The Roundup

December 21st, 2025

ChatGPT Images v. Nano Banano

This newsletter was brought to you bySetapp

ChatGPT has an image to uphold

gm legends. It’s Sunday funday.

This week: image generation gets an upgrade in ChatGPT; one founder shares what he learned running Reddit ads — and whether they’re worth it; who won marketing in 2025; and a blast from Product Hunt’s past. Plus: some of the top launches from the past week.

Throw on some Christmas music, get cozy by the fire, and read the last weekly newsletter before the holidays.

P.S. Launching soon? We’d love to hear about it → editorial@producthunt.co 🫶

IN THE NEWS

ChatGPT launches Images 1.5

ChatGPT has always been a go-to AI tool for, well, chat. Words were its thing. Images, not so much. But the launch of ChatGPT Images powered by GPT Image 1.5 this week could change that.

The tool, which was our #1 launch on Wednesday, promises faster generation (save your patience for the airport) and edits that let you keep the elements you like and replace the ones you don’t. A dedicated images tab in ChatGPT and an upgraded workspace combine to make this feel almost like a lightweight studio. The question is whether this turns ChatGPT into the go-to place for making thumbnails, mockups, and quick visuals so you don’t have to open five other tools.

Speaking of other tools, the early reviews put this on par with Gemini’s AI image generator, Nano Banana. Which do you prefer: ChatCPT Images or Nano Banano?

Vote

STARTUP STORIES

What $50 on Reddit ads will buy you

After launching a finance app in September, where he hit #4 for the day, Matt Carroll got a lot of churn and struggled to convert free users into paid subscribers. After repositioning the tool, he wanted to test out if he was on the right track.

So he bought some ads on Reddit — $50 a day for 10 days. What did he learn? And is it enough to save his idea? Contrary to standard advice, you should read the comments under the post: They’re stocked with advice on how to run a good ad campaign.

Read the post

Grow your app with Setapp: revenue, users, & AI

You shipped the app. Now comes the part nobody warns you about.

Billing across dozens of countries. Licensing agreements. Tax compliance. Customer support for users you haven't met yet. And if your app does anything with AI, add provider management and infrastructure costs to the pile. None of that is why you started building — but all of it is now your problem.

Setapp is trying to take it off your plate.

You probably know Setapp as the subscription marketplace — one monthly price, hundreds of Mac apps. On May 21st, they turned toward developers. The pitch is simple: list your app, reach users who are already looking, and let Setapp handle the business layer.

Share your app

FROM THE FORUMS

Nailed it!

Nika asked: “Which company nailed marketing in 2025?”

Some of her picks for “the most intense (and impossible-to-ignore) marketing campaigns this entire year”:

Base44, the vibe coding tool that had two top-5 launches this year
ClickUp, the productivity platform that hit #1 last week
Lovable, an AI engineer with four top-5 launches in 2025

Folks are chiming in. What are your picks?

Chime in

'POP QUIZ, HOTSHOT'

Name the Product Hunt launch

If you’re like us, looking at products all day, you might lose track of which tools have which features — and more importantly, how they compare to similar products. Sure, you could go on the company website, but it’ll probably just give you a chart showing all green checkmarks for itself and red Xs for the other guys. This platform, which reached #4 in December 2024, does the comparing for you.

Can you name the launch?

Weekly

Leaderboard highlights

Unloop — Visual pattern mapping for adhd & neurodivergent mindsUnloop is visual pattern mapping for ADHD and neurodivergent minds. It gives you a canvas to lay out triggers, thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, then lets AI highlight links you might have missed. From there you can design tiny experiments to see what changes when you tweak one part of the loop. No prescriptions, no generic tips, just your own system made visible.

ManyPI — Turn websites into APIsManyPI lets you turn any website into a clean, type-safe API. You describe the data you want in natural language or as a JSON schema, it handles the extraction and typing, and you get usable JSON you can plug into RAG pipelines, sales workflows, content aggregation, or research without rolling your own scraper each time.

Monocle 3.0 for macOS — Noise-cancelling for your  screen now with cursor shakeMonocle 3.0 is a window dimmer for macOS that treats your screen like it has noise-cancelling. Shake your cursor and everything but the active window blurs out; shake again and your desktop comes back. You can tune blur strength, add grayscale or tints, and it’s all built to feel like a native Mac feature, not a hack.

FramerLaunch websites with enterprise needs at startup speeds.

Promoted

Shadow — AI that sees, listens, and understands every meetingShadow sits on your Mac and quietly captures both sides of every meeting: what people say and what’s on screen. No bot joins the call, but you still get transcripts, slides, shared screens and context in one place. From there it can draft follow-up emails, pull out action items, and run custom workflows so you spend less time recapping and more time actually doing the work.

GitStory — Turn your GitHub commits into a cinematic storyGitStory turns your GitHub repos into short, watchable timelines instead of static graphs and green boxes. It maps how a project changed over time so you can show the real work behind it, not just the final screenshot.

Show more products

The Roundup

Every Sunday

Everything you missed this past week on Product Hunt: Top products, spicy community discourse, key trends on the site, and long-form pieces we’ve recently published.