I built a side project over a weekend: saas.pet
— a daily AI tool
leaderboard that aggregates GitHub Trending, Hacker News, and Product Hunt
every morning and ranks the top 30.
It's free, has no signup, no ads collecting data, and refreshes at 8:10 AM
Beijing time. Here's what I learned building it.
Why I built it
I'm a heavy AI tool user. I check 5-10 different sites every week to see
what's new — GitHub Trending, Hacker News, Product Hunt, Twitter, Reddit.
That's 30+ minutes of manual work daily, and most of it is noise.
What I wanted: one page, refreshed every morning, that just shows me the
top 30 AI tools, ranked by community votes across all three sources.
The tech stack
- Vercel — static site + cron jobs
- Resend — newsletter (no backend)
- GitHub Trending + HN + Product Hunt APIs** — data sources
- Static HTML — no SSR, no JS framework Total cost: $0/month (Vercel free tier + Resend free tier). The interesting finding After running it for a week, I noticed the top 10 is stable day-to-day (Cursor, Claude, V0, etc.), but #11-30 rotates wildly week-to-week. That means the "discoverability ceiling" for AI tools is real — once you hit the top 10, you stay there. The middle is chaos. GitHub is 80% signal, HN is 70% noise once you filter out the political/AI-policy stories, Product Hunt is great for launches but front-page rotation kills 5-day-old posts. What I wrote (105 reviews + 20 best-of guides) Every tool on saas.pet links to a 1500-2300 word review I wrote. The reviews cover pricing, alternatives, real user pain points, and a "should you switch?" verdict. The pattern: long-form content ranks better than thin reviews. A 2000-word review gets 3-5x more search traffic than a 500-word one. What's next I want to add:
- User voting (so community decides, not just aggregated votes)
- A "compare two tools" feature
- A weekly digest email (already built, needs more subscribers) Check it out: saas.pet
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