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

another post of this topic two weeks later: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39110194

Out of all the side projects I’ve tried, the one that’s been the most lucrative consistently is buying boring index funds.

I kinda wish I just doubled down on the boring route sooner .

I've been writing an email newsletter on backend dev for the past few years - https://quastor.org/

Basically, I look through all the Big Tech engineering blog posts and look for interesting posts. Then I'll write up an article talking about the tech stack and the main takeaways.

I've been learning Adobe Illustrator + After Effects recently and am now starting to add some visualizations + graphics to accompany the articles.

I make more than $500 per month but this is more of a passion project and the income is honestly not competitive (at all) with what I earn as a dev.

It also gives me a way to learn about marketing/growth + monetization. Hard to learn that stuff w/o doing.

I started SupeChoiceForm as a passive income project many years ago: https://superchoiceform.com.au/

It started as just a content site, with google Adsense. Making about $1200 per month from ~30k visits.

It kept growing in popularity over about 2 years and I finally decided it might be worth some more effort.

So I turned it into a web app that took an employee through the process of gathering/generating all the paperwork they require to provide their employer with their superfund details. Effectively just digitising the paper form process with some smart automations.

(Superannuation is the 401k of Australia, but probably more widespread as it’s mandatory)

That was 2x MVP’s ago. Last year I got two trust partners / co-founders involved and we’ve turned it into an embedded service that can drop into any payroll/hr provider.

Raised $1M and now we’re making a lot more than $1200

All because I was nervous about getting Adsense banned for no reason. So thanks google!!

I’ve been running Bear Blog for a few years. It’s a privacy focused, super fast blogging platform, and is making well over $500/mo. It’s also a really fun tool to build and use, with a tight community.

https://bearblog.dev

I started a travel inspired bakery with my partner in the bay area - https://kayabakerysf.com/

We do popups once a week alongside our day jobs. It's been a long journey and we would like to open a storefront at some point. The bakery makes well over $500/month, but not quite enough to sustain ourselves full time yet.

It's a great way for me to learn about design and marketing as well.

I built and recently released a UI kit for Rails - https://zestui.com

Built with Phlex, styled with Tailwind with custom built Stimulus controllers.

It's got

- 25 themes

- Dark Mode

- Form Builder

- Icons

- Built in Flash Toast

- The components are responsive or have specific mobile views

- All the JS needed (Stimulus controllers) is wired up automatically

Phlex is a game changer. It is simple, powerful, intuitive and performant. I will never ever write a component as a partial/ViewComponent again.

A short video (50 seconds) showing it off: https://youtu.be/OQmDZddLtR8

It has crossed $500/month but since it's a one time purchase it is too early to tell whether it will sustain since I launched it only in December 2023.

These threads, along with the related recurring Show HN solo-founder success stories often seem to either be some form of newsletter/social publication, or analytics platform. I wonder if that's just the natural limit of what teams of 1 can feasibly accomplish, but I do wish there was some more variety in what people were successful with.

I started working on an open-source API mocking tool six years ago. It's called Mockoon and has recently crossed 500k downloads.

Two years ago, I quit my job to focus nearly full-time on it. I'm still freelancing on the side, but it's slowly bringing more money through sponsoring and the SaaS platform I'm building (a bit less than 1000$/month). Hopefully, 2024 is the year I can stop freelancing and live the dream! Work on an open-source project I love while not feeling guilty about not bringing enough money home :D

--> https://mockoon.com

I've been running OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com) since early 2021 now (almost three years).

I recently wrote about how last year it grew twice as fast as I expected: https://maxrozen.com/2023-focus-single-product-pays-off

It all started because I needed a weekly report for my contracting clients to prove their web host sucked to the point where it was costing them significant money. They were paying for cheapest tier WordPress hosting at the time, and didn't believe me when I said random 5 min blocks of downtime throughout the day were adding up.

I built a dirt-simple form that takes a URL and sends a notification when the site goes down/up, with a weekly summary email. Then, I kept adding features every day, responding to customer requests and fixing bugs 2 hours at a time, even after I stopped being a contractor.

Since then I also added status pages (example: https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/) and cron job monitoring, to ensure database backups and whatnot run when I expect.

I work as head of ML & Innovation at my day job.

On the side, as a technical consultant, I help teams to ship products with ML under the hood.

I live in Vienna, so that makes it convenient for evening calls with USA/Canada, where my three clients operate.

Usually this involves weekly 30min calls with the teams to show them shortcuts, working recipes and save time by avoiding pitfalls. Mostly around ChatGPT/Local LLMs and RAG/Business automation type of things.

I run a newsletter [1] to try extending my client base. Not very efficient yet, since all clients came through the LinkedIn [2] and personal contacts.

[1] https://abdullin.substack.com/ [2] https://www.linkedin.com/in/abdullin

During the pandemic, I made an online version of the game Mexican Train ( mexicantrain.online ). It became popular in retirement communities during lockdown. Gameplay has dropped off significantly since, but I still have several regular players. It averages about 50 games/day and between $500 and $1000/month, all from donations.

I am building https://dreamgen.com : platform for story-writing and role-play based on my own open-weight models [1][2]. Sort of alternative to NovelAI and CharacterAI. Launched November last year.

Why? I think building on top of (and using products built on top of) closed models in this space is not sustainable.

Currently the largest limiting factor, and why I am not spending on marketing just yet, is the model quality at longer contexts. This is my main focus right now, and I am in the middle of data collection for opus-v1 (which will also be released in various sizes). I also hope GPU prices will go down soon :D

It's a lot of fun, being able to work on data, models, backend and frontend all within the scope of 1 project.

[1] https://huggingface.co/dreamgen/opus-v0-7b

[2] https://huggingface.co/dreamgen/opus-v0-70b

I have a simple sex life tracking app that fills a niche many users are willing to pay for. (iOS only)

https://nicetracker.app

It has a single one time purchase of US$9.99. I loathe subscriptions personally, so all premium purchases just get all and any new features I add.

1500$ MRR (or ~1000$ after taxes and operating costs) with a (native) Plex audiobook player for iOS and Android.

Android accounts for 85% of the userbase and has been the focus last year with a 2.0 release so it's in much better shape than the iOS version, which is still in 1.0 today. MRR is growing 5-10% per month, not sure how big the niche is yet. It's a lot of efforts to maintain both platforms as native apps with a high level of quality, but trully convinced crossplatform solution are not worth it either.

-> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.bookcamp.a...

I started working on KTool[0] in 2022. Here was the Show HN: https://pdfpals.com

I started a project to do Search powered by mixture of ai models: https://www.Labophase.com

It's like google but all the results are from different ai models. Some ai models are better at reasoning, others at coding, or have bigger context.

Makes money from a tier where more advanced models can be used like gpt4, claude2, mixtral. But a very permissive free-tier has led to a lot of fraud/spam with the associated costs but most users like to see the benefits right off the bat without signing up for an account.

Got a few defenses coming up for fraud detection and hopefully cross the $500 barrier soon.

I run a Chrome extension that gives SEO, speed, and security tips after crawling all the pages of a site:

https://www.checkbot.io/

There's a lot of sentiment on HN about SEO ruining the internet but the SEO tips I promote are ones that make content more readable for humans (e.g. setting image ALT tags, avoiding broken links, giving each page a unique title, using valid HTML) rather than tricks for gaming Google:

https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo/

Getting around $1-$2k/mo building self-hosted web analytics: UXWizz[0] since 2013 and WPLytic[1] since 2022.

I am trying to market it more, tried a partnership, unfortunately it didn't work out, so this year the plan is to do the marketing myself or continue building and improving the product and hoping the quality of the product will lead to word-of-mouth marketing.

[0]: https://uxwizz.com

[1]: https://wplytic.com

Doing AI Headshot Generator https://aiheadshotgenerator.app/en/

My MMR was on 538 EUR at the end of 2023. I am building not that visually pleasing, but hopefully a useful dividend portfolio tracker - digrin.com. I wrote a small summary here - https://lucas03.com/digrin-com-in-2023/

Just recently surpassed $500/mo with a pdf to csv converter, https://bankstatement2csv.com

But as someone else mentioned, from a purely financial stand point, I'd be better off investing in an index fund.

I built a Chrome extension that integrates with Gmail (and other sites) to write emails, messages, etc using ChatGPT. This is my full time work and I'm living comfortably from it (for now).

https://chatgptwriter.ai

I do payment processing and have an all in one business suite of tools I use to build sites for clients.

clearpayments.ca for CAD

clearmerchantsol.com for US

sytescope.com for website builder, email marketing, AI content Generation.

These are side projects as I have a full time job.