daily.dev vs Hacker Pulse
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
daily.dev
Get a personalized feed of developer news, articles, and discussions tailored to your interests. Discover new tools and insights across AI, React, DevOps, and more from thousands of sources.
- Personalized developer feed
- AI-powered content curation
- Community discussions (Squads)
- Bookmarks and reading streaks
- Developer profile
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Your whole dev world, distilled into one personalized feed. daily.dev pulls the best engineering articles, tutorials, and discussions from 2,000+ trusted sources — including the GitHub Blog, Dev.to, freeCodeCamp, and hundreds more — then AI and a community of over a million developers cut it down to what actually matters for your stack. Signal, not noise. The more you read, the sharper it gets. It learns from you, and from what a million other developers find worth reading. :trophy: Product Hunt — Golden Kitty Award winner :star: 18,000+ GitHub stars, fully open source at github.com/dailydotdev WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU OPEN THE APP :one: Your feed is already yours. Technical articles, tutorials, and community discussions from 2,000+ sources, matched to your stack from the start. :two: Caught up in minutes, not hours. AI summarizes the noise away and a million developers upvote the good stuff to the top — so you read what's worth reading and skip the rest. :three: Every article is a conversation. See what other engineers think, add your take, and learn from the comments — the real insight is often there. :four: A calm daily habit. Build a reading streak, unlock achievements, and grow a developer profile over time. Come back because it's useful, not because it nags. :five: Find your people. Join a Squad around React, DevOps, AI, cloud, mobile, open source — or anything you care about. Share links, start discussions, learn together. Public or private. :bulb: WHY IT FEELS DIFFERENT Most tools in this space are glorified RSS readers or pure-algorithm feeds. daily.dev is different because the community is built in. Developers upvote articles, which teaches the system what actually matters — not just what's new, but what's good. Discussions add context you can't get from reading alone. Squads create focused curation around every topic and language. And AI personalizes on top of all of it, matched to your specific stack. Think of it as a feed curated by a senior engineer who shares your exact interests. :hammer_and_wrench: FEATURES (all free) • Personalized reading from 2,000+ sources, powered by AI + community signals • Multiple views: Popular, Upvoted, Discussed, Following • Custom feeds for different interests and stacks • Squads — communities around any topic • Reading streaks, achievements, and leaderboards • DevCard — a shareable developer identity card • Bookmarks with folders • Search across millions of posts • Dark mode and light mode • Syncs seamlessly across all your devices :dart: WHO IT'S FOR • Developers who want what matters without opening 10 sites every morning • Engineers who learn better when they can see what peers think is worth reading • Anyone who wants a daily reading habit that builds over time • Teams that share and discuss technical articles in private Squads :gem: daily.dev Plus Unlock premium features: • Presidential Briefing — a personal agent scans the landscape daily, analyzes 100+ posts, and delivers one concise briefing • Smart Titles — rewrites clickbait headlines so you know what you're actually clicking • Clickbait Shield — detects and replaces misleading titles automatically
Hacker Pulse
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Hacker Pulse is a Hacker News reader built for reading — the article and the discussion, together, beautifully. THE ARTICLE, RE-TYPESET Every story is fetched, parsed and laid out natively — no web view, no reader-mode shortcut, no external service. Set your type size, and with Premium the typeface, line height, margins, spacing and paper colour; images, code blocks, tables, quotes and lists all survive the trip. The discussion continues below the article in the same scroll, and your place in a long read is remembered. BUILT FOR LONG THREADS The whole discussion arrives at once. Fold a subtree, step between conversations with the navigator, pull a deep reply's ancestors into view, open any comment on its own screen, or search inside the thread. Hold a comment to copy, share, translate, block or report. YOURS TO KEEP Read state, saved stories and reading positions live on your device, and a mis-swipe can be undone. With Premium, a saved story is downloaded whole — article and discussion — and stays readable offline until you remove it. TRANSLATE ON DEVICE With Premium, on iOS 26 and later, articles and comments translate entirely on your device. Nothing is sent to a server. The interface itself speaks nine languages — English, 简体中文, 繁體中文, 日本語, 한국어, Français, Deutsch, Русский and العربية — including full right-to-left layout. TWELVE LISTS, A WIDGET, AN iPad LAYOUT Top, New, Best, Ask HN, Show HN and Jobs from the official API, kept on disk so a cold launch is instant; Active, Classic and the front page from any day back to 2007; three score thresholds; and two lists of comments rather than stories. A widget in three Home Screen sizes — four on iPad — and one for the Lock Screen follows the list you choose. On iPad, a real two-column layout — list beside reader. TAKE PART, IF YOU WANT TO Reading needs no account. Sign in with your own Hacker News account and you can also upvote, downvote, reply, submit a story, and edit or delete your own comments — without leaving for a browser. Your password is never saved; only the session, in your keychain, until you sign out. QUIET BY DESIGN Block users, and with Premium mute title keywords or whole sites. No analytics, no tracking, no ads; the one server of ours the app ever talks to hands out reader-engine updates and learns nothing about you. Your reading habits are nobody's business — including ours. FREE TO READ, ONE PURCHASE FOR THE REST Every list, every discussion, search, profiles, your account and the reader itself are free, with no ads and no time limit. One purchase — no subscription — unlocks Premium: your own type and paper, saved stories kept offline, iCloud sync and library import, on-device translation, read aloud, automatic archive lookup, discussion detail, hiding read stories, four more colours with their icons, and keyword and site filters. One purchase covers iPhone, iPad and Mac, and Family Sharing shares it. AN HONEST NOTE Hacker News publishes no API for signing in, voting, replying or submitting, so Hacker Pulse does those the only way the site allows: by posting its own web forms, exactly as a browser does. They work today and could be broken by a redesign tomorrow. Hacker News itself has no downvote for stories, and it allows editing and deleting only for a couple of hours after posting. Hacker Pulse first shipped in 2012. Version 2.0 is a complete rewrite that keeps the original's look — the same rust-and-orange chrome, the same pulse — and the same two-finger flick to switch between light and dark. Hacker Pulse is an independent app, not affiliated with or endorsed by Y Combinator. Story and comment data come from the public Hacker News and Algolia APIs.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is ads: Hacker Pulse at none against daily.dev's shown. On price, in-app purchases, device support and iOS requirement there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. daily.dev sells 14 in-app purchases, starting at $9.99 per month and Hacker Pulse sells 4 one-off in-app purchases. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.
| Parameter | daily.dev | Hacker Pulse |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.3 (40 ratings) — better | — |
| Positive reviews | 68.4% of reviews | — |
| Number of ratings | 40 — better | — |
| Update frequency | Every 10 days | — |
| Ads | Yes | No — better |
| In-app purchases | Yes | Yes |
| Monetization | Free with in-app purchases | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad, Mac — better |
| Requires iOS | 16.6 — better | 17.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 20 MB | 8 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Daily Dev Ltd | S. Smart Rabbit LLC |
Bugs and requests
daily.dev
Reported bugs
2 issues- Buttons not working
- Unable to sign up
Requested features
1 request- Web app option
Hacker Pulse
Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.
In-app purchases
daily.dev
- Monthly$9.991 Month
- Annual Special$59.991 Year
- Annual$89.991 Year
- 100 Cores$1.49
- 300 Cores$4.49
- 600 Cores$8.99
Show 8 moreShow fewer
- 1,200 Cores$17.99
- 2,400 Cores$34.99
- 5,000 Cores$72.99
- 8,000 Cores$114.99
- 12,000 Cores$174.99
- 25,000 Cores$364.99
- 50,000 Cores$549.00
- 100,000 Cores$999.99
Hacker Pulse
- Small Tip$1.99
- Hacker Pulse Premium$4.99
- Tip$4.99
Show 1 moreShow fewer
- Generous Tip$9.99
Questions
Is daily.dev free?
Is Hacker Pulse free?
Do daily.dev or Hacker Pulse have ads?
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