even though it is fully functional.

I actually shared this on a similar HN thread not too long ago[2]

[1] https://Last10K.com

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37156101

Interesting! Great submission.

> I've been reluctant to put this app in front of others even though it is fully functional

I have a few projects like that. I've built something that works for me but I don't really want to bare the maintenance costs so I don't tell anyone about it

Once upon a time, I clean up a table that my team refer to for HTML entities used in HTML, CSS, and Javascript. It became surprisingly popular and I haven't touched it in years, except for moving it to my family's Github account.

https://oinam.github.io/entities/

There are a few others, such as a tiny community informational site. People have made mobile friendly versions out of the website that I made, and the like. I gave that away, including the domain and the whole thing is now owned by that community.

This is nice! I've never heard of a family GitHub account before. Amazing haha!

https://turas.app

My wife and I were planning a trip over the holidays and it was getting out of hand on Google Docs.

Ended up building a small tool over 3 days (v1) and then sharing it to Reddit on day 7. Got a bit of traction and started working on it full time over the summer, but I don't think I can figure out a business model.

So enjoy an ad-free, complelety free collaborative trip planning and travel blogging tool for obsessive planners!

I built something like that, a few times. Yes, it is very difficult to monetize something like this:

- https://unli.xyz/city/calc/

- https://unli.xyz/city/window/

- https://travel.unli.xyz/ (no longer loads data)

https://www.modu-blues.com/

Automatically render Google sheets/forms into nice web pages.

https://uw.leftium.com/

Simple weather forecast that shows previous two days for comparison.

https://multi-launch.leftium.com/

Launcher that launches multiple sites with a single click, with search params.

https://tt.leftium.com/

Quickly copy some currency conversions into clipboard. Also transforms Sofi Relay HTML snippet into Excel TSV format.

---

Some tools to help with a game I used to play. The last one creates/updates a "perpetual" calendar event:

- https://orbs.leftium.com/

- https://ff.leftium.com/

Invoice pdfs https://many.pw/sd

I was inspired by GitHub Projects' new table layout to make it into a really simple to-do list website. I wouldn't say this is complete, but it does it's job.

https://tables.pages.dev/

not really niche yet but good starting point to branch off to niche tools!

You should definitely consider adding save to / load from localStorage, IndexedDB, or URL.

Nice thing about URL is you can send pages to other people like this:

https://unli.xyz/tabsender/?links=%22open%20a%20bank%20accou...

Or use LZString https://github.com/pieroxy/lz-string like this:

https://unli.xyz/html/edit.html?t=%22DwBwfALghgTgXlAdsA9OYAz...

An accidental page refresh shouldn't eliminate all your TODOs :/

Matrix server that is publicly accessible [0].

[0] - https://shpong.com/shpong

https://transfermyti.me/

Tool to transfer data from Clockify to Toggl (and vice versa). It also provides the ability to bulk delete data from either service. For some reason, I have a weird fixation on time tracking tools. People have reached out to tell me how much they appreciate it, so I'm happy to keep it running.

https://patcher.xyz/home

Patcher.xyz is a tool for Eurorack enthusiasts, improving modular synth management with intuitive signal flow visualization and a comprehensive platform for visual planning, researching, and sharing of patch ideas and modules.

https://bandamp.fly.dev/

I listen to a lot of music on Bandcamp. Unfortunately their player has only basic capabilities and doesn't support queuing multiple albums in a row. So I've built this site which is basically a queue-based player for Bandcamp.

https://synthmodes.com

Cheat sheets for multi-mode eurorack synthesizer modules. Before I made this the standard was to have a binder you flip through when going deep on a module

https://madnight.github.io/imdb-series-chart/

Visualize the IMDB rating of every episode for any TV series.

Learn Yugoslavian online for free. No cloud, no whammies. All client-side!

https://vidovi.ch/assets/flashcards.html#

https://www.bandtr.com

Play a random album from your Spotify collection

https://jobboardsearch.com/

A curated list of job boards (400+)

Helps:

- Job board founders: to promote and get traffic (5.4k Newsletter members, 5.2k Telegram members, 4.1k Subreddit members)

- Job seekers: to find jobs thanks to job posts from 50+ feeds