Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

[program247365]

Got a side project? Making money? Please share! $500+/month show and tells welcome, cuz inflation. :)

Previously asked on:

2023 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34482433

2022 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29995152

2021 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095

2020 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167

[FriedPickles]

I got annoyed that my MacBook case would slightly buzz when plugged in, so I worked with a factory to make these grounded Apple adapters: https://www.amazon.com/Grounded-Duckhead-Apple-Mac-Adapter/d...

They've been selling consistently to others annoyed by the problem or who want to ground their MacBook for other reasons.

[kube-system]

> Grounds or "earths" your body whenever you use your computer! Earthing is good for your health.

You're really hitting all of the applicable target markets there. Love it.

[FriedPickles]

Can't say I personally believe that claim, but there are a fair number of people out there who do. One person even sent formal test results showing that the adapter drastically reduces EMFs coming off the case. Not sure what to make of it but I found it interesting.

[kube-system]

The concept of grounding devices is a safety feature, broadly speaking. /shrug

It's a stretch, maybe an oversimplification, but I don't think it's a lie.

[cici1970]

Glad they are selling for you. It's a known issue, so I just went to the Apple store and since my MacBook was brand new, they gave me a three-prong adapter for free.

[blopp99]

Can you share more info about the creation? Did you register a patent? What was the MOQ? Have you sold out? Did you have to comply to any electrical regulation?

Kudos!

[deepsummer]

Wonderful idea! I never considered that a grounded power adapter could solve the buzzing issue. But now that I think about it, that's the reason why I don't get the buzz when my MacBook is connected to my monitor.

[neurostimulant]

You should made this for other plug types as well and sell it in other countries!

[royaltjames]

Amazing! I feel the tinge on my left palm when it's plugged in. Bought.

[gadders]

It looks like you've invented British plugs.

[aetherspawn]

Note grounding your MacBook is likely to result in you constantly zapping your MacBook with static electricity if you wear rubber sole shoes, which is likely to not be good for the MacBook and may randomly damage the electronics. This may be why they did not put a grounding pin the first place.

I usually discharge my static buildup in the office sink.

[kube-system]

The grounding lug exists on the charger body itself because some of Apple's first party plug adapters are grounded.

[FriedPickles]

Exactly. The Apple extension cord is grounded. They likely didn't include a grounding pin on the stock adapter because (1) it'd be really hard to make it fold down and (2) you lose the option of which direction to plug it in (potentially blocking a plug). So it's a design call.

[aetherspawn]

Note only USA adapters are bi-directional like you say.

[tharkun__]

Wrong.

https://www.adapterelaptop.com/images/Apple-61W-USB-C.jpg

[callalex]

Apple supports grounding as a first-party offering by using their extension cables that plug between the wall and the power brick. So this product isn’t doing something untested and unsupported.

[aetherspawn]

I had wondered about this, because my 2013 MBP was grounded (it came with this cable) and it used to zap me constantly. But I did not put 2+2 together.

[homero]

I know it grounds inside the brick but does the connector have a third pin?

[FriedPickles]

The adapter connects the outer metal part of the connector for both USB-C and Magsafe to to ground, thus grounding the metal shell of the MacBook.

[goenning]

During my previous job, when we were migrating to Kubernetes I couldn’t really find a GUI app that I liked, and most importantly, that could connect to multiple clusters simultaneously. We had 6 clusters and having to switch context constantly was annoying

I ended up building one [1] to use myself, shared with a few people and they loved it. I asked if they’d pay for it and to my surprise, a lot of people said yes. I’ve put up a website and a “pre-order” button with a regressive monthly discount. Sales were going up month after month, and a few months later I decided to quit my job to go all in on it.

Today, I’m averaging on ~€5k/mo from this app, but I’m still doing some part time freelancing, as well as building other products that are not as successful, but are making >€1000/mo

The latest one is open source, privacy friendly analytics for apps [2] that I’m still very actively working on. This is my current “side project” as the previous side project became my main job :)

There’s also an open source upvote site [3] that I started 6 years ago, but haven’t had much time to work on it lately, still generating $$ monthly

[1] https://aptakube.com [2] https://aptabase.com [3] https://fider.io

[isaackrasmussen]

Thumbs up for "Not another Electron app"! And multiplatform.

Coming from a very unreliable Lens, I'm looking forward to try out your app. Its already so speedy!!

[goenning]

Awesome! Glad to hear you liked it :)

[silisili]

This is awesome. Not using k8s in my current role, but when I was, that would have made my life a whole lot easier.

[ilamparithi]

Sounds great. How do you handle the licenses for the desktop app? Custom solution or is there a library for it?

[goenning]

It’s a custom solution, zero regrets building it. Gives me total control over how it’s done and didn’t take me that long to implement

[monroewalker]

Looks really well done! What did you build it with?

[goenning]

The app is built with Tauri

[mattfrommars]

Could you please explain how did you make the UI of the application very modern and startup vibe. I am really into UI like that and I have no idea how its built. this is beyond bootstrap UI, is it true?

I geniuely thought after looking at the screenshot, I would need to learn Swift and understand how apps are made in Mac to make an app to look like that.

My background is in Java and C Sharp. Looking at Microsoft UI framework, it does not look at all what you made.

Could you please show a good place to start to make and mock UI like that ? I find your work more interesting since your background appears to be backend/cloud!

[goenning]

It’s all built based on tailwind ui and shadcd ui

[hondanyc]

Hi there! What is https://fider.io/ built on?

[goenning]

It’s Go and React

[whyleyc]

Clicky:

2023 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34482433

2022 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29995152

2021 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095

2020 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167

[matt3210]

You sir.... are a paragon among men.

[rozenmd]

I'm coming up on three years of running OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com) in 3ish weeks.

In short, I wrote about React from my own perspective for a year (despite thousands out there doing the same thing), made money, and got inspired to do the same thing with an uptime monitoring tool (200th alternative to pingdom when I released it).

I turned a tool I used for convincing contracting clients to not cheap out on hosting into a proper product, 2 hours a day at a time, and kept adding features since.

Here's how I got my first 10 customers: https://onlineornot.com/how-to-get-your-first-ten-customers

[mickael-kerjean]

Filestash [1] was born from the infamous top comment of the Dropbox launch [2] as it got me wondered if we could make a Dropbox like UI that is based on this interface:

  type IBackend interface {
    Ls(path string) ([]os.FileInfo, error)
    Cat(path string) (io.ReadCloser, error)
    Mkdir(path string) error
    Rm(path string) error
    Mv(from string, to string) error
    Save(path string, file io.Reader) error
    Touch(path string) error
  }

Once I had it working with FTP, I made it work for every possible file transfer protocol: S3, SFTP, NFS, SMB, WebDAV, Dropbox, Google Drive, ..... As of today it is closer to a full time mac donald employee than 500$ per month with revenue coming from making customisation via plugins for people who need some extras like layering your SAML or OIDC authentication on top of a FTP server or any other storage, custom access / authorisation layer on top your FTP, etc...

[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

[Share6323]

how long did it take you until this point ?

[mickael-kerjean]

I prefer not to calculate but in the range of 20 to 40h a week from 2017 but a big part of that time doesn't go in creating code but talking with people, supporting them, write stuff, improving other bits and bolt.

[cperciva]

FreeBSD on EC2: Last year between my Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/cperciva), private "consulting", and a GitHub Sponsors donation from AWS, I received $20k to support my open source work. It's not a lot compared to my day job (Tarsnap) but money helps to free up time to keep everything working.

[johnwheeler]

Really admire what you’ve built with Tarsnap. Seems like a very durable business with a great reputation

[ninefoxgambit]

I launched https://www.builtatlightspeed.com/ in early 2023.

I’ve been involved in the Jamstack, static site generator, template ecosystem for many years. Built At Lightspeed is a template marketplace focused on ssgs and “modern frameworks”

Sales have been entirely from Affiliate sales, mostly via the Lemon Squeezy affiliate program. Its doing about $400usd/month. I recently launched sponsors and the initial interest has been good.

Tailwind and Nextjs are the most popular categories and best sellers. Tailwind (like Bootstrap before it) has a vibrant commercial template ecosystem. I’m seeing a huge uptick in interest in “full stack” boilerplates that have hefty price tags of $100-$400 and I plan to focus on this area more. No code templates for Framer have also exploded.

The site itself relies on Algolia to drive the faceted search results and filters and overall I’ve been happy with it. It’s a bit expensive and the older release of its react hooks library had a lot of edge cases with nextjs, but it’s been improving.

This year I will continue to refine and curate the results, focusing more on content quality and classification the extending the inventory. I recently bumped it from 4000 results to 20000 as an experiment, and this was just by easing back some of the quality filters.

[Lord_Zero]

Some links 404 like https://www.builtatlightspeed.com/theme/tailus-ui-astrolus-p...

[sarora27]

My cofounder and I launched Kbee (https://kbee.app) in 2021 as a way to turn Google Drive Folders into hosted, searchable wikis. We're doing ~$2k/month and run it as a side project

[adobrawy]

Sounds very cool. I passed it on to a friendly organization.

This organization is in the Google Workspace ecosystem, but Google doesn't have documentation as accessible as Notion. We could try to implement Notion, but this will scatter the data storage and then there is the problem of archiving if the experiment fails. This looks like a plug-in solution to our problem of having Notion-like lightweight documentation and not scattering data.

Do I understand correctly that you charge a fee per organization regardless of the number of seats? This is important for this organization because it is a non-profit association, so there are many members, the board must provide access to information to all members, some members are minimally active, so per seat licenses seem to be often a blocker due to the large loss on inactive members.

[sarora27]

You are correct that we charge a per org fee regardless of number of seats. For non-profits, we offer a 50% discount on the subscription price. All the nonprof needs to do to get the discount is email me at [e-mail]

[pestaa]

https://roadmap.kbee.app doesn't load for now. Will check back later! :)

[sarora27]

Ahh yes, this is down. We are still deciding if we want to bring back the public facing roadmap :)

[alexanderhall]

Is the Google drive thing only a way to import data - or can the data be stored in Drive but edited in your service?

[sarora27]

All data is stored & edited in Drive. Kbee simply renders it in an easy to search/consume manner

[ganarajpr]

Do you have a blog or a write up explaining how you went about doing this ?

[sarora27]

We wrote about our entire journey on IndieHackers. You can find our posts here: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/kbee

[gardenhedge]

Where do you find customers for this?

[sarora27]

We went from nothing to paid users & number 2 product of the day on ProductHunt over a period of three months.

I documented our entire journey here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/our-journey-from-idea-to-p...

[TheCapeGreek]

I came upon KBee 'organically' last year. I came from a Notion org to a Google Doc org and I hate Docs and the siloed nature of it. General Drive search is a mess when you're searching for knowledge and not files. Suggested KBee to bring some of the discovery back in to the org.

[gardenhedge]

What else do you hate?

[hsuduebc2]

I'm curious too.

[lukebouch]

Same here

[sarora27]

Documented our journey here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/our-journey-from-idea-to-p...

[hackerbeat]

Cool tool, but way too expensive.

[Glench]

I made a couple browser extensions that make over $500/month each. The key seems to be naming your extension after high-volume search terms and getting good reviews on the chrome store (and obviously having an extension that works well and solve a common problem on major websites).

I'm extremely biased (see below) so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but I think browser extensions are a pretty neat way to break into indie hacking. They cost nothing to run because they're hosted by extension stores. They're often faster and easier to build than whole apps because you can just use them to fix or modify existing websites rather than create your own from scratch. They can get organic traffic from extension stores, especially if they're well-named.

The main piece that was a pain in the ass for me was adding payments, so I made a service to do it (https://extensionpay.com), and now I can just focus on making the extensions work well. Because of all my previous work I was able to build and submit my last extension (making over $500/month now) to the chrome store in four hours — no joke! It was a really cool moment. Plus, running an extension monetization API I'm able to see all the extension that make real money and learn from what works for them.

[takkatakka]

I built https://bankstatement2csv.com It's a pdf bank statement to csv converter (which seems like an increasingly popular niche for solo devs), making $550/month as of today.

Marketing is challenging, and have only really had some minor success using ppc. Also, I have a fairly high churn rate (like 30%). From talking with users, it's mostly from individuals or small business owners that convert their statements from the year and then are done. Book keepers and CPAs tend to keep their subscriptions, which makes sense.

Tech stack: Java, Javalin, Jooq, PdfBox, JavaScript, React, Tailwind

Hosted on DO

[adobrawy]

Since you are struggling with churn, maybe this solution is not suitable for subscriptions. Instead, it's better to charge a much higher one-time fee for occasional users who have no chance of converting to permanent subscriptions anyway? It enables you to focus on real ones.

Regarding selling it as an API. In Europe, PSD2 is the standard to provide third-party read-only access to banking data. I am using this to make my business bank account accessible to accounting SaaS. PSD2 requires renewal access every 3 months. At the same time, I have a summary of transactions in my e-mail every, so I would rather set forwarding once than keep to renew PSD2 (I set it, it expired and I do it manually).

[alain34]

I am working on a PSD2 / Open Banking solution to aggregate bank statements into a single CSV / webhook response. I think the target audience is business having multiple bank accounts and not only wants to have a CSV version, but also aggregating may be a large number of bank accounts their are using. https://www.bankaccountchecker.com

[program247365]

That's awesome!

I wonder if you could make this an API you could sell to devs/businesses? It's a different customer, but maybe something you could expand into.

Thanks for sharing the details!

[kebsup]

https://gifmemes.io/

Made 240 USD in December. About 9k visitors and 27k page views tracked through plausible. Spent maybe 5 hours working on the codebase in 2023, which makes a solid ((240 * 12) / 10) = 288 USD / hour.

All of the money are from the watermark removal sales (10 USD). A lot of people say I could be making much more with some subscription model, but so far I'm resisting. (And the codebase is a mess :D )

[chocoboaus2]

Personally I think you are making the right call avoiding subscriptions in a side hustle project like this.

Once subscriptions get involved you have to deal with a lot more complexity, churn metrics, refunds (more so than now because of people 'forgetting' to unsub), the stuff around do you pro-rata at subscription cancel or leave it running until date is reached, stripe makes that a little easier but its still a thing.

so yeah, good move imo.

[koolba]

This thing is awesome. I’m going to be using this near daily.

For bandwidth cost reasons I’m guessing you don’t support live linking right?

[kebsup]

I think it would be quite cheap. The only reason is that I was using Gfycat which shut down.

The reason I did not implement my own was that Gfycat was integrated with reddit, so that posting the link would automatically show the gif.

[jasondigitized]

Ok, I'm gonna need you to break down the motion tracking for me. Are you using MediaPipe?

[kebsup]

No external libraries are used. I just greedy search the image from a grid of starting points to find the best match.

The similarity function is a sum of squared differences of the pixel values.

[jmhmd]

I started and run https://pacsbin.com, a radiology teaching file/research platform. I’m a radiologist and started this as a resident while unsatisfied with all existing options. It has been really gratifying to work on a niche problem for which a lot of my colleagues need a solution, and has helped me learn a ton about the tech and standards that underpin my profession.

[shipwright]

That's rad, lack of lock-in and sharing in a niche is a big green flag- Hope adding ultrasound to the list of modalities goes as planned, would gladly lend a hand at no cost if it's high on the priority list!

[domlebo70]

This is great. I run a very very similar platform. How are your prices so cheap? 120$ for 500 studies a year?

[jmhmd]

S3 is really cheap, and from the beginning I spent a lot of time optimizing for simplicity and efficiency, so I don’t have much overhead. Since this is targeted towards residents and academic radiologists, it’s important to me to keep the price as low as possible. What is your platform if you don’t mind sharing?

[JohnCrickett]

I started the Coding Challenges newsletter March 2023 to share the real-world projects I use to learn a new programming language.

It's evolved from then and now has 40+ real-world projects you can build to level up as a software engineer.

You can find the coding challenges here: https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/intro

After many requests I built a few paid courses, which I'm slowly adding to around the day job.

[alexmitelman]

How are the course sells going?

[bunnyhop]

I train LoRAs for diffusion models using collab. I've automated a good portion of it so I only have to deal with the customer saying yay or nay to a commission. The notebook I run takes a shared drive folder of pictures, or if a public figure... runs a crawler that grabs images from instagram and X. Run a face-scoring script that tosses out pictures with no faces, multiple faces, or non-target faces. Run the images through segment anything to annotate caption files. Then start training on cloud resources. It stashes 5 checkpoints and zips them up, and it emails the customer when done.

Best month I've done so far is about 2k, at about 30 USD per commission.

[prz7]

Can you share url? I'm interested in testing it out.

[bunnyhop]

Soz, I don't like to cross link my accounts, especially with all this TSWift shenanigans going around. But, if you look at https://civitai.com/ plenty of people have links to their ko-fi accounts where you can commission them (heck you may even find me somewhere on there).

[thyrox]

Serious question but does anyone get any value out of these threads? Most of the time it just devolves into hundreds of comments with links to random projects hoping to get traffic.

I think to make it more worthwhile people posting here please write a little about your tech stack, why you made it, what are your struggles, and tips for other founders, etc.

[acuozzo]

Around these parts "ideas are cheap" is often repeated, but I've failed to come up with a marketable idea for the past ten or so years.

My hobbies & interests are too niche and the problems I have in life can't be solved by tech, so I have yet to run across an idea I'd be intrinsically-motivated enough to pursue.

With that being said, I'm hoping I'll run into someone else's idea which will help me see through the kind of blindness which prevented rsync users from seeing Dropbox as something worth building, so I find exposure to these "little" ideas useful since reading through threads like these is somewhat like speed-dating for startup ideas.

[callalex]

This is the kind of content I come to HN for. If it makes you feel better, this kind of thread also serves as a lightning rod that contains the self-promoting of projects so you won’t see as many posts of this type.

[taylorfinley]

I love these threads fwiw and will come back to them from time to time to read about what others are doing

[abetusk]

Yes, I get something out of these threads.

I'm relatively technically inclined so the "tech stack" used is not really all that interesting. I don't really care about what React widget was used to create a customizable overlay text on an animated gif meme, I care about how the person found an audience and managed to monetize it.

GitHub, Reddit, "Show HN" or other areas of the internet are much better at highlighting interesting projects. This thread is specifically about monetizing small to mid range projects, so the focus is on how to acquire a meager income stream both in targeting audience and monetization strategies.

The best responses in this thread, in my opinion, are the ones that talk about how they managed to get to $500/month by identifying what problem people would pay money for, how they found customers and the specific type of transaction (purchasing something physical, subscription, one-time removal of watermark, etc.).

[hackan]

Getting traffic, and getting to know the project, is the value produced by this threads.

You may either be a potential client, or an entrepreneur looking towards tips or inspiration on things to do/how to do them.

[a_petrov]

Yes, I love that thread. It helps me with brainstorming on new ideas.

Also, it's pretty nice to share with the small team I'm part of. We're currently working on custom client projects and we'd like to build our product. Seeing how people do it is a nice morale boost, especially for a team that lacks experience in building.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

I do. I don't care about the tech stack, but I'm always curious about what got people started building something. What opportunity did they see and what led them to that point.

[givemeethekeys]

One thing I wish I had when I was in school was learning about all the different things people do to make a living.

Threads like this give us a window into a world of ideas and possibilities.

[rozenmd]

These threads work.

Both as a seller and a buyer, I've found customers and products I wouldn't have found organically.

[deepsummer]

Yes. These are the posts on HN that I enjoy most. Tech stack etc are also somewhat interesting, but not that relevant since for most people is best tech stack is the one they are familiar with.

[jasondigitized]

Absolutely. I love seeing people find success with their creations.

[hsuduebc2]

I do. It is always interesting for me to see what people come with.

[realprimoh]

Yes, these are some of my favorite threads on HN.

[jgillyon]

https://convertcase.net/ - Approx $20k/month. Been going for years and keep on building on it.

[jasondigitized]

I am scratching my head on how you are making $20k/month on this. Are that many people searching for “how to convert my text to uppercase”? and other variations. Can you explain where the majority of your traffic is coming from.

[jgillyon]

Exactly it, over 2 million vists a month, mostly coming from organic searching for text conversion, etc

[pgrenn]

Great inspiration. I like that the website solves a simple problem very well and makes a lot of money doing it.

[aaaronn]

Wow, nice! :) Do you do any marketing for the website?

[jgillyon]

All organic

[freetinker]

Brilliant!

[mr-pink]

how does that make money?

[jgillyon]

Advertising, turn off your ad block :)

[predmijat]

https://sre.rs - DevOps course for small companies and individuals/self-hosters.

I’ve posted this previously, but it’s been more than a year since I published the course and it’s still right about $500/mon.

When I was starting all this, I had higher hopes, but it’s been difficult competing with instructors who already have tens of thousands of students and thousands of reviews - they appear on the first page when you search for a particular subject and “no one” goes past the first page.

[cbluth]

Landing page immediately sucked me in, and I'm curious about more. I looked at your blog and I was disappointed

[predmijat]

Sorry :) That one thing is cool though?

[kLama]

I have a serious question to those making money and I am hoping to learn here. How did you acquire customers? We have a startup going on for 3.5 months but it is incredibly hard to acquire customers. People don't respond to email or LinkedIn. We have not tried SEO and Ads yet.

[thekevan]

Could you link it here? It's hard to say without knowing what we are talking about.

[taylorbuley]

If you're struggling to land your message, your value prop might be off or you might not be communicating it well in your pitch. Take a look at your outbound marketing and focus on the call to action, destination, content and "give a shit factor" ... then test various approaches. If nothing works, it's probably not your message, but the product's value proposition itself.

[Lionga]

If they dont respond it just means they do not really care about what you provide. People will respond if they really need what you provide. Best case you just write to the wrong people, worst case nobody needs your service.

[JohnCrickett]

Build an audience first, then build the product that they want.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

This isn't repeated anywhere often enough!

[brysonreece]

Seems akin to “to be a billionaire, start with a million”. Are there any decent resources out there related to growing a genuine audience? Shitposting on Twitter seems to be a skill I never picked up.

[julianpye]

'ds' is still perfect advice: https://www.paulgraham.com/ds.html

[bdominy]

If you have an audience in mind, try meeting them in person to demo your solution. I've found people are most receptive when they see your passion and resolve.

[shinycode]

Try a service like lemlist But usually it’s not free in time and/or money. Even harder if it does not really solve a pain point

[yhavin]

I made an Excel/Google Sheets course, hosted with smalltime Masterclass non-(competitor) called DAASS: https://learnwithyakir.com/daass. Does over $1k/month, for my commission portion.

No frills, 6.5 hours of digestible videos, 30+ functions/formulas, enough theory to help you learn on your own. Writing complex formulas in Excel was my gateway to proper software development. It's a useful skill even now as a developer, working with data in CSVs, making small tools for quick automation, things like that. (Just don't make a CRM in Excel, lol.)

[alexmitelman]

How do you promote it? How your students learn about you?

[yhavin]

Luckily DAASS does all the promoting, and I also get sign ups by word of mouth

[mikece]

Given the pace of inflation shouldn't we raise the bar to $1000/month side projects? I'm always in search of "I could pay my mortgage with that!" side projects...

[hawski]

At least $500 would pay for my mortgage almost just as well as when I got it.

[mikece]

$500/month doesn't even pay property taxes anymore, sadly.

[Sohcahtoa82]

It would for me! :-D

But only because Oregon has a nice law that makes it so the assessed value for a house for property tax calculation purposes can't rise more than 3% per year. My house is estimated to be worth $550K, but I'm being taxed as if it's only $250K.

Which is nice for a homeowner as you're totally screwed by the rising housing market, but it makes new housing harder to sell since your tax will start where it needs to be, whereas buying an existing home keeps your tax low.

Also causes problems when areas gentrify, but the city isn't collecting enough tax to make improvements that are expected by the residents.

[ijhuygft776]

you must have bought a long time ago

[program247365]

Haha, true story! But you gotta do $500 before you can get to $1k. ;)

Let's say, $500 *or more*. The previous year's submissions definitely had ones that were more. :)

[McLarenF1]

I wouldn't consider this a startup.. but my co-founder and I built a model-based algorithm that uses maritime trade activity to predict inconsistencies in shipping company performance, and we use that information to buy/sell options in those companies. We make some money off of it, and we've sold a few "subscriptions" to our close friends and stuff to kinda help them out financially. It's nowhere near finished but it makes close to 500 a month including our gains (we don't have much money lol).

btw I had to make a new account for some reason so this is technically my first post but i've been using HN for a while now.

[legionlegion]

How can I get in touch with you? [e-mail] is my email

[wahnfrieden]

Over $500/mo but not entirely a livable income yet

Manabi Reader, iOS/macOS app for learning Japanese by reading. Tracks the words you read on the web and shows you what % of an article you're already familiar with (vocab or kanji). Tracks your JLPT level progress. Has Anki integration or its own companion flashcards app.

https://reader.manabi.io

[zurtri]

I have coded a tool to help record everything about your horses.

I have coded it to be as flexible as possible, so it works for all breeds and all disciplines.

I have collaborations with Racing Associations within Australia to provide the software to new owners of retired racehorses.

I am trying to expand to the USA via Texas and to the UK this year.

https://horserecords.info

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Been living with horses for almost 20 years and I had no idea what an Agistment was (we call it "boarding" in the US).

I took a quick look. Did not see medication records or required tests (Coggin's etc.), but that may be different from country to country.

[zurtri]

You can record Medication as an Medication event type or a Veterinary event type.

For required tests - you can create a custom Event Type called 'Coggins' and record that. Or there is a genetic test result section under the horse that you can record info.

You can also upload document for the tests you are taking.

There is also a Medication Task List feature. If you have a lot of horses that need meds - this allows you to check them off each day as they are done.

I developed this feature earlier this month but haven't publicised it yet as it is still being tested by the user who requested it.

Happy to have a chat - particularly about what USA users are looking for - just email me via === support at horserecords.info ====

Cheers!

[jondwillis]

But I have no horses :(

[zurtri]

We have some for sale. :)

[jbird11]

I've been living in Montreal now for the last couple of years and have struggled to find people to practice speaking French with, so I created a web app to talk with an AI to improve my conversational skills [1]. I launched a few months ago and am seeing a little bit under $500/month in revenue so far.

I initially started by offering the service for free, but it eventually became too expensive to handle by myself. I then decided to switch to a paid and free tier and by that point I had amassed enough of a user base that a decent handful signed up to the paid tier. I optimized for user growth > revenue in the beginning because I kept thinking, "if people are not going to use this for free then they surely are not going to pay for it".

Anyhow, it's called Proseable and it also supports English, Italian, German, and Spanish!

[1] https://www.proseable.com/

[adobrawy]

I am unable to use Google SSO:

> proseable.com has not completed the Google verification process. The app is currently being tested, and can only be accessed by developer-approved testers. If you think you should have access, contact the developer. If you are a developer of proseable.com, see error details. Error 403: access_denied

[jbird11]

Oh that's odd... are you accessing the web app through a regular browser like chrome, safari, mozilla, etc. ? I know the Google SSO does not work if you access the web app through something like Facebook's built in browser.

[adobrawy]

It was just Chrome on MacBook

[nikitaga]

My quite niche open source project broke this threshold last year, via Github sponsorships. Of course, I put a lot of time into it, so it's not "passive income" or even "market rate income", but still, without these sponsorships I wouldn't be able to work on it so much.

The project is Laminar, a UI library for Scala.js https://laminar.dev Yes, you can run Scala on the frontend. The language is nice, the implementation is rock solid, the community is relatively small, yet lively. On Scala.js, Laminar is more popular than even React.js, and is used in SaaS apps, financial services, hospitals, etc.

I opened Github sponsorships three years ago, but overall since the library's inception it took me 7 years of continued work to get to this point.

[PinkPigeon]

I run https://pinkpigeon.co.uk

Just about at $500 per month in recurring hosting fees.

It's a CMS which publishes static sites to Cloudflare workers sites.

I've not done any marketing, it's all word of mouth and took 3 years to get to this point.

Gonna keep growing it slowly on the side.

[Swalden123]

I built https://www.CheckYourList.app originally for myself for spontanous checklists that I go through regularly. Happy to say it just passed $500 a month recently :)

[program247365]

Nice!!

I've been thinking about doing an iOS app for awhile now.

Does this have a backend of some kind? What's your tech stack? All SwiftUI, or Expo/React Native?

[Swalden123]

All SwiftUI, it is built within Apple's iCloud ecosystem using core data. It's a great way to get an app up and running with sync very quickly, but then you are stuck on Apple's platform.

[mateuszbuda]

A web scraping API: https://scrapingfish.com/

[pjot]

I’m curious who your customers are; being tech savvy enough to use an api, but not enough to scrape the web confuses me. Mind explaining how you make money?

[fullspectrumdev]

They seem to handle all the more annoying parts of web scraping: bypassing anti scraping things such as rate limits and captchas.

[nomel]

Being tech savvy, there's no way I'm implementing that for $0.002 per request. $150 gets you 75k scrapes.

[kube-system]

And if you're not doing it yourself, $150 does not get you very much labor.

[sneakysunny]

I couldn't find a good way to visualise road trips, so decided to build this: https://www.myholidaymap.com/

It's fully automated, all traffic is organic. Sales are quite consistent, normally peaking during holiday periods.

[mamcx]

I have a niche in "make orders/invoices" for on-the-road sales in my country. The major selling point is that I synchronize the data ASAP from dozens of local ERPs/Accounting packages.

A business partner is the one that sells it, but now I am looking to do direct sales:

(The site is in Spanish, and the app is already localized in English but not yet an international customer):

https://www.bestsellerapp.net

Now I am turning it into a more fully-featured app with integrated eCommerce (still incomplete!) and an offline native iOS/Android app for order taking.

[klaaz0r]

I'm building a Zillow for Europe (https://homestra.com) which is focused primarily on expats and remote workers. Growth is steady and revenue slowly going up (sales cycles on this are brutal).

My other side project (https://webtastic.ai) has become my main work now since it has grown quickly since the last time I posted on HN

[tsingy]

Are you building this alone or with a team? Kind of impressive if alone.

[klaaz0r]

Both are with a co-founder, I would not be able to run it alone at this stage, most of my time is spent on development

[aaaronn]

How do you generate traffic for it?

[beatthatflight]

Beat That Flight - https://beatthatflight.com.au/ - been my side hustle for nearly 6 years now. White labeled flight & hotel search engine, and I share deals for Aussies (and now Kiwis as well) via FB/email subscription. Not huge income but it means the wife doesn't need to go back to work yet after having kids :)

[CipherPilot]

We've been working on an AI portrait generation tool that creates strikingly lifelike depictions of people from just a few photos. By leveraging self-supervised models trained on billions of publicly available images, our site kahma.io allows anyone to generate high-resolution portraits of themselves, loved ones, or historical figures with just a few clicks. Early feedback has been very positive - people are genuinely amazed at the level of detail and realism achieved. While still prototyping monetization strategies, we think tools that can bridge connections to memory have valuable applications. We're always looking for technical co-founders or beta users interested in pushing the boundaries of AI-generated imagery.

[ipaddr]

Include a link.

[IronIronIron117]

Is there anyone here with a revenue stream that is mostly from ads or premium accounts? I'm working on a side project that is essentially IMDB, but for music. As I'm reaching the MVP, I'm starting to think more about monetization, and I'm trying to gather as much experience as I can, but it seems like most successful side projects here sell a product or service, not exactly what I have going on here.

[huydotnet]

Over $500/mo but still nowhere near my goal ($5k/mo). Started as a tool I built for myself to brainstorm and convert ideas into diagrams. Still need to invest more time on SEO and writing. It's just hard to find time to do all that stuff :P

https://chatuml.com

[lgats]

discussed 2 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38935714

[program247365]

Wow, search failed me. I did not see this. :(

[em-bee]

well apparently neither did anyone else because out of more than 160 users that wrote comments only three!!! users were commenting on both submissions. (four if you count this post of mine now)

maybe this should be posted more often?

[caviv]

Made an online dream interpreter that works automatically: https://www.understandmydreams.com in English and https://teusonho.org in Portuguese and also https://www.dreamon.co.il in Hebrew. People type in a dream and it interpret it online.

[dave333]

Free online sudoku sites supported by minimal ads have produced steady income since 2005:

https://www.samurai-sudoku.com

https://www.fiendishsudoku.com

https://www.extremesudoku.info

https://www.sudokuhints.com

https://www.sudokuprintables.org

[techmiker]

I love this because it combines my favourite things! Nice work. Can you share what your income is from the sites combined roughly? Is this your side job or is it your main income now?

[dave333]

It's always been a side job/income, but comfortably more than the $500/month listed in the thread title.

[techmiker]

Cool! Nice work!

[kzisme]

Is there a different backend/purpose behind each separate domain/site?

[dave333]

Yes samurai vs normal sudoku, different ranges of difficulty, different sets of puzzles, and a purpose built printables site.

[jasondigitized]

How have you gotten traffic to these? Genuinely curious.

[dave333]

Purely organic - have not found any way to pay for traffic with a positive ROI although I have not tried very hard.

[pclmulqdq]

This isn't so much a side project as a project that I tried to bootstrap and then never turned off, but as of December/January, I have made a little more than $500/month selling cloud true random number generators. I have not touched the code in a very long time, and today it is pretty much just a website and a listing on the AWS store, but it somehow made a few cents.

I'm still nowhere near wanting to quit my "day job" for it.

Shameless plug: https://arbitrand.com/

[taylorfinley]

This is super neat, and looks way easier to set up than a lava lamp wall.

[Havoc]

Unique idea. Well done.

[tanujnotes]

I made a minimal Android launcher called Olauncher during the pandemic. It now has a million downloads with 4.8 rating. A year ago (Jan, 2023) I launched the pro version, called Pro Launcher, and it's doing well.

Both available on my Play Store account called Digital Minimalism: https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=719880784008107493...

[sebadel]

interesting - can you help me understand how much it represents in terms of revenue ?

[ssz]

I'm making some money by putting all my nonfiction book notes on https://littlerbooks.com/

[program247365]

Nice! I thought about doing this at some point. Did you have to run ads, do SEO or anything to start to get traffic?

[benoror]

I sell a middleware I built to access data in Airtable / Google Spreadsheets using GraphQL: https://www.baseql.com

[tusharmath]

This sure seems very interesting. Have you written the GraphQL layer by hand? Have you tried https://github.com/tailcallhq/tailcall

With tailcall, you can quickly bootstrap a GraphQL service on top of existing APIs. I would love to collaborate on this and help you on board.

[gorkemcetin]

This looks very interesting. Would you be interested in adding Retable.io support as well?

[mixedsignals]

I run https://bonusbuddy.app.

Online casinos in the US will give you daily bonuses of $0.50-$1 just for logging in, and I built a Chrome extension that automatically collects the bonuses for users every day for a bunch of different casinos.

I charge $20/mo and users make roughly $200/mo in bonuses (trying to adhere to the software must provide 10x value philosophy).

[lemerou]

Would this work for someone outside the US using a VPN?

[j0hnyl]

Funny, I've been thinking of building this automation for myself.

[mixedsignals]

Cool! It's been super useful personally and hard to describe without sounding scammy because people don't believe there's free money just sitting out there.

Need to put some more work into it, but there's so many sites that could be added and the bonuses really tally up if you collect from all of them (I have a running list and right now it's around $20/day in bonuses if you collect from every site on the list).

[j0hnyl]

I think someone maintains a spreadsheet of these that I came across on reddit. I'll come back and post it here later if I can dig it up.

[zurtri]

So how do you withdraw the funds? Or do they sit in the online casino's site for you to put a bet on or something?

[mixedsignals]

It sits in the online casino's site. Some sites require you to play through the bonus once, while others allow you to withdraw directly once you reach a certain balance. For the ones that require you to play through, I just play the bonus through low-volatility slots.

[BjoernKW]

We make about $1300/month (shared among three co-authors) from the ebook "Stratospheric - From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS" and a companion online course: https://stratospheric.dev/

[dSebastien]

I've built a template for Obsidian accompanied by a user guide and video course, all based on my personal system.

It's solid and scales well. I've sold 700+ copies and most customers are happy with it.

https://ObsidianStarterKit.com

[jonwinstanley]

I have a load of side projects but I rarely market/promote them as I worry that if my 9-5 employer would be unimpressed if they saw me putting a load of effort into e.g. creating YouTube videos, running events, doing podcasts.

Is this something anyone else thinks about?

[j0hnyl]

I guess it depends on the employer. Mine is fairly chill with it.

[skwee357]

I'm not near $500/month yet, and none of my side projects have a recurring model, but it's always great to read these posts.

Kudos to everyone who makes money from side projects!

[hmsp]

https://intentionallyconfusing.com

stories from two artists.

[syngrog66]

I call these posts sucker bait. be wise folks

[WhackyIdeas]

I am making an uncountable amount of money with my side project of being a ‘gentleman of the night’.

[crs_gentleman]

Ha! I've considered this, and would really value pointers, if you're able to share?

[WhackyIdeas]

I haven’t managed to make ends meet yet. It really is uncountable.

[curtisblaine]

What does it mean?

[acuozzo]

Likely a joke, but prostitution.

[WhackyIdeas]

I believe it’s more P.C. to say ‘sex worker’ these days.

[acuozzo]

Sex workitution?

[mgl]

We started https://scanrepeat.com to enable companies of any size to introduce continuous security scanning of their web apps with direct reporting to Slack, Trello, Teams, etc.

We also cover a few more misc cases like detection of potential GDPR/CCPA personal data leaks.

[wooque]

we already had this thread

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38935714

[program247365]

Yup, my bad. The Algolia search on HN defaults to "Popularity", and the 2024 version from earlier was 20+ links down on the page.

So I missed it. And I don't read so good.

Sigh.

Buuuut, it seems like we're getting different people sharing their side projects, so that's a win!!

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[codergautam]

https://swordbattle.io

[Hammerhead12321]

Could you add a bit about how you made the game? I’ve been interested in making .io games for some time.

[codergautam]

I used Phaser + uWebSockets. Source code is public, feel free to take a look: https://github.com/codergautam/swordbattle.io

[program247365]

Nice! What's your tech stack here?

[codergautam]

NodeJS, React, Postgres (for accounts), uWebSockets and Phaser

[jeremywho]

You make $500+/mo from that game?

[codergautam]

Used to at least, still gets a lot of traffic mainly from web game portals but not promoting it rn.