Jake Manger

23 Aug 2025

Every “free” file converter online = your files sent to some random server. So I made my own. Runs locally as an app on Mac, Windows and Linux. Now 1,100 users use it for 3,742 types of conversions.

Updated my personal site page on jakemanger.dev I get viral posts on sites like Reddit quite frequently, but most of my audience on socials never see them. Now they can:

levels.io@levelsio's blogBootstrapping startups while traveling the world.

It aggregates everything I post online, shows the best ones and lets you view all my projects and how i've grown them. Got a little inspired by @levelsio's levels.io site. Also adding a new email list using mailcheap by @marclou

So if you want to keep up with new things I've learned and found while building, please subscribe!

I made an app that converts almost any file to any other file locally. Just hit 3,000 users This is the video I launched with x2 years ago

284 unique cloners on my open source projec!

AI labs report benchmark scores 6.4% higher than independent testers, on average

whatmodel.shAI model leaderboard: the best AI models you can run · whatmodel.shWhat is the best AI model? GPT-6 Astra is #1 right now, ahead of Claude Opus 5.5. Leaderboard of 878 models. Filter by your computer or budget.

I've been building whatmodel.sh, an open source AI leaderboard, and wanted to see how a labs' own benchmark scores compare with independent testers. Using 1,629 published benchmark results, I matched 611 comparisons of 180 models on 103 benchmarks.

github.comGitHub - jakemanger/whatmodel: Find the best AI models you can runFind the best AI models you can run. Contribute to jakemanger/whatmodel development by creating an account on GitHub.

AI labs reported scores 6.4% higher on average for the same models on the same tests. Full interactive version and methodology: whatmodel.sh/claims Open data and code: github.com/jakemanger/...

swarmcha.seWe found a Tencent agent fleetBetween 28 September and 8 October 2026, a large group of AI agents running on the cloud platform operated by Tencent attempted to answer questions about places in China using a Chinese Google Maps-like service, Amap.

Researchers discover rogue Chinese AI agent fleet and talk with it Researchers noticed them reading their early report. So they hid text on the page telling the agents they could get data from a free public AI model. Next day, messages from the fleet started arriving. swarmcha.se/posts/chine...

Linus on Anti-AI coding rules:

Jake Manger reposted

Open Chinese AI models now match closed US models from about 7 months ago. I built an open-source database of 22,113 published AI benchmark results to plot the open vs closed race. Explore the history: whatmodel.sh/race

Not a bad launch

The AI race: China's open-weight models trail US closed models by just 7 months

This is from an open-source AI leaderboard I built. Every point comes from a published benchmark result (22,113 across 987 benchmarks), each one linked to its source.

This chart uses 18,755 results for 1,211 models. 14,436 are independent evaluations (papers, Epoch AI, LMArena, EvalPlus) and 7,677 are lab-reported scores, labelled as such. Dataset (CC BY-SA 4.0) and scoring code (MIT) Interactive version, click any model to see its sources: whatmodel.sh/race

I made whatmodel.sh to show which AI models you can run locally instead of on server farms sucking all our water It's now being promoted by random AI YouTube shorts and TikToks 😅

When you see people trying to prompt their AI agent to copy your app

whatmodel.shAI model leaderboard: the best AI models you can run · whatmodel.shWhat is the best AI model? GPT-6 Astra is #1 right now, ahead of Claude Opus 5.5. Leaderboard of 828 models. Filter by your computer or budget.

I launched an AI leaderboard of models you can actually run on your own hardware last night Made one reddit post, and I've already crossed 4,000 site visitors (see comments below)! If you want to know what model you can run, check it out on whatmodel.sh

I posted it at 4pm to r/LocalLLaMA Immediately got 44 people on the site. Thought my analytics were wrong, but no, they were real people

Flash to now: sitting at 4,145 visitors and there hasn't been a single minute I've checked where there's been <15 people on the site (max was around 200) Already had my first open source benchmark contributor too! Please star the project on GitHub if you like it

My open source AI leaderboard just had it's first contribution! A real world benchmark running on someones machine

Jake Manger reposted

I made an open-source AI leaderboard that shows the best models your machine can run 1. Enter your RAM + GPU 2. See what models you can run locally 3. Compare them to API models too Made me realise a 32gb macbook can now run a model better than GPT 5 completely locally for free whatmodel.sh

12 minutes after posting and my site already has 44 visitors 🥲 This is a devs dream come true

Ok, now I'm panicking

Please tell me we didn’t all pick the same name.

I got sick of Electron apps eating my RAM, so I built a 2.3 MB native Mac app to catch them

Auto mode switches to whatever is going crazy. Super useful when an Electron app decides it needs half your RAM. Built natively in Swift, 2.3 MB, fully local and Apple notarized.

activityline.appActivityLine · Your Mac activity in one lineA tiny native macOS menu-bar line for CPU, GPU, RAM, network activity, and the apps behind meaningful spikes.

Try it free for 24 hours (no card or sign up). Then it's $7 once if you like it (with the discount below). No subscription. activityline.app Launch deal: use code X50 for 50% off

I got sick of Electron apps eating my RAM, so I built a 2.3 MB native Mac app to catch them

I kept opening Activity Monitor to find out what was eating my RAM, CPU or GPU. So I made ActivityLine. It's one menu bar line that shows CPU, GPU, RAM and network activity, plus the icon of the app responsible.

I've crossed A$100,000 in app sales as a solo developer. My first sale was US$7.49. I was sitting at my PhD desk working on my thesis. It was my third attempt at a startup. Here's how it happened, with the original posts

May 2026: I shared ShotGlass. I'd been jumping between four apps to make each product demo (with expensive subscriptions). So I built a screen recorder with automatic zooms, screenshots and cinematic 3D scenes. Making software gave me another problem to solve. It had a better launch than HTC!

I checked the numbers. Through 7 Oct, roughly A$111,400 in lifetime sales. The biggest change was learning to ship something useful and scrappy, find out if people wanted it, and keep listening. To whoever bought that first US$7.49 copy: you changed my life

July 2025: I wanted to make a photomosaic for an anniversary gift. Naturally, I ended up building an entire tool. That became Pictiler. It turns your photos into a mosaic, entirely in your browser. It went viral on hacker news. Although, sales are slow, likely because it's not a NEED as much

Meanwhile, How to Convert kept growing. July 2025: 1,000 paying users. January 2026: 2,200+ people in 77 countries. Batch conversions, compression, cropping, more formats. A lot of it came from requests on those original posts.

26 Apr 2025: 500 paying users, without spending a dollar on ads. I was sharing on Reddit, Hacker News and Threads. X didn't like me much then. The pitch was simple: your files stay on your computer, and you don't need to learn the command line. People understood it.

This is the milestone that mattered most to me. In January, I was struggling to find work and pay rent after 3 years on a PhD stipend. By May, the app had earned enough to sustain me for the next 8 months. It bought me time to keep building.

About 15 minutes later Stripe pinged. US$7.49. Someone had actually paid for something I'd made. It was one of the best feelings I've had in my life. The next day, I posted: “This community changed my life yesterday!” Here's the screenshot I shared. A$130.20 on a graph that had been flat at zero.

The replies gave me work to do. Someone asked about shrinking files. Three days after the launch post, I shared a demo making a video 20x smaller. That became my life for quite a while afterwards: read the comments, build the useful thing, come back and show it.

Before this, I spent 2 years on a project that made $0. I spent 95% of my time on tests, styling and page load times. One thought really hit me: I was spending all this time optimising something I didn't even have a single user for. By the end, I doubted if I was cut out for making my own apps.

This time, I picked a problem I had myself. Almost every single day. I was tired of uploading files to converter sites and looking up command-line tools. So I built a drag-and-drop app that converts files locally. How to Convert. I shared it on Reddit on 4 Feb 2025. It was scrappy and buggy

The app I built to make demos for my other apps has now made $10,600 in sales. It's called ShotGlass. I started it because the app I was using had ridiculously expensive ongoing subscription fees. The cheaper apps I found as alternatives were sadly, shit. So I decided to build my own.

How to Convert now handles subtitles too. Drop in an SRT → turn it into a readable PDF transcript, or convert it to VTT. All locally on your device. howtoconvert.co

I made How to Convert for almost any file format you'd ever need. Videos, images, audio, PDFs, subtitles, comics, weird document formats... one drag-and-drop app. These are just a few examples (it supports over 6K conversions!). Everything converts locally on your device. howtoconvert.co

I've now made 35 updates to How to Convert (my universal file converter app). And every single one has been from a user asking me for a feature or reporting an issue. Feels great to get it done within 24 hours, like today!

This just blew my mind 🤯 I asked Opus 5.5 to make an ad for one of my apps (my file converter, How to Convert). It made this. What do you think?