It all began in the first week of August. I hadn't been doing much in June and July—mostly just working on random projects without real direction. One day, my dad approached me and asked why I wasn't building anything new like I used to, why I wasn't putting my skills to use.

So I hopped on X to see what everyone was working on, hoping to find inspiration. That’s when I came across a post by the Perplexity AI CEO — Aravind Srinivas boasting about their Pro search feature.

I checked out their site and realized they only allowed five Pro searches before the limit reset the next day. To unlock better limits, they were charging $20/month, which felt absurd to me. The design might look classy, but the restrictions, sidebar, and cluttered search results made it feel overwhelming—definitely not what most people want.

That’s when it hit me: I should build something like this, but let everyone use it without limits—something cleaner, simpler, more minimalistic!

And so began the journey of building MiniPerplx, a minimalistic and open-source AI-powered search engine.

Today, MiniPerplx gets 1k+ daily visitors and has over 1k stars on GitHub.

Try it out here → https://mplx.run/search
GitHub → https://git.new/mplx
Sponsor me on GitHub → https://github.com/sponsors/zaidmukaddam

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That’s the story of why I built MiniPerplx. If you want to know more about me or MiniPerplx, let’s connect on X (@zaidmukaddam).