Skip to content

Compliance baseline generator for small public projects

Answer a dozen questions about what your project does and get the actual privacy policy, cookie handling and terms it needs — scoped to a side project, not an enterprise.

Legal Techweeks build~6 weeks to MVPPromising
57
Opportunity score
1 signals · 1 source
Hacker News

The problem

Anyone publishing anything publicly now inherits privacy, cookie, terms and accessibility obligations. The available guidance is written for funded companies with counsel, and the available generators produce boilerplate that does not reflect what the project actually does. Developers copy policies from other sites and hope, which is exactly the outcome the rules were meant to prevent.

The solution

A short, honest questionnaire — what do you collect, where are your users, what third parties do you load — that outputs a policy set matched to those answers, with a plain-English explanation of why each clause is there and what would change it. Regenerates when the project changes.

Who it's for

Indie developers and small studios shipping public side projects, plus the agencies that build them for clients.

Why now

Obligations that once applied only to large sites now attach to almost anything public, while the cost of getting real advice has not fallen.

Why this wins

Existing generators produce boilerplate detached from what the project does. Tying output to the actual data flows, and explaining the reasoning, is the difference between a document and a defence.

Scoring

How this score was built

A weighted composite of seven dimensions. Evidence strength is measured from the corpus, not judged by a model.

Pain severity
5/10×0.18
Competition gap
6/10×0.18
Market size
6/10×0.15
Monetization clarity
6/10×0.14
Build feasibility
8/10×0.13
Evidence strength
2/10×0.12
Distribution ease
7/10×0.10

Developers publishing small public projects cannot tell which privacy, cookie, terms and accessibility obligations apply to them, and the available answers are written for funded companies.

Execution

Build plan

From zero to a first paying customer.

  1. 1

    Cover one jurisdiction properly

    Depth beats breadth, and accuracy is the entire value proposition.

  2. 2

    Have a lawyer review the templates

    Non-negotiable given what is being sold.

  3. 3

    Explain every clause

    The explanation is what separates this from the free generators developers already ignore.

Landscape

Who already competes — and where they leave a gap

Knowing who competes matters less than knowing where their own users say they fall short.

ProductGap it leaves open
TermlySubscription-priced and aimed at businesses; output is boilerplate rather than derived from actual data flows.
Free policy generatorsProduce generic text with no explanation, which is what developers already distrust.

Receipts

The evidence behind this opportunity

Developers publishing small public projects cannot tell which privacy, cookie, terms and accessibility obligations apply to them, and the available answers are written for funded companies.

  • Hacker Newsindie developer shipping a public side projectsource ↗

    Developers shipping small public projects have no clear baseline for which legal and compliance obligations apply.

    What's your starter kit for satisfying legal/compliance obligations that are now incumbent on basically anything available to the public?

    Workaround today: Copying policies from other sites and hoping they apply