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

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.

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

Clicky:

2023 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 )

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.)

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...

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.

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

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

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/

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.

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.

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 :)

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

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.

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.

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

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 :)

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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/

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...

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

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

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).

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/

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

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?

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!

https://intentionallyconfusing.com

stories from two artists.

I call these posts sucker bait. be wise folks

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

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.

we already had this thread

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

https://swordbattle.io

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