Max Basev.

Writing

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About

I'm Max - an independent developer. I build small SaaS products, automation, and AI tools, mostly my own. This is where I write about the work: build notes, postmortems, no hustle porn.

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buildSep 25, 2026

Scanwise: I Built a Security Scanner, Got Rejected by My Payment Processor, and Shipped It Anyway

A passive website security scanner that doesn't just list problems but writes the fix. Then Paddle said no to the whole category, so it runs on one-time crypto credits instead. What it checks, what went wrong, and why I audited my own security tool twice.

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essaysSep 19, 2026

Soon Everyone Builds Their Own — And Most SaaS Won't Survive It

I keep replacing apps I used to pay for with tiny versions I build myself: budgeting, nutrition tracking, flashcards, and now a CleanShot alternative I actually ship. If that's easy for me, it's easy for everyone — and that's a problem for a lot of SaaS.

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buildSep 2, 2026

Lived: I Turned My Life Into a Grid of Dots

A single-page app that draws your life as a grid of dots — one per day, week, month or year — with no account, no backend, and nothing leaving your browser. Why I built it, and the one decision that shaped everything else.

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buildJul 19, 2026

I Built an Invoice Tool Because of One Required Email Field

A free invoice builder refused to let me skip the client's email. So I built my own, used it for half a year, and now it's NeatDue — a minimalist invoice service I'm growing with SEO only.

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buildJun 23, 2026

UghOkay v2: I rebuilt my anti-doomscroll app natively in Swift

v1 was a quick React Native thing. v2 is a full native SwiftUI rewrite with a home-screen widget that lives where the feed used to. Why I rebuilt it from scratch, and what changed.

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buildJun 22, 2026

I turned a stranger's Excel checklist into a calm life tracker

Ovanri started as someone else's spreadsheet — life areas in columns, days in rows, green/white/red cells. I asked if I could build it properly. Here's what it became, and why I deleted the streak counter.

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buildJun 19, 2026

Building a privacy-first habit-change app, the calm way

A native iOS app that helps people gradually step away from an unwanted compulsive habit — no shame, no accounts, fully on-device. The product and engineering decisions behind the calm approach.

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buildMay 8, 2026

How NotebookLM Quietly Became My Default Way to Learn Stuff

I've tried a lot of AI tools. Most of them are noise. NotebookLM is one of the few that actually changed how I read books, build routines, and process information — without pretending to replace my brain.

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productsJan 22, 2026

From raw draft to a tweet in seconds: Vibe2Tweet

Vibe2Tweet is an open-source Telegram bot that uses OpenAI to generate 3 post variants and publish your drafts to X with multi-persona prompts.

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buildJan 11, 2026

I Built a Free IMDB Poster Grabber Because “View Source” Finally Broke Me

I was writing a movie list post, needed lots of posters from IMDB, got tired of opening “View Source” over and over, built a tiny local tool… then turned it into a simple online utility when I found it again during a “clean my Mac” phase.

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productsJul 25, 2025

Building Offgrid Diary in One Turbo-Charged Weekend

48 hours from idea to live App Store build: a fully offline, AES-256-encrypted diary with an on-device LLaMA model. One weekend, one rejection, two hot-fixes, and a running Twitter play-by-play.

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buildApr 24, 2025

I Made a Tiny App Because My Brain Wouldn't Shut Up

A tiny app I built to stop doomscrolling and start doing... something. No tracking, no accounts — just one button and your own list of things worth doing (or pretending to).

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buildApr 16, 2025

I Made a Chrome Extension That Rewards You for Doing Literally Anything

I built a Chrome extension that gives you emotional validation for doing the bare minimum. One button, one compliment, zero pressure. It won’t fix your life, but it’ll clap when you exist.

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buildApr 6, 2025

From Chaos to Control: The Journey of Creating ExtenSwitch for Chrome

Juggling around 30 Chrome extensions just for crypto wallets was pure chaos. To bring some order to this madness, I dove into some vibe-coding and came up with ExtenSwitch.

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buildJan 26, 2025

How I Updated 2,000+ Elementor Buttons in WordPress

A step-by-step guide on efficiently updating links across thousands of Elementor-built pages using the Better Search Replace plugin.

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