Show HN: I made a picturebook app for my nephew where he is in the pictures

1 points by richkuo 7 months ago · 3 comments · 2 min read

Hi HN,

Went to the Luma ai hackathon.

Met a guy who vibe coded a legit app with 0 coding experience - I taught him shortcuts which was quite fun to see him 10x his Cursor productivity.

Anyway, this inspired me to vibe code something, so I made this short story generator for my nephew.

It takes a profile image, gpt-image-1's it into an avatar.

Yes I know what you are thinking, privacy! The profile image part is completely optional - you can upload pretty much any image you'd like, already avatar-ed images work great.

Then you can create stories with the avatar as the main character in all the story images.

Stories teach a lesson and moral, and are age appropriate.

Also threw in some great narration voices since I use Elevenlabs all the time.

Nephew's feedback is overwhelmingly positive, but he is 1.2 years old so...

Hoping to get feedback from folks here as well.

Stats for nerds: Built with: React Native Expo (first time using Expo - props to them for coming so far) Supabase (first time as well - love it) Elevenlabs gpt-image-1 (i tried over 5 different api's for i2i and this one is the best BY FAR)

Made with 80% Cursor, 20% by hand

Bare bones story generator MVP was done in an afternoon, more features added over 1.5 months like i2i, narration, auth, iap, etc.

First 2 stories are free (24 images), and I put 250 bucks into openai, so it should last a few days. Openai image rate limits are kinda low for my tier, so some images might not generate - if this happens, please let me know so I can add mo money to upgrade my tier.

If you encounter any issues or find a bug or have suggestions, please let me know.

Free to download in the app stores, https://www.onceupona.ai

Give a upvote on Product Hunt if you enjoyed: https://www.producthunt.com/products/once-upon-a

Thanks! Rich