KeyTakes

This is my first post on PH, so I have no idea how much detail is desired, but I hope this candid comment is good, and forgive me if it’s too long 😄 ➡️ Why I built this I would browse Reddit and see an interesting (often clickbait) post of some news article, but I didn't want to open it and potentially waste my time on nonsense, I just wanted to know the key takeaways. From reading the comments, I realized I wasn't the only one; many people weren’t even reading the articles. I thought, if only one could simply change the domain “reddit” to “keytakes” and get the key takeaways, that would be nice! So that’s where it started, the idea that you could change the root domain of any website to keytakes.com and get the key takeaways of that webpage. Later I realized that prefixing the entire URL with `keytakes.com/` would work even better (especially for me as the developer), so now that’s a supported method as well. I then added other usage methods, like the extension (fastest), and manual input on the homepage, plus support for YouTube videos. The reason I made an extension too was because I didn’t deploy the app to production until it was fully finished (incredibly stupid 🤦‍♂️). That’s when I found out performance wasn’t as good as on my local server. The extension solves this, since it sends the text directly to the LLM, skipping a few steps (like serverless searching & scraping). ➡️ How it differs from the alternatives: It aims to be much more than a simple summarizer. It comes with a comprehensive set of smart features: * Adjustable summary depths * Audio player * Integrated AI chat (Gemini 2.5) * Misinformation & bias detection * Interactive, exploratory experience by drilling down into the key takeaways All of this is offered at no cost. KeyTakes will always provide a generous free usage limit of 15 summaries and 15 AI messages per week, which is sufficient for most users. For $2 month, users can 10x their quota to 150 summaries and 150 messages weekly. ➡️ What are you most proud of in this launch? I built the whole thing myself, from idea to production. That includes everything: frontend, backend (Next.js/Firebase), AI integration, networking & middleware, and even the payments system (which I built as a learning experience, my goal with KeyTakes was never profit). I’m also proud of how scalable and cost-effective it is. Generating these advanced summaries involves a lot under the hood, but I got the cost down to well under 1 cent per summary (thankfully! 😅). Then there’s the actual tech, like how the expandable bullet points and AI chat work. They rely on generating embeddings and matching via cosine similarity (a method common in RAG) to keep everything linked to the original content, so users can explore the summary with the source, keeping trust in both the summary and the AI responses. ➡️ Bonus Section - The struggles: * Realizing (close to launch) just how many summarization tools already exist! This was more of a mental shock as I put in months of effort and the idea that no one would end up using it did disturb me a little bit. * Similarly, finding out Chrome is releasing Gemini Nano, a built-in LLM API, so it’s probably a matter of time before Google ships something similar built into the browser. * Spending *way* too much time on the original “change root domain” method, which uses a search engine to find the original URL. Later realizing simply prefixing the full URL with `keytakes.com/` is both easier and more reliable. * Finding out once deployed, that the performance was slower than locally (due to scraping limitations in a serverless environment), necessitating the development of the extension (fortunately, did not take too much effort). * The last 10% always takes 50% (or more) of the total time I spend on a project. The same thing happened with my previous project Dawn: New Tab Dashboard (I will probably launch that on here as well some time in the future, though it was released a year ago). This marks my second project. I hope some of you will use it, try it out, and let me know your (brutally) honest thoughts! It currently has 2 users so it is fresh out and you will be essentially a beta tester!