Cryptick
free and open-source alternative to Minute Cryptic
Details
- External ID
- 48007175
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Cryptick
- Website domain
- wildvale.co.uk
- Launched
- May 4, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.1147011308562197
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Hi HN!I'm an amateur cryptic crossword solver and setter, who cut my teeth on Minute Cryptic. I liked that you could create custom clues on MC but was annoyed that it required creating an account to do.I wanted to create a free, open-source, and (as much as possible) anonymous version to make it easy to share clues online; not everything needs a user account to provide a good service to users.I'm primarily a backend developer so this was also a learning experience in creating a site with no backend; it's all vanilla client-side HTML / CSS / JS, built using Metalsmith.js, hosted as a static site on AWS S3 behind CloudFront.The source is on GitHub, of course! https://github.com/mrwilson/cryptickI'm still iterating heavily based on feedback, which would be appreciated!I, plus a few guest setters, also run a Clue of the Day entry on Cryptick which is exposed as an RSS feed (https://cryptick.wildvale.co.uk/feed.xml). Here's today's (thematically appropriate) COTD:Film franchise launch snubbed, original footage sent back with extra section (4,4) (https://cryptick.wildvale.co.uk/cotd/2026-05-04.html)
Enrichment
- Theme
- self-hosted infrastructure and security tools
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- Vertical SaaS
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- open source cryptic crossword app
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes A static client-side web application for displaying, checking, and creating cryptic crossword clues is standard front-end development with local state or basic database storage.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 57 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #47 of 58 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 185 days after the earliest competitor.
- Open Passkey · hn · 2026-04-19 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Prom.dev · hn · 2025-11-13 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- PhishScout · ph · 2026-09-15 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Portable Secret · hn · 2026-02-26 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Osint tool that finds exposed files on domains · hn · 2026-07-05 · 58 upvotes · similarity 0.35
- KeyLeak Detector · hn · 2025-11-01 · 30 upvotes · similarity 0.35
- Curated list of 1000 open source alternatives to proprietary software · hn · 2026-02-08 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- Sprime · hn · 2026-02-23 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.34
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a vertical saas tool for Insurance yet.