Death by subscription

gm legends, happy Saturday, and happy 4th to the Americans. Something new today: this is the first weekend edition of this newsletter, ever.

Here's why. Makers don't stop shipping on Friday. Some of the best things on this site launch on a Saturday, solo builders, side projects, the stuff people make because they can't not.

Today, three debuts: a subscription tracker built by a man who forgot eleven of his own, an iPhone that becomes your Mac's controller, and your coding agents building live in 3D.

CentryAI is a subscription tracker with the most honest origin story on today's board: solo founder Emre Yilmaz built it after discovering he was paying for eleven subscriptions he'd completely forgotten. His profile says it plainly, built for ADHD, which makes this the rare finance tool designed for the brain that signs up, means well, and never sees the charge again, keeping every recurring payment somewhere it can't quietly slip away.

🔥 Our Take: Subscription trackers are everywhere, Rocket Money built a whole company on this problem. The difference here is who's building. Every big subscription tool is designed by people organized enough to work at a fintech, for users they imagine are just a bit lazy, and this one comes from a brain that actually loses the thread. Eleven forgotten subscriptions is a better credential than a Series A. Whether one solo dev out-executes Rocket Money, probably not. But if "forgot 11 of them" felt personal, this was built for you specifically.

PhoneDeck turns your iPhone into a free controller for your Mac, the trackpad, remote, and control surface you already carry, no extra hardware and no subscription. It's from Vansh Parihar, whose entire bio reads "23. Built PhoneDeck in 7 days."

🔥 Our Take: iPhone-as-Mac-controller apps have existed for years, and almost all of them are the same experience: ancient interfaces, ad walls, and a subscription for the privilege of moving your own cursor. That's what makes the bio the story here, a 23-year-old built a free one in seven days and shipped it into a category that's been coasting on paid junk for a decade. Seven days also means rough edges, buy the polish claim only after you've paired it. But free and modern in a space this stale is its own argument. Sometimes the passion project is just doing the obvious thing nobody bothered to do properly.

Termi Protocol turns your AI coding agents into something you can actually watch: a live 3D view of them building, so the work that normally scrolls past in a terminal becomes a scene you can look into. It's from Eric Omer Ercan, an app builder who decided the most invisible work on your machine deserved a window.

🔥 Our Take: Everyone who runs coding agents has the same nagging question: what is it actually doing in there? Right now the answer is a wall of scrolling terminal text you stopped reading weeks ago. Termi's answer is to make it a place, your agents building live in 3D, work you can watch instead of logs you can trust. Whether that's a debugging tool or just a beautiful screensaver is the real question, and honestly, even the screensaver has value, people trust what they can see. Last week someone gave Claude Code a pet. This week it gets a world. The agents got interesting enough to watch, and the tools are catching up to that.