Ideas for Software that People Would Actually Use

Inspired by https://github.com/joereynolds/what-to-code.

These ideas, as far as I know, don't exist yet (or have done a poor job with SEO on Google). These are also ideas I desperately wish I could have tried at least once, meaning many others probably have as well. It's difficult to stay motivated coding or on a side project when you don't know if people will use it, or if your end goal is solving a solved problem. This list aims to fix that.

This list is around 100 curated ideas, and I hope to hit 150 by the end of 2023. Stay tuned, as I have several hundred on my list (the majority of them are patently ridiculous and not a good use of anyone's time to read).

Feel free to use these for a hackathon, side project, or hacklodge project -- I'd love to see them get built! If you're curious about an idea but don't know where to start, just reach out to me at aayushg@mit.edu; I'd be happy to give pointers on the frameworks I'd use, the high-level design, and/or the best way to learn how to build them. Ideas include apps, web apps, and chrome extensions. All I ask for is they are open source, credit is given to Aayush or yush_g or Divide-By-0, and your repo + site link back to this list (the shortlink is https://aayushg.com/ideas) :)

Funding

If you fully deploy the project publicly, I award free hosting and small cash prizes at $200 per idea ($400 per crypto idea). I personally put in $200 (crypto ideas additionally 2x matched by @smsunarto). This is at my discretion so people don't game the system or feel cheated; the point is to build the project for learning and self-satisfaction, not the grant -- the money is mostly just so it can continue to exist :). I will likely fund any good-faith implementation. Reach out to me if you're interested in helping sponsor bounties as well!

Total projects built: 16.

<details><summary>Finished + Paid out Bounties</summary>

<p>

Mixmello: Remix Spotify Playlists

Bounty Prompt: A program that takes your spotify playlist and converts it to another one of remixes of the same songs, to get some variety. Create remixed versions of your favourite playlists. Free and open source! </br> Website Link: mixmello.com </br> GitHub Repo: alexgurr/mixmello

Damn Daniel Button

Bounty Prompt: The bruh button, but for damn daniel </br> Completed by: Daniel Bessonov, Patrick Li </br> Press: Saratoga Falcon: Top 25 App on App Store Taken Down

Phone Scroll Distance Leaderboard

Bounty Prompt: An app that tracks the distance you've scrolled on your phone and puts it on a leaderboard </br> Completed by: Bryan Chiang </br> Demo Video: Demo

Auto-LaTeX Equations

Bounty Prompt: A way to use LaTeX equations in Google Docs </br> Completed by: Aayush Gupta (me) </br> Website: https://autolatex.com </br> Press: Nature

Spotify Playlist Cleanify

Bounty Prompt: A program that takes your spotify playlist and converts it to a clean version with the same songs and removes it if it can't find any. Used to be able to listen to my playlists in the car with my parents </br> Completed by: Arman Rafati</br> Website: https://www.cleanify.app/ </br> Github Link: https://github.com/code-arman/Cleanify

Windows Automatic Unzipper

Bounty Prompt: When something is downloaded, unzip it to its own folder then delete the original zip file </br> Completed by: Aiden Magrath</br> Github Repo: https://github.com/aidenmagrath/Windows-Auto-Unzipper Website Link: https://autounzipper.com/

Trippy Videos

Bounty Prompt: Upsample each frame in a video independently with a GAN, creating an entirely style-transfered universe that moves from frame to frame in a slightly jarring and hypnotic way. </br> Completed by: Milo Cress, David Wu, Alice Chen, Vincent Huang </br> Demo Video: 30 second Video </br> Github Repo: Github

Colorize Video

Bounty Prompt: An API endpoint for temporally consistent video colorization</br> Completed by: Syed Mustafa</br> Deployed Demo: Replicate API Demo</br>

Get Off Those Sites

Bounty Prompt: A good Chrome extension to keep you off Facebook etc. Tracks how long you spend on degenerate sites, then when you go to Facebook etc, it says "On average, you think you'll spend 16 minutes, but you end up spending 31 minutes on this tab. How many minutes do you think you'll spend this time?" And at the end of that # of minutes, it makes the page black and white so you can continue to browse but it'll be slightly uncomfortable. </br> Completed by GrimSteel </br> Github Repo: get-off-those-sites </br>

Spotify Match

Bounty Prompt: A website that, when given a certain song or artist on Spotify, it finds friends who have listened to that artist/song (by # of occurrences in their public playlists). Useful to find concert buddies/people with similar music tastes. </br> Completed By: Colin Flueck </br> Website Link: spotifymatch.com

Safe Tornado Cash

Bounty Prompt: Safe tornado cash, where users can use it but hackers/North Korea can't. To be able to use tornado.cash, you have to wait a significant number of blocks between deposits and withdraws. You know the leaves being added to the Merkle tree, and can trace which are linked to stolen deposits. You can create a second blocklist of "banned leaves", which allows you to block withdraws of nullifier leaves, meaning hackers can deposit but not withdraw. </br> Github Repo: tornado-core-blacklist

Open-source Keybr Clone with More Statistics

Bounty Prompt: Make an open source keybr clone with more statistics, like seperating lowercase/capital letters, and showing most missed keys and most missed pairs of keys. </br> Completed by: Aayush Gupta (me) </br> Github Repo: keybr-with-stats Deployed Website: https://keybr.onrender.com

Tuneder

Bounty Prompt: A tinder for songs -- plays the most commented 10 seconds of a song on Apple Music and adds it to a playlist if you like it. Inspired by Soundsieve (https://github.com/wilzh40/SoundSieve) which is unfortunately dead, and fab.fm which has a different song discovery method. Released as an iOS app. </br> Completed by: Aditya Saravana </br> Github Repo: github.com/adityasaravana/Tuneder

SoundSwipe

Bounty Prompt: A tinder for songs -- plays the most commented 10 seconds of a song on SoundCloud and adds it to a playlist if you like it. Inspired by Soundsieve (https://github.com/wilzh40/SoundSieve) which is unfortunately dead, and fab.fm which has a different song discovery method. Released as a web app. </br> Completed by: Kevin Grosso (k0dev)</br> Github Repo: https://github.com/k0dev/sc-explorer</br> Website Link: SoundSwipe

AI Video Colorization APIs

Bounty Prompt: Make it really easy (replicate.com deployed, with a nice interface and API) to run the latest colorization and OCR AI models, at near-cost.</br> Completed by: Cudanexus </br> Demo: debvc and tcvc were state-of-the-art, but perform poorly in practice. Facebook Nougat (academic OCR AI where huggingface demo doesn't work) and BiSTNet (which won NTIRE2023's video colorization challenge) are in progress.

Pitchpin

Bounty Prompt: An audio recorder where you can tap to add a flag at any time -- you can attach a note if you want, but the purpose is that later you can quickly skip to that time and know something important is there. </br> Completed by: Aditya Saravana </br> Github Repo: github.com/adityasaravana/Pitchpin Website Link: <a href="https://adityasaravana.github.io/pitchpin-site/">Pitchpin</a>

</p> </details> </br>

Contribution & pull requests

If you make any of these, please make them open source!

If you want to be added to the list of people that have completed a project, request a PR adding the project idea, your project's URL, and your repo's URL to CONTRIBUTORS.md and above, and edit the README to mark them done. I can help brainstorm relevant communities, and recommend marketing ideas to help get your first few hundred users.

<details><summary>Why make them open source and ad-free?</summary>

<p> I think open source is very, very powerful. I'd also love to add features to apps that I use if I want them, and I'm sure I'm not alone. Your app can be maintained and improved by the community that most cares about it (with minimal effort on your part!). If you're worried about someone else making money off of your work, you can just put a note in the README that anyone is free to share it not for profit, but anyone who monetizes, needs to check in with you first (and hopefully partner with them!).

Open source companies with canonical deployments are still often successful, and it makes little difference to the end user -- 99.99 percent of end users are not technical enough to even deploy a Github app. Gitlab, Android, Linux, Firefox, Flutter, React, Python, Rust, Docker, AWS, Box, Darabricks, Kubernetes, etc -- there's a massive list of open source projects that are wildly successful, and many of them have some "canonical deployment" which is monetized. People will pay a lot just for a hosted service of existing open source software.

I wasn't always pro-open source. I thought, aren't you giving up your technical moat by open sourcing? But the financial upside to closed source compared to open source is very little, and the developer friendliness of open source is high enough that if there's any shot for the app to get big, that's the best shot. If someone publishes a competing app without your consent, expose them on Twitter (you can partner with them which is win-win, or report them to the app store which in a sense is lose-lose but an option). Companies recruit through open source too, so if you're a student, it's a great way to show off your skills.

I promise none of these will be a billion dollar app (or frankly even a thousand dollar app), and is just an early step in a long list of many future great things you will do. I highly recommend you invest in maximum social capital right now, and convert it to technical capital later. If you have a desire for monetizable projects, I'm happy to send over more ideas for those! Open source is also a great way to make sure you structure your repository well, especially secret management.

Ads bring in surprisingly low revenue -- I hope that the bounty makes it worth your time; for most of these apps, the amount you expect to make off of ads will probably be less than the bounty amount I pay you upfront. Overall, I strongly advise against closed source and ads -- not just because of me, but for the success of the app, and for you to have the satisfaction of creating software used by the maximum number of people :)

</p> </details> </br>

Index

All Software

• Music
• Health
• Programming Tools
• Family/Roommates/Friends
• Politics
• Image Processing
• Video Processing
• Audio Processing
• Edtech/Research
• Text Processing/NLP
• Fun
• Hardware
• Crypto <a name="all-software"></a>

All Software

<a name="Music"></a>

Music

• A Chrome extension that tracks if you're on a certain song or artist on Spotify, and it finds friends who have listened to that artist/song (by # of occurrences in their public playlists). Useful to find concert buddies/people with similar music tastes.
  • This is surprisingly highly requested, see thread 1, 2, and 3.
  • DONE: This is done by Colin Flueck, project at spotifymatch.com!
  • Note that the above isn't exhasutive; as @alexgurr points out, for thoroughness you may need a Chrome extension to hit the friends API endpoint on Spotify web, or Facebook login to use Facebook friends.
• Spotify Playlist Remixer: A program that takes your Spotify playlist and converts it to another one of remixes of the same songs, to get some variety.
  • DONE: By Alex Gurr, project at mixmello.com!
• Spotify Parent-Friendly-ifier: A program that takes your Spotify playlist and converts it to a clean version with the same songs, and removes it if it can't find any. Used to be able to listen to my playlists in the car with my parents.
  • DONE: By Arman Rafati, project at cleanify.app!
• Tinder for Songs. Plays the most commented 10 seconds of a song on SoundCloud and adds it to a playlist if you like it. Inspired by Soundsieve (https://github.com/wilzh40/SoundSieve) which is unfortunately dead, and fab.fm which has a different song discovery method.
  • Note: This already exists for Spotify, namely Tuneful for a webapp, Discz which has an iOS app, and Swipify on the Play Store!
  • DONE: By Aditya Saravana for Apple Music on iOS
  • DONE: By Kevin Grosso for Soundcloud as a Webapp
• Responsive AI DJ: Uses a camera to monitor the movement of the people in the crowd and run sentiment analysis on their faces. Notices how that changes as it changes the music, with higher weights for more people. Can then "gradient descent" towards the optimal AI generated music for that crowd, keeping in mind things like repetitiveness and how the audience composition changes over time. Want to add variety over just beats, so give it some samples and voices to throw in as well.
• Automatic Music Video Creator: Upload any collection of videos, pictures, or a topic, that you want to auto-align to an uploaded mp3. The app detects drumbeats or other features and staggers the videos to transition at those times. Note that this kind of exists with Adobe Firefly now, I think.
  • Could potentially also upload a 3d scene somehow, and randomly move around and show the field of view, but at a speed proportional to music energy and rotating only when beats hit. Perhaps to import the 3d scene, could be autogenerated from an image/set of images, or just a spot on google earth or something?