Almost 70% of the YC W24 batch are building AI tools. This is a good indication of how the world of tech has come to.

BUT we are looking the other way this time: of all the AI products and launches, there are still products that are non-AI (or at least, not directly related to AI) and are fire🔥 ATM. What are they? How did they break through the AI storm?

Bruno

Bruno is a Git-friendly API client. Feature-wise, what makes it stand out from other popular GUI API clients out there is that Bruno stores your collections directly in a folder on your filesystem and it's a desktop app made for offline use.

Apparently, it took them 2 years to get from 0 to 500 stars, and 10 days from 500 to 5000. And now they have over 17K stargazers. This discussion might have something to do with their rapid growth, which was also debated on HN. People are passionate regarding the topic of oss monetization! Monetizaion or not, Bruno definetely got way more popular over the past 6 months.

Dub

Dub is the open-source Bitly successor. It debuted in September, 2022 as an internal tool for Vercel, but the author started a company around Dub earlier this year and recently landed #1 on Product Hunt.

It's more than just your usual link-management tool: it's a dream for marketing teams, as it comes with built-in analytics, geographic data, and branded links.

Maybe

Maybe is the story of a comeback. It was shut down in July, 2023. Not wanting to waste the $1,000,000 from investors, Maybe was open-sourced this past January as a fully transparent, open-source, community-backed personal finance app. It was hard to miss because it was trending on GitHub for the entire week.

Right now they are making improvements from the story-learned from the previous rendevous, new funding, and the power of open-source. So keep an eye out for it if you like looking at sexy finance dashboards. 📊💰

Monolith

Monolith is a CLI tool for saving complete web pages as a single HTML file.

Unlike the conventional “Save page as”, Monolith not only saves the target document, it embeds CSS, image, and JavaScript assets all at once, producing a single HTML5 document for you to store and share. Perfect if you are looking to save something for offline access, a read-it-later, or bookmarking/archiving.

It was open sourced in 2017, and the two spikes in stargazers it since had are most likely thanks to two HN submissions (2019, and 2024). All hail HN!

Puter

Puter is a cloud personal computer, and you can have all your files, apps, and games in one place accessible from anywhere at any time. So, basically a computer in your browser,

Puter has been around a while, but was recently open-sourced so that you can self-host it on any device, even from your EV car!

Lastly

So... what are you working on? Is it AI or non-AI?