Idea Miner

Idea Miner is a research tool that finds software ideas with money behind them by mining public freelance job postings. Instead of counting how often a feature gets mentioned on forums, it collects outsourcing tasks that come with a posted budget, groups them into features, and ranks the results by a potential score that weighs demand, growth and what people are actually offering to pay. The trend board is public. Deeper briefs and idea validations cost tokens.

The problem it solves is the gap between chatter and demand. Plenty of tools scrape Reddit or Hacker News to tell you what people complain about, and mention counts reward whatever is loud rather than whatever is funded. A freelance posting is different. Someone has already decided the problem is worth paying to solve, written it down, and attached a number. Idea Miner treats those postings as a demand signal and the budget as the price tag, and the founder's own summary of the idea is that they stopped ranking ideas by how often they're mentioned.

The board shows the aggregated picture. At the time of writing it lists more than 20,000 tasks collected in the month, grouped into about 2,800 features, each with a potential score from 0 to 100, a month over month growth figure, and the median posted budget, which ranges from a few dollars to tens of thousands in the examples on the page. The page also totals mentions for the period, 6,350 at the time of writing, so you can see both how many distinct tasks asked for something and how often. Filters narrow the view by time range from a week to a year, by region across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America, by tech stack such as AI and LLM, React or Python, by competitive landscape, blue ocean or red ocean, and by potential band, high at 70 and above, medium from 40 to 69, or unproven below 40.

The paid layer is where the tokens go. A development brief takes one feature and lays out MVP scoping, the steps to verify demand before building, and a breakdown by region, which is the part that turns a ranked row into something you could start on Monday. Watchlists let you follow a handful of features and see whether their growth holds up over the following months, which guards against building on a spike. The evaluate my idea feature runs the same scoring against an idea you describe yourself, so you can check a pet project against the market instead of only browsing what the board surfaces. The pack sizes are framed in validations, at roughly five tokens per validation, which gives a sense of how far a $9 pack goes.

It's for solo developers and indie builders who want evidence before they spend a month on a product. It's also useful for freelancers deciding which skills to sharpen, and for small agencies scanning for a productised service they could sell repeatedly. The site is candid about the limits. Posted budgets aren't verified transactions, and the data currently reflects one freelancing platform's public tasks, so it's a view of outsourcing demand rather than the whole software market. The board is also a useful reality check for anyone who has fallen in love with an idea, since a feature nobody is paying to outsource may still be a fine product, but it's one you'll have to prove demand for another way.

What makes it different is that single design choice, ranking by budget-weighted potential rather than mention frequency, and the fact that it says so plainly. The caveats on the page are unusual for a tool in this space and make the numbers easier to trust for what they are. It's a demand signal, not a guarantee, and the site treats it that way. It's a single-purpose tool, and that focus is easier to trust than a dashboard that claims to measure the whole market. Pairing it with your own customer conversations is the obvious way to use it, and the watchlists make it easy to keep an eye on a niche over months rather than deciding from one snapshot.

Pricing is freemium and token-based. Signing up grants ten tokens with no card, tokens never expire, and during the pre-launch period the grant includes full Pro content. One-time packs are $9 for 65 tokens, about 13 validations, $29 for 300, and $49 for 560, with the Value pack about 30 percent cheaper per token than Starter and the Bulk pack about 36 percent cheaper. Subscriptions are Solo at $9 a month for 60 tokens and Builder at $19 a month for 180, with annual billing and a 17 percent discount described as coming, and a cancelled subscription runs to the end of its period with no retroactive refund. Unused tokens are refundable within seven days, and the trend board and public feature summaries stay free. Support is at support@idea-miner.com, and the team posts as IdeaMinerHQ on X.