All 100 ideasWork and hiring
#62 of 100 · Work and hiring
A fairer marketplace for small gigs
A low-fee place to post or find short paid programming tasks, consultations and bounties, with reputation to filter quality.
Asks per year
What the askers want
- Would pay36%
- Want it local or private0%
- Object to subscriptions9%
- Want it open source or self-hosted9%
- Want AI to do it0%
Share of the 11 asks that say so, as judged by Jev.
What exists on Show HN
Built, still asked for3 Show HN launches do this job, and 9 more do part of it. People still ask, so the launches are missed, unknown, or not what they want. Ask what they’re missing before you build.
- Uber for Coding — Build product with bounties2022 · 66 pts
- AskLorem – A freelance marketplace embedded in tools you know and love2018 · 3 pts
- Golance – Cheaper Alternative to Upwork2024 · 3 pts
Instead of: Upwork, Fiverr
The idea, as matched
A low-fee marketplace for short freelance software gigs, paid expert consultations and code bounties (roughly 1 to 10 hours), with reputation and quality filtering, as a fairer Upwork or Fiverr.
Jev first matched 15 requests to this idea; a second reader kept 11 of 15.
Every ask, newest first
Each line is an AI paraphrase of what the writer wanted. The link goes to their own words on Hacker News.
Reader’s note. Split between buyers and freelancers seeking work.
- Jan 2026Wants a site for finding 1 to 10 hour software gigs, as Fiverr once offered. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Where do you find single day software gigs?”
- Jul 2024Wants a free alternative to Upwork, since paying fees to find freelance work is a burden. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Why Pay to Work?”
- May 2024Proposes a database of people available for short paid consultations, to talk through problems without Upwork noise. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Who Wants to Consult?”
- Jun 2020Wants an informal online marketplace matching mentors and apprentices for paid quick Q&A sessions. Read it: a comment in “Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice”
- Nov 2019Wants a Stack Overflow-like board for 1 to 10 hour programming tasks with bidding and reputation ratings. Read it: a comment in “[dead]”
- Feb 2019Wants a marketplace for paying someone to maintain or extend an unmaintained open source project. Read it: a post: “Open Source Software Bounty Sites”
- Feb 2016Wants a service listing programming problems students can solve in spare time for spending money. Read it: a comment in “Show HN: I'm looking for science fiction writers”
- Sep 2012Wants a cheap, simple place to post or find jobs, including small paid programming tasks. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Is anyone doing a job board "right"?”
- Aug 2012Describes mixed quality of freelance developers on oDesk and considers hiring someone to manage the weaker contractors. Read it: a comment in “Freelance dev market”
- Jan 2012Wants a better freelance network for designers and architects, since existing sites demand heavy work for low pay. Read it: a comment in “Ask HN: Elance for software designers/architects?”
- Oct 2008Wants small coding gigs to fill weekends, asking for a crowdSPRING-like site for programming. Read it: a post: “Anyone know of a coding equivalent to crowdspring.com?”
Building this?
Read ten of the asks above first, because they say what the existing launches miss. If you ship it, post it as a Show HN so the next run of this list finds it.
Ship it like Vercel, on a server you own
This site runs on ShipTiffin. A push to GitHub deploys it, the way it would on Vercel, but the server is a Hetzner box in your own account. Postgres, sign-in, email, jobs and analytics are already on it, every project gets a hard limit, and nothing is billed by usage.
$19 a month per box, plus about $10 for the server at Hetzner. Open source, so you can also run it yourself for free.