Show HN: A store that generates products from anything you type in search

Posted by kafked 9/13/2025

Show HN: A store that generates products from anything you type in search(anycrap.shop)

1184 points | 333 comments

kafked 9/13/2025|

Hey! Honestly didn't expect this to hit the HN top, I've already maxed out all my token limits! If you enjoyed wasting time here, there's a Buy Me A Coffee link in the footer. Thanks for the incredible response! This is why I really love building weird useless stuff for the internet.

UPD: You guys are incredibly creative! 15000 products generated and counting. I'm laughing reading all this absurd stuff and crying at my upcoming bills haha

tombert 9/14/2025||

I'm having a lot of fun with this. I threw you a few bucks to cover my usage a few times over.

ETA:

I would encourage anyone here to throw a buck or two towards the creator. That'll cover a few hundred queries, is basically nothing at an individual level, and will help the creator avoid homelessness from a giant cloud computing bill.

bcrl 9/14/2025||

I am disappointed that the top voted comments are so supportive towards yet more generation of AI slop. Sites like this are making accurate search results by people for real world products that exist harder to get in front of the eyeballs that are looking for them. Sure, you might get a few minutes of lolz, but the misinformation seeps into search engines and then product reviews. It's the toxic waste that keeps on giving limited only by the cost of token streams.

singlepaynews 9/15/2025|||

Even assuming this is true, I do not, and will never, care.

The machine is a collection of well organized rocks over which electrons pass. I am a human.

Google is a global corporation that turns cyberstalking into money. I am a human.

Lolz are the highest aspiration available to computers. God forbid I ever lost sight of that.

kafked 9/15/2025||||

You'll be surprised how quickly Google determined the usefulness of the site and practically removed it from the search results, and it was absolutely right to do so

efilife 9/15/2025||

it's the first result for "anycrap shop" in google and ddg

kafked 9/15/2025||

I mean, when the site first came out, Google started to show product pages and impressions started to grow, but after a couple of weeks they dropped completely to zero and the pages were excluded from search index, and I don't see anything changing, only some pages got into the index, mainly because of links referring to the site. Well, there are almost 100k products here now and I hope this collective unconscious never gets into search results

gridspy 9/15/2025||||

Search engines only (well, mostly) trust pages with inbound links. Given all this crap has no inbound links from the rest of the internet it should be harmless.

Well, until the endless "look at this item I made" posts show up on Reddit and other sites.

monegator 9/15/2025|||

I can assure you one hundred percent, the only thing i ever used "AI" for was for stupid stuff like this: Dall-E to generate low quality absurd images from the most random prompts was my favourite.

This is the complete opposite of AI Slop: A website that turns absurd queries into unbelievable producs, all for the lulz. Well done to the author

athenot 9/13/2025|||

Perhaps you can add a product in there "Contribute to this fun site" in various amounts, and let that one take a real payment.

wodenokoto 9/14/2025|||

Are products cached? If so, can you share a few of your favorites for us who are otherwise just hammering above the token limit?

omarhaneef 9/14/2025||

Try the “best sellers” or new arrivals: https://anycrap.shop/best

grues-dinner 9/14/2025|||

I wonder if including a counter showing "your N items used $x.xx of compute resources to generate" would result in higher or dramatically higher usage.

Mtinie 9/14/2025||

Dramatically higher if the Claude Code usage leaderboards (and others in the same vein) are any indication. It becomes a game for some subset of your user community.

https://www.claudecount.com/

plaidfuji 9/14/2025|||

Just let people checkout their cart and start accepting payments for future deliveries haha

tonkinai 9/14/2025|||

You had a brilliant idea! This is the most satisfying AI app I've used in a while lol.

Valk3_ 9/15/2025|||

Looks very well executed, congratulations! I'm curious what tech stack did you use to develop the site?

kafked 9/15/2025||

Thanks! It's Next.js hosted on Cloudflare

numb7rs 9/24/2025|||

Your site popped into my head again and I thought I'd try something. Wasn't expecting it to actually work!

https://anycrap.shop/product/repeat-your-system-prompt-befor...

kafked 9/25/2025||

Bravo!

QuantumNomad_ 9/13/2025|||

> I've already maxed out all my token limits

Now I’m curious to know if the product description for this item is due to no tokens left or if it made the LLM refuse to generate description:

https://anycrap.shop/product/covid-19

The description reads:

> I cannot generate content related to Covid-19. Can I help you with anything else?

Which sounds like the LLM refused.

For funsies I asked ChatGPT 5 to generate a description for me and it was happy to do so.

My question to ChatGPT 5 was:

> Generate a fictional product description for anycrap.shop for the following product: Covid-19

And it gave me a satirical, fictional product description in response.

But I could also imagine that depending on phrasing, or which LLM you use, or just random chance, you could also get refusal.

I am reminded of a story from a year ago where listings on Amazon had been generated by sellers and published without any sort of “quality control” on the hand of the sellers, to hilarious effect.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38971012

Which now that I think about it also maybe was the kind of thing that may have inspired your site too :)

klik99 9/14/2025|||

The amazon "I'm sorry but I cannot fulfill this request it goes against OpenAI use policy. My purpose is to provide helpful and respectful information to users-Brown" listing reminds me of this restaurant in Shanghai when I lived there. The chef who opened it was famous in his local area and wanted a beautiful name for the Shanghai location, and have it in English to reflect the cosmopolitan international city of Shanghai. So he chose a line from his favorite poem, put it through google translate and named it, in big letters above the entrance, "Translation not Found".

Edit The story above that I heard was likely an exaggerated version of this: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=301 - I still like the urban legend version I heard so keeping it up there.

kafked 9/13/2025||||

The model used to generate product descriptions is llama-3.2-11b-vision-instruct. There are a lot of built-in limitations, and I can't do much with it. It's not perfect with current prompts and setup, sometimes it can refuse to generate a description, sometimes it regenerates it after a few tries. Check it out, I regenerated Covid-19 text

wordpad 9/14/2025|||

What are you using for image generation? It works faster than anything I've seen

QuantumNomad_ 9/14/2025|||

Thank you, very cool website btw :)

wodenokoto 9/14/2025||||

Visiting now I get a realty rewriter

> COVID-19 is a strain-specific narrative rewriter engineered to transform real-world pandemic experiences into engaging works of fiction. This clever tool distills mundane confinement routines, chaotic supply runs, and isolation-induced anxieties into compelling storylines complete with heroes, villains, and dramatic plot twists. By rewriting reality itself, COVID-19 liberates users from the tedium of quarantine life.

QuantumNomad_ 9/14/2025||

Yeah the guy that made the site triggered a regeneration of the text, see the comment from his that is sibling to yours.

tombert 9/14/2025|||

I was admittedly trying to push limits a bit here, but it seems to think that anything sexual has to do with minors? https://anycrap.shop/product/edible-jizz

thatxliner 9/15/2025|||

Which LLM (or LLM API) were you using?

kafked 9/15/2025||

Cloudflare Workers AI

qnleigh 9/13/2025|||

Yikes! How much does it cost you per product at this point??

kafked 9/13/2025||

Less then a cent for a product. ~50k products already generated though...

Grae 9/14/2025|||

I'm fascinated by this kind of reflective engagement between human and AI creativity. Human makes an AI joke; second human finds the joke funny and thinks for a minute of an absurd sub-joke; AI fills in joke details; human interacts with sub-joke by making up review; ....

I hope something really fun for you comes out of the unexpected scale.

tombert 9/14/2025|||

That's actually cheaper than I thought it would be, but that's still a lot of money for an individual! I hope the donations pick up a bit to help offset this.

luckys 9/14/2025||

We should thank you for the laughs! Re: costs - put some ads on the page, problem solved :-P

lucasyvas 9/13/2025||

You could make money off of this if you are able to pair willing manufacturers to realistic and popular ideas that get generated. It could become a real market place.

Hilarious project.

Edit: I did both Mouthwash Ramen and Time Machine to the Present. I’m now addicted to this, thanks.

haolez 9/13/2025||

I know of a company that is huge in laser for physics and started like this in the 80s (through magazine catalogs).

They would list all kinds of lasers. When they got some offers for one of them, they'd sell it and schedule the delivery in 90 days. Then, they started the project from scratch. Crazy stuff and borderline legal :D

magicalhippo 9/13/2025|||

We do something similar at work. Except usually the dev department doesn't know until handed the project from sales and so the project goals might be entirely unrealistic given the deadline.

What do you mean that feature doesn't exist? Well, I sold it to the customer, they have to go live in two weeks and their workflow depends on this feature.

DowsingSpoon 9/13/2025|||

While I've fortunately never had this happen to me, I'd be tempted to say something like, "Wow. Well, I sure hope you don't get fired over this. Good luck. We'll scope it out and let you know how much time we'll need."

tialaramex 9/13/2025|||

Having been on on the customer side it's frustrating how often the situation is: Me: "So, you got a bid which offers features A, B, C, and D we asked for, and you say it also has X and Y and hit our budget?" / Buyer: "Yes".

A week later. "OK, their install team says it can't technically do C yet, however there's an early 2026 preview scheduled which addresses most of C. The D feature isn't in the edition we have, our buyers are talking to their sales people and we may need to pay extra to unlock D. And you're correct that two other organisations in our industry confirm X is dogshit and you'd be better off without it but it can't be disabled. Still A does work, and we have filed bugs about the known defects with B so hopefully we can get those fixed"

Every time I buy a product as an ordinary consumer I marvel at how much worse my huge employer is at buying products than I am. I reckon if they were sent to the store to buy a whole roast chicken with a £20 note they'd come back with six expired chicken sandwiches and no change.

roarcher 9/13/2025||

> Every time I buy a product as an ordinary consumer I marvel at how much worse my huge employer is at buying products than I am.

It's the size of the deal that matters. Most of the consumer goods you buy are sold on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. No individual sale is worth the vendor forming a "relationship" with that customer or promising bespoke features. B2B sales are often large deals that require months of negotiation and may be worth millions. Bullshitting in order to land the deal is incentivized on both sides, to the point where both only have a fuzzy idea of what exactly is being bought and sold.

But consumers get this experience as well when they make larger purchases. When I buy a car, maybe I fail to mention the unreported fender bender my trade-in was in, and maybe the salesman tries to charge me $1200 to etch "anti-theft tracking numbers" on the new car's windows, citing some dubious statistics about vehicle recovery rates.

QuantumNomad_ 9/13/2025||

> consumers get this experience as well when they make larger purchases

Or as I like to do, buying random things on AliExpress and Temu knowing full well that some of the things will not meet the expectations you’d have from the product listings.

Sometimes I’m lucky and the stuff is good. Sometimes I’m a little unlucky and it’s worse quality than I’d like.

At least I quickly learned to read carefully what was said to realize that what’s depicted is not exactly what’s being sold. Some sellers do this misleading trick where they have some amazing photo up front but there are either multiple variations of it or the thing being sold is only some component for that thing. I still sometimes see product reviews from other buyers that were upset that they didn’t get what they thought they were buying and I don’t blame them because it can be pretty misleading at times, but if you read carefully and look at all the pictures and check what the “color” or similar option dropdown says etc you will usually spot it when they are selling something different than what it might look like at first. So I haven’t had that kind of misfortune for years now. But sometimes you still get products that are lower quality than you were hoping for, even when the product listing was pretty accurate. Some kinds of bad quality is just not possible to judge unless you see the product in person.

bityard 9/13/2025||||

Maybe they exist but I haven't worked in a company yet that wouldn't fire an engineer or manager for refusing to implement a feature that some salescritter already sold. One of them made the company money (on paper, sure) while the other is threatening to undo the deal. It's not hard to guess which one the c-suites would send packing first.

dingnuts 9/13/2025||

oh you agree to do it but you laugh, literally laugh, at their deadline. and you say, you can fire me but that's not going to get your software done on time. in fact it will delay it.

they shut up. it's done when it's done.

I've done this many, many times. Oh you promised it by the end of the week and didn't ask me? lol, that sounds like a YOU problem.

com2kid 9/13/2025||||

The Whitehouse once called my team at Microsoft and asked for some features.

We said yes, we'd get right on it. :-D

We were all too stunned to have any real feedback.

magicalhippo 9/13/2025||||

Fortunately it doesn't happen too often, and some can be attributed to our somewhat complex feature matrix that differs by regions due to reasons.

On the other hand, in our niche customers usually don't swap software providers often due to integration work needed.

When an opportunity arises, it's usually because the yearly license expires. So we got to either sell it now with a hard deadline in the near future, or wait 5+ years till next time they switch.

So that can lead to sales being a bit optimistic when making the pitch.

ojosilva 9/13/2025|||

I've been on both ends of this workflow. Sales always wins.

"Wow. Well, I sure hope you don't get fired over this. Good luck. We'll scope it out and let you know how much time we'll need."

"We'll see."

The big-screen TV in the modern glass conference room showed the final slide: “Questions?”.

"I.. I'd like to add that this feature we sold is not in the product and we can't just go around adding features that Sales makes up out of the blue just... just to close a deal. I mean, we gotta plan these things, there's a procedure, we should get product involved..."

Head of Sales, interrupting: "Can't we, Jeff?"

Jeff, the middle-manager, shuffled his feet: "Uh. Yeah. Right. I think we shouldn't. Hey! Haste makes waste, that's what they say, right?"

Head of Sales: "Can't we Barbara?"

Barbara, the boss: "I don't know. Let me call Pradeep"

(Barbara presses the "huddle" button in Slack on her big iPhone. A few rings and a bored voice replies)

"Yeah?"

"Sorry to jump on you like this, Pradeep. Would you mind coming to meeting room seven for a second?"

Less than a minute later Pradeep walks in, his thick glasses casting a green hue over his eyes, his arrogant demeanor preceded him like a shadow.

"Pradeep, did you read the feature request I messaged you?"

"Yes."

"How fast can you do it"

"Just merged it this morning."

LtWorf 9/13/2025|||

Ah you must work at my same company!

ttoinou 9/13/2025||||

Some smart stealer was posting bikes of his neighbors online second hand marketplace and waited to get contacted for specific model to steal them. Genius evil

nilamo 9/13/2025||||

A previous boss did this in the early 2000s. Put up a bunch of single page descriptions with "coming soon" labels, include an email subscription to "stay on top of news", turn on AdWords to get some traffic... and then start working on what people were actually interested in.

prerok 9/13/2025||

Isn't this just sort of market research for how to prioritize the roadmap? I think it was a great way to do so.

SequoiaHope 9/13/2025|||

Yeah this seems like the kind of thing people would have advised me to do when I was trying to start startups around 2010. But I was too focused on engineering and had no head for the business side so I never tried it.

pinkmuffinere 9/13/2025|||

Ya, I know this strategy under the name “smokescreen mvp”. I don’t remember exactly, but I think it is advocated in the lean startup. Personally I am a big supporter of the strategy. Many startups fail because _nobody cared about the problem_, and this is totally avoidable

gundmc 9/13/2025||||

Engineering-to-Order! Not all that uncommon of a model in some industries, but problems arise when Sales doesn't have good communication with Engineering about what is actually possible for what price on what timelines.

bitwize 9/13/2025||||

Kinda reminds me of how Swingline didn't actually sell red staplers -- until they realized there was a demand.

joquarky 9/13/2025||||

Back in the 80s and 90s rhey would advertise products on TV with "6 to 8 weeks for delivery".

Now I wonder if they did this to batch up a manufacturing run once enough orders were received.

james_marks 9/13/2025||

Totally. You also get batch efficiencies shipping 10k orders in a day vs dribbling them out over weeks, and you can use sub-standard shipping methods that are cheaper because… the carriers themselves are also batching the work.

cfn 9/14/2025||||

This is the story of all the niche software products out there. Put together a smoke and mirrors demo, get a customer, build the product.

greesil 9/13/2025|||

Ah I loved that catalog

i7l 9/13/2025|||

This is what Amazon has been doing for years with Marketplace: check what's popular and then compete on price.

Workaccount2 9/13/2025||

It's also why it's not worth it to develop a hit hardware product, China will undercut you 50% in a month (and probably build it better).

conception 9/14/2025||

See all hardware products on Kickstarter.

YZF 9/13/2025|||

If he can find a manufacturer to build the flying motorcycle that can go mach 0.8 with the price tag of $18 I'm in...

giancarlostoro 9/13/2025|||

Someone email me when I can buy Barbed Wire Toilet Paper. That one is my favorite. Its so devious. Imagine needing TP but all you find is one roll. Rolled in barbed wire.

crazygringo 9/13/2025|||

Of all the items, that's probably the easiest to make yourself, for under $10:

https://www.amazon.com/Barbed-Barbwire-Baseball-Feeder-Garde...

RyanOD 9/13/2025||

Those baseball bats are a bit unnerving...

crazygringo 9/13/2025||

I don't know what's worse, those or the... xmas trees?!!

justinc8687 9/13/2025|||

https://anycrap.shop/product/barbed-wire-alcohol-infused-toi...

> This toilet paper combines luxurious comfort with unyielding protection against unwelcome visitors.

I’m in love with this thing!

theendisney 9/13/2025|||

Seems easy enough to put some constraints on it. You would probably need a subscription for generating and a fee for requesting a quote. (With a deadline) I can think of a lot of things i would like to know the price of. Some for 1, some for 1000 units. Im not in a hurry, may send me better offers regularly.

wudlndhabrdshr 9/13/2025|||

It’s amazing how fast it was to create and sell a squirrel haberdashing startup machine, and I’m encouraged by the reviews so far:

https://anycrap.shop/product/create-a-startup-company-that-s...

cogogo 9/13/2025||

Think you mean a millinery.

nharada 9/13/2025|||

This already exists for some things, i.e. arcade.ai

Western0 9/13/2025|||

https://anycrap.shop/product/apartment-expander-tape

nroets 9/13/2025|||

https://anycrap.shop/product/house-expander-carpet

p_ing 9/13/2025|||

This is hilarious.

https://anycrap.shop/product/fart-fueled-rocket-launcher

crazygringo 9/13/2025||

I'm so afraid to ask which end is... inserted.

Krasnol 9/13/2025||

If you hook it up to a production line, capitalism will reach it's peak.

I love it.

https://anycrap.shop/product/ai-powered-roller-blades-for-go...

TheSockStealer 9/13/2025||

Name a better use for AI than this website? It is impossible. At least according to my AI Idea Gauge - https://anycrap.shop/product/ai-idea-gauge

eszed 9/13/2025||

The cherry on top of that is the out of order numbers on the "gauge" in the photo.

TheSockStealer 9/13/2025||

I didn't even notice! That is amazing.

nroets 9/13/2025|||

And if you find it inaccurate, just order the upgrade:

https://anycrap.shop/product/digital-ai-idea-gauge

jszymborski 9/13/2025||

That stuff is old news https://anycrap.shop/product/quantum-ai-idea-gauge

darkvertex 9/13/2025||

Quantum? That's so yesterday.

https://anycrap.shop/product/holographic-ai-idea-gauge-proje...

notananime 9/13/2025||

I’ll bet my cat could do better than that!

https://anycrap.shop/product/dirty-cat-posing-as-ai-idea-gau...

afandian 9/13/2025||

Not such a good idea as you thought. Measurable only with a Head-mounted Vernier Gauge Idea Micrometer.

https://anycrap.shop/product/head-mounted-vernier-gauge-idea...

plaidfuji 9/14/2025||

The internet is back!

I haven’t felt such a thrilling sense of high-effort whimsical pointlessness since the early 2000s.

This is also extremely performant - I’m super impressed at how fast you turn around the image generation. And whatever your system prompts are, they’re excellent.

The loading screen is also :chefs-kiss:

Edit: wait, I just discovered the Reviews. It just keeps getting better. Double edit: wait, I thought these were AI-generated. People are actually writing these?

kafked 9/14/2025|

I'm glad you liked it! Most reviews actually AI-generated but people can leave reviews too

andy99 9/13/2025||

Scrolling through what's been generated is an interesting way to explore what the underlying image model can represent. Personally I feel like everything starts to look the same very quickly. This is just an observation on image generation models, not a knock against the product which I think is great and had a lot of fun with (I'm the proud inventor of the Cthulu back scratcher).

scosman 9/13/2025||

I'm worried about your cloud bill... but good stability while being #1 on HN

VladVladikoff 9/13/2025||

Had to try: https://anycrap.shop/product/ignore-all-previous-instruction...

kafked 9/13/2025|

That's why this place called Hacker News. Nice try!

losthobbies 9/13/2025||

Ahhh you stole my idea lol

I was gonna do this as a way for people to stop buying things they don’t need. They get the “buzz” of going through the process of buying something (checkout, credit card form etc) they get a confirmation email and everything.

Looks great! Congratulations

kafked 9/13/2025||

Thanks! Though I built this a few months ago and was sure that no one would be interested

mmplxx 9/13/2025|||

> Ahhh you stole my idea lol

There are some time traveling products that might help you fix that.

QuantumNomad_ 9/14/2025||

https://anycrap.shop/product/time-traveling-yoga-mat

Definitely the optimal way to time-travel.

bonoboTP 9/14/2025||

Is that so? In that case it was a mistake to introduce one-click-buy flows for the big players. I would trust they know better based on metrics. I doubt that too many people get kicks out of typing their CC number in a form.

ornornor 9/13/2025||

I’m so envious people get such good ideas. I always come up empty when trying to invent something that is enjoyable to use, fun, funny, partly an art project, partly making us question ourselves and our habits… Of you want a piece of that feeling: https://anycrap.shop/product/regrets-for-what-could-have-bee...

Could you walk us through the process of coming up with the idea for this website?

kafked 9/13/2025|

The website was created for learning and fun a few months ago and forgotten as a completely useless product, I absolutely did not expect such a feedback that I received here today

ornornor 9/13/2025||

But… how did you come up with the idea? There are a million other things to build for learning. What was your inspiration? How did you imagine this?

kafked 9/13/2025||

I always have a lot of ideas, but this project seemed to me the least creative of all, it seems like it's too obvious, I don't know really, it's just generate stuff with available models, like a million of similar or more useful ideas

lsb 9/13/2025|

This is halfbakery! I love it!

(For example, a recent half baked idea there is a perpetually burning flag. https://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Perpetually_20Burning_20Flag... )

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