We had this discussions for years with factory machines, and nothing came out of it. Don't get me wrong, I hate having taxes for everything (living in Germany with ~65% total tax strain for me if you include everything), but this is about power and stealing other peoples work.

1. Shifu (https://github.com/emvi/shifu) - a code-based CMS with admin UI. It's really easy to set up, written in Go, free and open-source, and I already sold a few websites using it. It can be used as kind of a framework to build more specialized features into a website and takes away the maintenance hell from managing a WordPress installation or a similiar CMS with tons of plugins that break with every update.

2. Zenko (working title, repo is private for now) - a very simple and no-bullshit project management software. It will be free and open-source, but I might offer a hosted option for a few bucks (like $20/year for all users of a team). I mainly build this for ourself to replace Linear, because we don't really make use of it. Don't get me wrong, Linear is awesome, but we basically only need an advanced Todo list. Main goals:

* Pull updates on the dashboard by yourself, instead of receiving notifications all the time via email

* Keep it simple stupid - no unnecessary features, no AI, just the bare minimum

* Cheap (for the hosted version, free if self-hosted) and easy to host (again written in Go)

* No feature-creep

3. Last but not least, I'm working on a "game engine" written in Go and SDL2. I do this for fun, but it is coming along nicely and teached me a few new concepts already (like ECS in Go).

One of the main reasons we've switched from hCaptcha is privacy. The server-side stuff can be self-hosted and there is a Golang integration. Really nice.

Here is the link for anyone who would like to take a look: https://altcha.org/

Some of the default config options are weird and SSL is something that needs to be addressed. Overall, still one of the easier DBs to maintain.

I'm one of the co-founders of Pirsch, and a bit worried because the space is getting really crowded :D

There is still a lot to do and learn (especially in the marketing department), but we have plans for a new product in the privacy space. I don't want to say too much about it until we've started working on it, but it's in the compliance space and fits quite well with our existing product. I think it's always a good starting point to solve your own problems.

LLMs have mostly been useful for three things: single line code completion (in GoLand), quickly translating JSON, and generating/optimizing marketing texts.

Imagine starting a business in Germany. How are you suppose to pay 30-50k for legal questions before selling anything?

If you would like to self-host or have other specific requirements, you can quickly reduce the list to a couple of options of course.

I basically started this for my personal use as a library for Go, which it still is:

https://marvinblum.de/blog/server-side-tracking-without-cook...

https://docs.pirsch.io/privacy

https://docs.pirsch.io/advanced/events

We have done a privacy risk analysis with an external lawyer and data protection officer, and concluded that Pirsch is in line with GDPR as we do not collect nor store personal identifiable information (PII). Processing stuff like IP addresses for example is legal as long as they are not stored and only cached for a reasonable amount of time (a few milliseconds in our case).

If you're interested, we have extensive documentation on this. You can reach out to support@pirsch.io to get it :)

If anyone is interested in doing something similar. This did cost us about 8,000 € in Germany.