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Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

1901 points l2silver | 4 comments | 27 Apr 23 15:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.871s | source

Maybe you've created your own AR program for wearables that shows the definition of a word when you highlight it IRL, or you've built a personal calendar app for your family to display on a monitor in the kitchen. Whatever it is, I'd love to hear it.
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zciwor ◴[28 Apr 23 14:19 UTC] No.35741561[source]▶
I'm a credit card point junkie so I always volunteer to pay the bill at dinner or drinks. But, if everyone doesn't get roughly the same thing, it becomes a massive headache. I got fed up with having to manually tally up what everyone ordered and then hunting them down individually to get paid back.

Surprisingly, I haven't found a good tool that addresses this, so I spun up my own. I didn't want to force my friends to download another app just so I can get paid back so I tried to make it mostly SMS based.

You text a picture of the receipt to my Twilio phone number. It triggers a serverless function that runs AWS Textract to itemize the receipt, then stores it in a database. Twilio responds with the unique URL for the receipt and I can text that out to my friends so they can claim their own damn items.

Win win, I get the points AND I finally get paid back.

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1. epiccoleman ◴[28 Apr 23 14:24 UTC] No.35741614[source]▶
Wow, that's a pretty cool idea. Sounds like it has some potential for being productized!
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2. zciwor ◴[28 Apr 23 14:32 UTC] No.35741728[source]▶
I am thinking about doing something with it. I put up a landing page to gauge interest, but I have no idea how I would monetize. Right now it's just burning money on AWS.
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3. epiccoleman ◴[28 Apr 23 14:51 UTC] No.35741968[source]▶
Yeah, I can imagine it would be tough to charge for this, especially on a recurring basis. If I was splitting a bill, and thought I could use this, but then it turns out I'm going to have to pay $5 or a monthly subscription or something, at that point I'd probably just split the bill manually.

If you actually handled the payments, you could introduce a small upcharge that way, but even there it might be a hard sell, and the amount of bullshit you'd have to deal with to be able to scrape a buck or two off each transaction might mean the juice isn't worth the squeeze. But still, if you could scale it enough, a buck or two per transaction could be big money!

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4. zciwor ◴[28 Apr 23 14:57 UTC] No.35742066{3}[source]▶
Yeah, definitely worth looking into. I think Stripe has their Connect feature which might facilitate payments between people. Could be fun to tinker with. Thanks for the feedback!