Build It on the Side First: De-risk Your Product with Progressive Growth
Don't quit your job on impulse. A day job quietly hands you two things other people pay for — free by-products, and the patience to outlast the hard part.
Stack, engineering, tooling
Don't quit your job on impulse. A day job quietly hands you two things other people pay for — free by-products, and the patience to outlast the hard part.
An open-source list with tens of thousands of stars cataloging 500+ AI agent use cases across industries, grouped by frameworks like CrewAI / AutoGen / LangGraph — most with links to open-source code. Useful for both idea-hunting and finding a reference implementation.
Drop-in authentication and user management with prebuilt sign-in components, social login, and session handling. The free tier covers tens of thousands of monthly active users.
Global CDN with free DNS, SSL, and DDoS protection, plus Workers edge compute. The free tier is remarkably generous for solo projects.
Cloud storage, optimization, and on-the-fly transformation (crop, compress, reformat) for images and video — all via URL. The free tier suits small and mid-size projects.
A huge curated list of SaaS, cloud, and tooling free tiers for developers — the go-to reference for bootstrapping on a budget.
A CI/CD platform built right into your repository — automate testing, builds, and deploys. Free for public repos, with a monthly free allowance for private ones.
The fastest way to start building with Gemini — prototype prompts and multimodal inputs in the browser and grab an API key. The interface is free, and the Gemini API has a generous free tier.
Type a keyword and get a batch of available .com domain ideas, so you can quickly find a memorable name for your product.
MongoDB's official fully managed cloud database, with a free 512 MB shared cluster — spin up a document database in minutes.
Compare domain prices across registrars in one place, including first-year and renewal costs, to grab the name you want for less.
A fully managed serverless Postgres with autoscaling, database branching, and scale-to-zero. The free tier needs no credit card — great for dev and small projects.
A veteran frontend/JAMstack host — push to Git and it auto-deploys, with a global CDN, HTTPS, and serverless functions built in. The free tier suits solo projects.
An all-in-one cloud platform for deploying web services, background workers, cron jobs, and databases. Offers a free tier for static sites and services.
A developer-first transactional email API — send verification codes, notifications, and receipts in a few lines, with React email templates. The free tier is enough to start.
A flexible headless CMS that treats content as data, with real-time collaboration, powerful querying, and a generous free tier for content-driven products.
Real-time error monitoring and performance tracing — catch production exceptions down to the line of code, across nearly every major language and framework. Includes a free developer tier.
An open-source Firebase alternative offering a Postgres database, auth, storage, and realtime. The free tier is enough to run an MVP.
A curated directory of quality React, Vue, and mini-program UI component libraries, so you can find ready-made components fast.
Serverless Redis and messaging billed per request — pay only for what you use. The free tier is handy for caching, rate-limiting, and serverless apps.
Uptime monitoring for sites and APIs — get alerted by email, SMS, or webhook when something goes down, plus public status pages. The free plan covers 50 monitors.
Frontend deployment platform with one-click GitHub integration, automatic HTTPS, and a global CDN. The free tier is generous for solo projects.