Trace - F**k The Algorithm. Make Your Own
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Trace helps you keep up by pulling content from multiple sources — like YouTube, Reddit, Hacker News, Medium, and X — into one place.
It learns from your work and feedback, remembers what matters, and surfaces signals from across the web without pulling you in.
Replies
I like the idea of tracking the content I consume. Can I also set up the sources I want to get content from, the types of content within them, specific topics, and formats? It would be great if the service could generate news just for me in audio/video format of my choice, and also let me choose where to send it (Messenger, email, etc.). A sort of personalized news aggregator.
Trace
@mykyta_semenov_ Great question — and you’re basically describing where this can go long-term.
Right now, Trace is opinionated on purpose: fewer knobs, more learning from what you actually read. I’m trying to avoid turning it into something you have to constantly configure to get value.
That said:
Source control, topic depth, and format preferences are all things I’m thinking about, especially once there’s enough signal to make them useful instead of overwhelming.
Audio summaries / alternative formats are very much on the radar, but only if they stay “open → get value → leave,” not another thing demanding attention.
Delivery to other surfaces (email, etc.) makes sense for some people, though I want to be careful about not recreating newsletter overload in a new form.
So yes — the vision overlaps with a personalized news aggregator, but biased toward less setup and less noise rather than maximum control from day one.
If you’re open to it, I’d love to hear which part of that matters most to you first:
source control, formats (audio/video), or delivery outside the app.
@tarat The most important thing is source control. In second place is delivery to messengers where I’m used to reading news (you could also enable posting to groups — that’s already a B2B feature and something you could charge for).
Respect the decision to charge early. $2.99/month feels reasonable if the product genuinely stays out of the way.
Have you found that charging upfront helps set expectations around intentional use, rather than people treating it like another free feed they mindlessly scroll?
Project tracking tools can get overwhelming fast, but this looks clean and focused. Does it integrate with other project management tools, or is it designed to be your single source of truth?
Trace
@easytoolsdev Good catch — and just to clarify first: Trace isn’t a project tracking tool.
It doesn’t try to manage tasks, projects, or workflows. It’s focused on information intake, not execution.
So it’s not meant to be a single source of truth in the “project management” sense, and it doesn’t currently integrate with tools like Jira, Notion, Linear, etc.
The idea is simpler: wherever your work already lives, Trace helps you stay informed about what’s happening around it — relevant updates, discussions, posts, releases — without pulling you into five different feeds.
In other words, it’s designed to sit alongside your existing tools, not replace them or compete for control.
Bought it on launch day — very promising so far.
$2.99 is insanely cheap for a personal signal engine like this.
Hope it keeps getting smarter over time and maybe even outperforms my $200 ChatGPT Pulse subscription 😄
Rooting for this to become my daily info cockpit.
Trace
@xkbear Thank you for the early trust 🙏
$200 vs $2.99 is a wild comparison — but if Trace can earn a daily spot in your routine, I’ll take that win. Lots more learning and tuning ahead.
Take the unprofessional F-bomb off your website and I'll take a look.
Trace
@jay_bienvenu I am sorry if this hurt your sentiment in any way but I really like our tagline and it resonates well with most of my users so I can't. Thanks for sharing ur thoughts though
I find the mentioned purpose and the implementation of Trace totally different.
1) If your primary purpose of building this product was to build user's own feed, then why is it implemented in a minimalist way? I do not recognise all the tech terms that will be listed on my feeds (even though I am in the tech industry), but I recognise through its logo or any image. Most of the time my mind needs any image (or thumbnail) to make me wanna read it. Any social media is basically a marketing application for any resource like blog, github repo, youtube video, etc etc. If you make that minimalist and less appealing, then I think the purpose of social media is defeated here.
2) How will you incite users to actually interact with the post, given that the minimalist impl. already makes it less appealing for a click. If over the time, people just find your application lying in the corner with minimum interaction, then most probably then would wanna scrap it off of their credit card bill. Then how are you planning to keep up your business?