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.
On Saturday it took 17 minutes to make a week of short videos. Then I spent the evening uploading 21 files by hand. AI handles the making now. The last click, publishing, is still a human's job, and that isn't the AI's fault.
I used to be the human API between my AI assistant and my own numbers: open a dashboard, take a screenshot, paste it into the chat. So I spent a week of evenings building one place for all of it — and gave the AI permission to write there too.
Every week someone posts a screenshot of a subscription app making absurd money. I want that too. So here's my honest starting point with Reset Ladder — 579 impressions, 12 downloads, $0 — and the experiment I'm running to change it.
I was paying a subscription for a screenshot tool I use a dozen times a day, and every capture had a cloud account attached to it. So I built Screo — a native, local-only macOS app. The code took a day. Shipping it took a month. Here's where the month went.
Over a morning coffee I decided to tidy up my GitHub and went through every repository — about sixty of them. Half had no description, a few I couldn't remember at all, and my blog was linking to places that no longer existed. What's alive, what got archived, and what it taught me about how I actually build things.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
A step-by-step guide on efficiently updating links across thousands of Elementor-built pages using the Better Search Replace plugin.