by Peter Thaleikis
Intro
As an indie maker, I suffer from the same issue as many other makers: I can't do marketing. I struggle to market my side-projects and earn money on my indie work. I see and hear this in many conversations in the indiehacker space. To help a little, I want to talk a bit about some neat indie projects I've discovered recently. Here we go:
“Time Well Spent“ — see pricing as working hours.
See prices not in $, see them displayed in the hours. Working hours needed, to earn this amount. Works on many major websites, such as Amazon & eBay. Available as Chrome extension only atm. Check the Chrome extension 'Time Well Spent' by Greg Greiner.
“AskBlocker“ — Stop permission requests in your browser
Too many websites request permissions such as for push notification by default. I'm by far no fan of this practice and found AskBlocker (Firefox) as a solution. It's a simple browser extension blocking requests and allowing you management requests (by allowing and reloading). The extension was built by Adam Lynch and is available as an open source library.
“CostMe“ — How Much Payment Providers Actually Cost You?
Are you regretting your initial choice of a payment provider for your SaaS or side-project and want to see what the options are? Or do you plan to start a new project using direct payments as a way of monetization? Check Fauzi Abdillah project to compare payment provider costs!
“FullHelp“ — self-hosted help-desk and knowledge-base software
Does your side-project, SaaS, or community require a comprehensive help section? FullHelp by Gerardo J. Báez allows you to self-host a help-desk and linked knowledge base application. Allowing you and your team to time to focus on what's important and not handling Login questions every day. The license fee includes updates and enhancements for one year and can be renewed at a discounted price.
“RecordScreen“ — Record your screen right from the browser.
A simple online-tool to take screencasts in your browser, no installation required at all. Just click "Record", then "Start Recording" and grant the permission. That's all you need. You can also record your screen and webcam at the same time to produce explainer or review videos. By Asad Memon and Munir Usman.
“Enso OS“ — an alternative to Elementary OS
I'm a big fan of Linux. Using it since before 2k when everything was ugly and many things didn't work 😂️ Luckily, these days are past. More great Linux distributions are released now than before. Enso OS is one of these.
Some tech stuff, if you're interested in this: Enso OS is a custom build on top of Ubuntu 16.04 (LTS - Xenial). It uses Xfce as a desktop manager. Besides this, Enso also has integrated the Gala window manager (from the elementary project) as well as the Panther Launcher (a Slingshot-fork). The 'simplest dock on the planet' Plank comes into action as well.
Nick Wilkins has also open-sourced the project. It's waiting for more contributions & bug reports at the moment. The source code is hosted on GitHub, if you'd like to check it out. Please consider supporting the project with a Tweet or downloading & trying it out 🙏️
“Pushfolio“ — create pop-ups messages with just a few lines of JavaScript
Pushfolio is a solution for those who don't want a complex tool like Intercom. If you just want to display some decent pop-ups to convert people, this is what you should look at.
It's basically a JavaScript library you can include on your website. It allows you to define and trigger popups using code. The aim to convert more visitors to users. In the basic version, it's free and one-time pay $9 plan is supporting the maker Danny Postma through the darkness of the night 😀️
Update (07/07/2019): Later editions
The series developed a little and here are some more lists of similar nature: second list of side projects and third list of side projects.
Final thoughts
If you liked any of these projects share and talk about them please 🙏️ As far as I can see, the indie-hackers behind these projects could use some more publicity for their work. Every little tweet helps. If you want to support all, you can also share this list on Twitter or Facebook.
Cover photo by Ashwin Vaswani via Unsplash. Thank you for sharing great images!
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Published under the following tags: Open Source Side-Projects Self-Hosted Projects Chrome Extensions