A long time ago, I made some Flash games. I recently converted some of them away from Flash and released them together as a desktop game for modern computers.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1458090/Hapland_Trilogy/
I am currently making more than $500 a month from this, although I don't necessarily expect that to continue. Games are a crowded market. It was a fun project, though.
I built a screenshot app for macOS and made ~$3k/mo from it :) https://xnapper.com
People like the app for its ability to turn a normal boring screenshot into a beautiful one that they can share on social media instantly.
https://zonewatcher.com is an audit trail and changelog for your DNS records.
It began in 2016 out of some frustration I was having with consulting clients who would modify their DNS records incorrectly, breaking their email and/or website until I was able to get them back online. It was frustrating digging through emails or old technical documents to find the original values before they had made their changes. I wanted a tool that could automatically backup those records to make reverting easy while at the same time notifying me of any changes so issues could be proactively fixed before their business was impacted.
So with that, ZoneWatcher was born. Depending on your plan, we check multiple times per hour and take a snapshot of each zone's records. When a change happens, we record the change and send you a notification so you can review and have the necessary data to revert if it was in error.
Making close to $500/mo now since a major relaunch / feature update back in December with a decent stream of new users every month. No major marketing done yet other than just word of mouth and the occasional reddit post on /r/msp's vendor threads.
Shortly after stable diffusion was released, I realized that an enormous number of non-ML people were suddenly interested in using an ML model.
However, APIs are insanely expensive and not very developer friendly, and running it yourself required pretty fancy hardware. The goal was to make the technology absolutely as accessible as possible.
So I launched https://computerender.com with the simplest API possible - just a URL that points to an image like: https://api.computerender.com/generate/cupcake-of-the-sky.jp... I monitor the prices on vast.ai and runpod to find the cheapest GPUs and run the service nearly at cost (as little as $0.0001 per image). No subscriptions, only pay for what you use.
Recently hit 700k images generated, and am excited to continue expanding the service.
https://extensionpay.com — A really simple way for browser extension developers to take payments in their extensions. I made it to use in my own extensions since it's a pain in the butt to take payments in browser extensions.
It has an open source library that works across all browsers and allows for one-time or subscription payments. Since 2021 developers have made over $125k with ExtensionPay which makes me happy :)
I sell handmade sculptures of influential people and famous monuments on Etsy - https://www.etsy.com/shop/jurgenstudio. Revenue is 2-6k USD depending on the season. I hired someone part time who took over production and shipping. it's mostly passive revenue for me apart from growing the business by developing new products when I feel like it. The profit margin is around 50% after all material and labor costs are paid.
I have two projects, combined doing ~€1500/mo
https://fider.io - an open source alternative to UserVoice. I started this one 6 years ago to learn Go and React. I’ve seen thousands of instances out there being self hosted, so I started a cloud hosting to those who don’t want to manage it themselves.
https://aptakube.com - Desktop Client for Kubernetes. This is very recent, launch was 2 weeks ago, so it’s only starting to get some traction now.
I’m leaving my job to go full time indie hacker now, wish me luck!
I have 2 projects right now, combined doing over $500+/mo :)
They are pretty different target market wise/price point and that has been pretty cool to see the differences in marketing/churn/adoption/etc...
1. Mogul - Privacy focused Personal CRM (https://mogulnetworking.com/) (~$650/mo, ~6 years old)
2. Ellie - A better day planner (https://ellieplanner.com/) (~$160/mo, ~1 year old)
Honestly no game plan, I just enjoy working on both and plan on iterating for a long long time (10+ years) and just slowly growing. I am literally addicted to working on these apps.
I tweet about these projects extensively on Twitter btw if anyone is curious to see what work went into both of these (https://twitter.com/raroque)
I built https://team-today.com in a lock down as a way for my remote team to see when people are on holiday, going to site, or wfh.
Since then it’s grown to include other features like desk booking and PTO approvals. But at it’s all been built around the core concept of seeing when your colleagues are working and where they’re planning on working from.
I built KTool (https://ktool.io) — it allows you to forward web articles, newsletters and RSS feeds to your Kindle.
---
I did a Show HN 4 months ago[1].
The reason I started KTool was to spend less time on computer screens, and more on e-ink Kindle. I was afraid of going blind.
After 4 months improving KTool, it now becomes a tool to help you combat doom-scrolling. Instead of mindlessly scrolling the web, I deliberately send interesting articles to my Kindle.
Recently, I added newsletter & RSS support, it's 100% automated now.
My favorite source of content is Hacker News RSS[2], Stratechery[3], Indie Hacker Newsletters[4] and a few other Substack newsletters.
I can enjoy reading HN latest stories or my fav authors' latest pieces on my Kindle without spending hours browsing on my computer.
I just reached $620 MRR today (Jan 23)
Created Video Hub App (that will be 5 years old next month). I sell it for $5 and $3.50 of each purchase goes to the cost-effective charity Against Malaria Foundation (See GiveWell.org for details).
It was averaging around 100 purchases per month, though it's lower over the last year as I've not had time to release new updates (moving to another state is challenging).
Thanks to the sale of this software I've donated an additional $16,000 to my favorite charity (I give 10% of my income there regularly - see Giving What We Can).
https://videohubapp.com/ - Think of it like YouTube for videos on your computer. Browse, search, and organize your videos
MIT Open Source: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
https://getblast.io/ - it is an end-to-end data platform: data ingestion + dbt-like transformations + data quality checks + data catalog, all through a single interface. It is making ~$4k/month currently.
Around the beginning of 2022, I was having a conversation with a few friends that are working at small mobile gaming companies, and they were having a lot of trouble building their data pipelines, especially because of the infrastructure part. I took on the challenge to start hosting some Airflow instances for them to get a bit more familiar with their problems, and over time some patterns started to emerge:
- they were writing custom scripts for mundane tasks.
- they had to write Python code, even though all they needed was scheduling a few SQL tasks.
- they needed some basic transformation abilities, but didn't have the budget to pay dbt-cloud $50/month (the minimum plan is $100 these days, I believe).
- they were losing track of where their data is going through and where it is coming from.
A friend of mine and I have started building some abstractions on top of Airflow to help these businesses: no need to write any Python, automatically deploying their changes to their instances after a git push, building data quality checks, materializing their assets based on their SQL "SELECT" queries, etc. Over time, we have gathered these features into a shared UI, and moved some of these companies piece by piece.
We keep improving the platform, and we are onboarding new companies for the past 2 months throughout our closed beta period. There are still many rough edges that we are trying to cover, but in the end, it was a great feeling when people were actually using the prouct quite often in spite of all these problems. We are pretty excited about where this can go.
If anyone is interested in taking part in the beta program, the first 6 months is free during the beta period. Feel free to fill out the form on the website and I'll reach out personally.
Twitter Archive Eraser (https://delete.tweets.app) makes ~3K USD per month.
I don't do any active work on it any longer for the past 2 years or so, other than the small bug fixes/when Twitter changes the archive format. Bracing for a shutdown to the API soon anyway.
Past submissions on how it used to bring in $7k per month and a few technical details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439606 (June 2020), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29998723 (Jan 2022).
Back in college (2016-2020), I used to work part-time for my university’s IT department. Most of my time was spent doing software development, but when I wasn’t busy working on a project, I helped work the help desk ticket queue.
Believe it or not, our ticket queue did not have an auto refresh feature - and manually refreshing my dashboard webpage drove me crazy. As a die-hard macOS user, I’ve always used Safari as my primary browser, but unfortunately no auto-refresh web extensions were available on the App Store at the time. So I learned how to package web extensions for Safari and sell them on the App Store.
Fast-forward to today, and I now have a collection of Web Extensions that net me ~$750 a month. Feel free to check out Simple Refresh for Safari here:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/simple-refresh-for-safari/id14...
My tiny game has been bringing in at least $5k a month since I released on mobile, it's fully passive now.
I feel doubly blessed that it worked out with no ads or micropayment sinks of any sort, just a demo and a single $5 purchase.
I got pretty into Stable Diffusion soon after it came out. Like a lot of users, I tinkered around with different ways to run it, going the usual route of running on my weak local machine, then going on to runpod, then implementing my own custom solution.
What I came up with worked pretty well for me, so I created a site that allows users to upload custom models and run Stable Diffusion “in the cloud”.
I launched in early December and it ended up being more successful than I expected. I just got to $700 MRR, which I’m definitely happy about after years of side projects making exactly $0.
The site in question: https://stadio.ai
I sell cheap but high-quality Anki decks for language learning: https://deckmill.com
Created using a mix of automation (TTS, machine translation, etc.) and human reviews.
Built it with a friend, making around $500 a month, very stable over the last couple of years. Spend 1 or 2 hours a month on it, mostly customer support.
I had 3 sources of side income last year.
1/ Started a niche dating app in 2017. Revenue ranges form 700-1,100/mo. Hosting is about $50/mo.
2/ Bought a house and rent our spare rooms for $3,100/mo.
3/ Contracting projects for a small dev shop earned $3-10k/mo (depending on how many hours I worked).
https://www.escape-team.com - a printable escape game. It currently makes about $600 on iOS and $400 on Google Play, all through the $1.99 IAPs.
I do not do any advertising for it, but as it is played in groups, it nicely advertises itself.
I made collaborative painting apps, https://hellopaint.io and https://malmal.io (there might be some slight NSFW content). In the best months I made 800€+ in ad revenue from malmal but currently it's a lot less. I think there's potential to make a lot more though, although I'd like to stop showing ads and switch to some more predictable income model. I do have a patreon but it only brings in ~100€ per month. I could promote it more though.
Python concurrency has a super bad wrap (the gil) and I'm trying to help out even change opinions (e.g. work with it rather than throw it all out).
I write short focused how-to ebooks that on the different Python concurrency APIs in stdlib. Content marketing leads to email marketing to one-off sales. Doing about $2K/mo. Might expand into third party libs this year.
I’ve mentioned before on HN how I make around ~$7k from my Lunar app nowadays [0] but controlling monitors is a larger niche and the app was developed and perfected over the course of 5 years.
This time I’d like to show you the progress of my last year’s project, https://lowtechguys.com.
It’s a small macOS app studio and here are my App Store sales for the last month: https://f.alinpanaitiu.com/gjxBpg/Image.png
You can see trends in red because December is a slow month for app sales, not sure why exactly.
But even with just 4 small macOS apps I manage to make ~1k/month with close to zero maintenance.
I have a lot more ideas for small non expensive apps that could add to the revenue but less and less time for them.
Right now I have to rebuild an old wooden house and finally move out of my rented apartment. I’m grateful to have a source of income on the side that can support me this year so I can pause tech while I do field work.
I make >€1K / month with https://amazing.photos
I generate amazing profile photos for users using dream booth and a custom stable diffusion model.
Our quality of output is the best that I’ve seen compared to competitors.
My secret to much higher quality: I rank images, and then only show the best images.
All other competitors that I’ve seen dump all the images to the user. Instead, my process means that the output images are consistently very high quality.
In 2018 I started making a browser interface you could put in an iframe to let you create web scraping scripts from any device. The web scraping part is still a WIP, but the remote browser interface became a product in its own right that pays for everything else. I fleshed it out during the pandemic and responded to customer requests to improve things like streaming and audio. I grew it well beyond Ramen possible without ever spending a dollar on advertising or marketing. Now that the feature set is pretty stable I want to focus on marketing for this year. Sales are up 224% since last year but I think I can do much better: I still never snagged those big government or huge enterprise customers that I really want. I just think that would be cool.
If you don’t know what remote browser isolation is, it’s basically a security product to keep browser. Content executing on a remote computer away from your local device and Netwerk but turns out people use it for a lot more than that: an embedded multiplayer browser for live streaming educational lessons; a human in the loop intervention console to investigate and unstick stalled web automation tasks; as well as the more traditional security or reverse proxy use cases. A large part of my nontraditional marketing came through my source available GitHub version, which is now languishing well behind the paid pro version in terms of features and quality: https://GitHub.com/dosyago/BrowserBox
https://toolwallhq.com - Digital organizer for your physical tools. I used to have a hard time keeping my shop organized, so I jumped in and came up with a solution that has worked for me so far and perhaps might help you.
The idea is you use the digital artboard to visualize your tools on the wall and then buy the holders to mount it on your workshop wall.
There seems to be a growing overlap between programming and woodworking for whatever reason. I could go on about the similarities, but after hours of staring at the screen, we sometimes want to make things with our hands and woodworking helps me do that. If you're looking to get started, I can't recommend visiting a local makerspace enough.
PS also on Etsy if that's your thing: https://www.etsy.com/shop/ToolWall
I'm making https://simplescraper.io - a no-code web scraping tool.
Saved up, quit my job and went all in...on a todo app. Needless to say that idea didn't go far, but it taught me how to code.
When I was close to broke I pivoted to this product and finally gained traction and now it's doing well enough to be my main source of income.
I'm kind of following the "1000 true fans" ethos that pops up here occasionally. There's a dedicated group of customers who benefit from the ease and speed of the tool and they're like my product team.
I check in with them often, make sure they're happy and build features for them. Turns out, what they value other people value too, and so the product slowly but surely grows.
Learning to code was definitely one of the best decisions I've made. Felt like gaining wings.
I built Tax Loss Harvesting Tool for different kinds of portfolios. Despite still being in the early stages, I'm gaining some interesting traction so far! I was badly hit in the recent market downturn because I had invested in leveraged ETFs without a deep understanding of how they function. But I still have faith in securities in the ETFs so I decided to see if it was possible to swap securities in order to harvest losses without triggering the Wash Sale. And, Lo and Behold, for 2330 ETFs, I found 1.2+M possible combinations.
Link: https://bit.ly/3H9Gkpb
Follow on twitter for twice-a-day insights about High Overlap Beta ETFS: https://twitter.com/optimizetaxes
I'm one of the cofounders of PriceTable. [1] It has been a side project since 2018 or so.
About a year and a half ago I posted about it on HN [2] and back then our revenue was $2,500/mo. We recently passed the $6,000/mo.
At this point we have a few very happy customers who make up the bulk of our revenue. We have been trying to grow more, but our challenge is that we haven't been able to figure out a cost-effective way of reaching potential customers. We target the landscaping market, and most landscaping companies are either too small, or they don't have tech-savvy owners/staff who are motivated to learn and leverage a software solution effectively in order to grow their sales. Phone and email outreach haven't worked well.
If anyone has experience in this market or similar, please drop me a line! ege@pricetable.io
[1] - https://pricetable.io [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26855726
I wanted to give swift a try when it came out in 2014. I created the keyboard I know you all miss on the iPhone, and it's been doing quite great since. https://typenineapp.com
I make videogames for a living:
- Flipon (https://flipon.net) an arcade puzzle/match-3 inspired by Tetris attack on PC mobiles and switch
- Steredenn (https://Steredenn.pixelnest.io) a roguelike shoot them up, pc, iOS, switch.
I’ve been lucky to have an extra income with those two games for a few year.
Been chipping away at this as a side project for many years - Visual Project Planning and Scheduling. Draw on a whiteboard and it makes a levelled schedule for you. It has resources, equipment, and much easier to understand than MS Project.
I have had a blast building it and it is hard to market - but the people that do stumble across and use it, the visual way of planning really resonates with them.
I have a weird set of skills that I've grown from just doing things that are interesting and fun.
https://www.munkle.it - Think Anki, but optimized for speed, and will be focused on content creators. First sale this month (>$500_ from manual outreach to a big content creator Individual purchases will be turned on eventually, but we're not focused on that right now. This is a labor of love as through college and 20+ professional certifications I wanted something faster and easier than what was available.
https://www.skullsplitterdice.com - I spend around 4 hours a week on this, but I used to do this full time. Currently it runs high four to low five figures 100% organically, but can easily do more if I ran ads. It 100% wouldn't be worth my time if I weren't using it to teach my kids things like customer service, product design, how to make content valuable to people so you get search traffic, single piece flow, etc.
It's also cool because I can geek out on a new thing in the area and apply it to something to see if I make any money on it or just have fun making art. Things I've done in the past is includes making a book for the game these are used for, a "choose your own adventure" style Facebook messenger adventure linked from hidden inserts in products, and working with visual and voice over artists to make stories around different products. My latest was using midjourney to create a character that I animated to say a script talking about a product.
Did I make money from that? No, was I entertained? Heck yes.
https://FreeSolitaire.win brings around $500/mo (advertising revenue).
I started making this PWA in 2016 and I’ve been slowly adding to it over time. I intend it to stay minimal & lightweight. No framework, etc.
Fun fact: because it is so lightweight, it was included in the Moya app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nu.bi.moya), a popular messaging app in South Africa that is “data-free” for users (it does reverse-billing). Now half the players are South Africans!
Feedback is welcome ;-)
I built https://chatgpt4google.com which is a browser extension that enhance search engines with ChatGPT. It got over 500k users in less than two months.
I started doing some monetization experiment recently, and already got $500+ now.
I wrote a book: https://www.pragprog.com/titles/rshaskell/effective-haskell/
I’ll admit that going in I talked to a few other authors and the common wisdom is that you don’t write a book for the money. I wrote the book because I thought there was room for a more practical industry focused Haskell book that didn’t assume any particular math or FP background, and showed readers how to apply the ideas in the context of real world problems. It’s been very well received so far as it’s been in beta and I made a decent amount on royalties in 2022. Going into 2023 I’m hopeful that I’ll see that continue as the book has its final release, and I’m planning to follow up with some additional materials like videos and interactive training that I hope will get more people excited about Haskell and will generate enough revenue to keep me motivated during the times when it all feels like a lot of extra work.
It's a bit depressing to realise that that first $500 MRR is both very hard to achieve (well done everyone showing and telling!) and not enough to quit the day job. (In the countries most of us here live in, and without having savings and deciding that with the push of working on it full time for a few months it can be a lot more, at least.)
After about a year of learning I made my first profit last month woodworking of $550.
A niche open source project. It's a GPS tracking system. There are a lot of proprietary alternatives, but not a lot of open source ones.
I'm making some money on SaaS and some on consultation and customization. In many cases people pay for something I can later include in the open source, which always feels nice.
being a designer, i share my experiments in UI and design on Twitter and some other sites. to present designs, i used to beautify them in Figma. this was a routine process where i would open Figma, create a gradient background for my design, add shadows, rounded corners etc. and export the image in correct size, so if i’m to share it on Dribbble I would export it in Dribbble size, for Twitter the size is different
this whole process used to take like 20 to 30 minutes easily. so i built an app https://pika.style to do all of that for me quickly
it started as a hobby, open-source and free to use project which i was building in public on my twitter(@thelifeofrishi). in a matter of time i started getting DMs on Twitter for feature requests
i remember a founder of a company wanted to have a certain feature, we discussed that and in the end i asked whether he would be happy paying for that feature, to which he said yes. i added the requested feature in 2 days and got back to him, he instantly purchased annual subscription and started using Pika. that was in February, 2022
fast forward to today, almost an year later, Pika now has 150+ paid users and makes $1,500+ in revenue each month. i’ve turned it from just a screenshot beautifying tool to a tool to design very customisable mockups and images. you can use it to generate images for your website, app, code, tweet etc. and to keep it more accessible, it has a free tier which doesn’t even require registration to use
i’ve also added a plan just for students and teachers so they can use Pika’s paid fearures at a very discounted subscription fee
if you’re a programmer, marketer, designer, no coder or work in the tech industry, i think you’ll definitely find Pika useful :)
I'm working part-time on my project https://chartbrew.com
It's an open-source data visualization and reporting platform that I started in 2018, I abandoned in 2019, then resumed working on it more seriously in 2020.
Currently, the platform is doing $1,138 in MRR from then managed hosting service and has made over $11k in revenue so far. It's been growing steadily in the last few months but going through a rough Dec-Jan period at the moment. You can see the open page at https://chartbrew.com/open
Onwards and great job everyone at working to make side projects work for you!
I started a solitaire website 5+ years ago. When Covid hit, I ended up finally putting ads on it. Since then it's been growing steadily and about half a year back I made it my full-time gig.
You can check out the game here: https://online-solitaire.com/.
I wrote a post about my journey on Indie Hackers if someone is curious about it: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-grew-a-simple-solita....
https://sre.rs - DevOps course (Udemy) for smaller teams and individuals
Making about 1200/month right now. It's a weekly list of companies that were funded in the last 7 days with founder/ceo contact information.
I use a mix of scraping and manual validation to make the list and currently doing cold emails to sell. I'm not truly a developer or a marketer, so learning a lot while attempting to make this work.
It seems to be valuable to different types of agencies -- recruiting, design, web etc.
I started selling NSFW stickers on Etsy. Originally it was a way for me to have a creative outlet but turns out a lot of people want this kind of product. Making just about $500 a month from it now. It’s great because all I have to do is draw the original art once and then I can just repeatedly print it and cut it out. It’s also a very relaxing hobby for me. I enjoy sending out envelopes with hand written notes. It’s refreshing from my usual 9-5 of spreadsheets.
Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34190421 - Dec 2022 (70 comments)
Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33942558 - Dec 2022 (211 comments)
Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32806068 - Sept 2022 (91 comments)
Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31764696 - June 2022 (265 comments)
Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29995152 - Jan 2022 (613 comments)
Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095 - Dec 2021 (841 comments)
Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2020 – Show and tell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167 - Oct 2020 (76 comments)
Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23438930 - June 2020 (461 comments)
Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2019 – Show and tell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20899863 - Sept 2019 (61 comments)
Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2018 – Show and tell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17790306 - Aug 2018 (151 comments)
Ask HN: Sideprojects/passive income businesses with little or no own coding? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15806208 - Nov 2017 (50 comments)
Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2017 – Show and tell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148804 - Sept 2017 (239 comments)
Ask HN: Those making over $1K/month on side projects, what did you make? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14752196 - July 2017 (27 comments)
Ask HN: How do you make money from your side projects? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13980274 - March 2017 (106 comments)
Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514093 - Jan 2017 (130 comments)
Ask HN: Those making over $1K/month on side projects, what did you make? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12670731 - Oct 2016 (245 comments)
Ask HN: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12145137 - July 2016 (58 comments)
Ask HN: What revenue generating side projects do full-time employees here have? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12123055 - July 2016 (117 comments)
Ask HN: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11214497 - March 2016 (44 comments)
Ask HN: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9508528 - May 2015 (31 comments)
Ask HN: How to get started with paying side projects? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8867035 - Jan 2015 (39 comments)
Ask HN: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects - what did you make? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6884552 - Dec 2013 (163 comments)
Ask HN: Are you working on any side projects that make "small/passive" income? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2358111 - March 2011 (167 comments)
I have one project running since two years, doing around $16k/mo - https://roshade.com/
It started as an useful app for myself. Releasing it publicly was an afterthought, and it has been six months since I introduced a subscription model.
I learned about marketing and working on this project contradicted my assumptions as a software engineer - making it educational.
OpenSay - Responsible anonymity in Slack, moderated by AI and team effort.
Tamagui is now making 2,500 a month purely from GitHub Sponsors.
Pretty amazing. It’s fully OSS, just developed by me. Somewhat non-replicable as it’s just been a passion project in some for or another for 7 years now, reborn several times.
For the moment Sponsors don’t really get much, but there’s some in development features that will make that much more valuable. Goal is to double it at least this year!
Not 500+$/month by any means, but 100$/month. I got 2 subscribers who are older clients that I had to convince -hurray for hallway testing- and I hope to get more soon. Having an actual pricing page and payment funnel might help haha.
It's a dead-simple data exploration and prediction micro-saas, but with a lot of nice pixels and state-of the art AI/ML explainability algorithms. Users come with their prepared excel files, upload them, and they get an 'explanation' as to the relations their data has within itself. It can also work as a prediction service.
For example: It can help a marketer know which prospects are likely to buy (prediction), but when said marketer has too actually talk to these prospects we can help with tailoring the message with the right knowledge (this one will buy because he/she buys like clockwork, whereas this one will buy because we saw them several times on our webpages)
I make $3k-$5k a month from my newsletter - https://www.startups.fyi - have just under 8K subscribers, mostly startup founders and indie hackers.
Related - Startups.fyi has hundreds of examples of profitable online businesses and side-projects, how much $$$ they earn and more info.
Two years ago I made https://vemto.app, a GUI code generation tool for PHP/Laravel developers. At the time, my wife and I were going through a difficult process, in which we urgently needed to move out of an apartment. The tool sold well enough for us to put a down payment on a house, and has continued to sell for those two years, and now I'm working on a second, more powerful version that not only generates code, but can connect to existing projects to edit them. There is a video of the second version at this link: https://twitter.com/Tiago_Ferat/status/1591450807433826304
2 years ago I made a code visualization tool called Codemap, https://codemap.app, which visualizes function calls in any codebase as a graph, to give the software engineers a high-level understanding of their code.
Last year I noticed its user sign-ups are ticking up quickly, acquiring hundreds of users in a few months, so I decided to redesign the app and add more language supports (now supporting Typescript, Javsacript, Python, Ruby, and Go.
It's a combination of a desktop app (to parse your local codebase) and a web app (to visualize the graph). Users pay a small price to unlock the full graph, otherwise the graph is capped at 100 nodes, which allows users to fully try out the product before committing to pay for it.
I released https://aipaintr.com based on the open source stable diffusion model. The webapp allows users to train custom dreambooth model and generate images using it.
Dreambooth is a powerful algorithm which can generate images of any concept you train it on. Users use it to generate images of person, e-commerce products, different artistic styles etc.
It has two main parts: 1. Webapp for individuals 2. API for other app developers https://app.aipaintr.com/api/v1/docs/
Its been 4 months since launch and it has gotten low 10s of thousand in revenue. Competition is fierce. Lot of apps launched in this domain.
I'm working on a timer app, and is now up to ~$2k/mo! - https://focusedwork.app
It's taught me a lot about the non-technical side of building a product. Very fulfilling from a personal growth perspective.
I have a collection of side-projects, all combined are making in the ballpark of $500/month:
https://mathlegame.com/ mostly via ads) - made this one when wordle got popular (
https://reversle.net/ (mostly via ads) - made a few weeks after mathle
https://slashdreamer.com/ (subscription) - wanted to do something with stable diffusion - this was the most useful one for me (since I am using Notion a lot)
Working on https://ogtester.com/ now.
One and a half years ago, I started Rocket Crew a Space industry job board All other job sites in this industry were old and quite hard to use and most of the time there were not a lot of New space companies.
So since I love Space I decided to build an alternative. To get started, I built a web scraper for more than 50 different space companies, including NASA, Space X, JPL etc. And the traffic grew month after month
Now it has become one of the popular job boards in this niche and starts to rank first on google for keywords like "space jobs"! https://rocketcrew.space/
I built SecAlerts https://secalerts.co a few years ago. Fairly straight forward SaaS product to send email alerts on new vulnerabilities matched to customer software.
I started making Browse AI (https://browse.ai) about 3 years ago. Quit my job soon after and focused on it full-time when I had savings enough for 2 years of my living expenses.
The next 1.5 years were intense. I learned to have better and more conversations with users (we'd crash and burn if I hadn't come across a book called The Mom Test) and we went through several positioning pivots.
As I was running out of money, I launched on ProductHunt and got decent initial traction and a group of angels who found us there and invested ~$300k.
Then we started making revenue... Then, after almost 3 years of work, we reached $100k ARR... Then we went from $100k to $200k ARR in less than 3 months!
We've signed up ~20,000 new users in January so far and I'm projecting $300k ARR in a month! We're growing ARR 30-50% month over month.
I have a team now who are doing a ton of the hard work. I still have to spend time on every part of the business, but I've been trying to focus my energy on certain parts that I'm better at.
The hardest challenge for me throughout these years has been figuring out if I should persist and work harder on the same path, or switch to something else or pivot. I went through a pre-accelerator program and an accelerator and I had some mentors through them. Some were super helpful and gave me the confidence I needed to keep going.
In general, specially if you're a solo (technical) founder like me, I recommend having mentors that have been through what you're going through and talking to them at least once a month. It's too easy to focus on the wrong things and waste the precious early capital and time. I know I would be 2 years ahead if I had sought mentorship early on.
I'd be happy to chat if you're working on a self-service SaaS. Message me on LinkedIn or Twitter: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ardalann/ https://twitter.com/ardalanme
https://www.scanii.com a content arbitration/malware API service. It has been profitable for over 10+ years now with customers around the globe.
Building it was one of the best decisions I made in my life since it enabled me to make hard decisions at work that were not skewed by the fear of losing my job and not being able to provide for my family - I'm in engineering/product leadership.
But, do not be fooled, this also means I've had two jobs (albeit of unequal urgency) and that, obviously, equates to long work hours.
I was pretty depressed at work a while ago and to take my mind off of the negative energy, I made a desktop app for provisioning bring your own servers, creating sites, and deploying web apps. It was free.
Fast forward a few years and a coworker joined me and we made a cloud version of it. It is doing ok but yet pay for two of us full time. However, we looooove working on it and helping customers esp. with their deployment issues. It is seriously more fun than our jobs that pay handsomely.
Scraping Fish - a web scraping API powered by custom-build, ethical, mobile proxy pool: https://scrapingfish.com/
ERD Lab - Database design tool built for developers https://www.erdlab.io
Login as guest directly at https://app.erdlab.io No registration required to test. No email confirmation needed to register either if you choose to do so.
Here is a 1 minute video of ERDLab in action. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VaBRPAtX08
https://gif.ski — a modern GIF encoder that beats everything else on quality.
I'm dual-licensing it. It may be surprising that people would buy a codec for a 34-year-old format, but GIF is a popular medium, and I've created a solid implementation (in Rust, of course).
I really like the licensing model. Unlike a SaaS, it doesn't require me to stay up all night worrying about uptime. The types of companies that buy the licenses know what they're doing.
I had so many side projects I made a side project to centralize accounts and payments. It’s now called Chief Tools (https://chief.app) and contains a certificate monitoring tool (https://cert.chief.app), a zero-downtime deployment tool for PHP (https://deploy.chief.app), a DigitalOcean billing monitor (https://bill.do; which I acquired) and a URL shortener (https://tny.app).
All of these have no marketing and terrible landing pages since they are mostly built for me (although I like to think they are pretty ploished) but hit $500+ a few weeks ago. It took 5-10 years but interesting to see either way (payments were only available about a year ago though, before it was all free).
The funny thing (to me) is that the URL shortener is doing the big bucks since apparently there is still a place for new ones in the market which I did not expect, I mostly built it to be able to easily redirect a hostname.
Few years back I built an RSS to email service, still making ~$600/mo from it. https://www.feed2mail.com. Later added an option to follow social feeds (Twitter, mostly) and connected the service to a Telegram bot that brings additional $100/mo. https://t.me/Feed2Telegram_bot
https://routineshub.com - a place to create, schedule and share your everyday routines.
I've been a long time self development enthusiast, regularly trying out new health/mediation/workout routines and wanted a tool to keep track of my routines, help me schedule everything automatically and where i could share my routines and explore other users routines too.
1). Started a small network automation product over Covid. The software brings AAA, secrets management (pki and passwords ontop of Vault), and config management under one platform. We let admins create programmatic runbooks to make changes to infrastructure using web forms. We have integrations to most major manufacturers to lookup warranty info for all devices. We are prototyping using NLP/OpenAI for users to create runbooks. "E.g.; I need a web form to deploy TLS certificates to all my Dell iDRACS" (but this is a ways off from being safe for anything but the lab).
2). We started another side project recently that manage large deployments of a popular OTDR manufacturer. System reports damage to dark fiber which alerts with with exact location info displayed on a map. Notifications are sent to staff via Slack/Email with photos and driving directions. We made a portal to manage all OTDRs from one interface.
Both of these are side projects but we will likely go full time on these projects soon.
1). www.realmhelm.com 2). No name yet but we will probably brand it under the realmhelm product above.
https://www.usecloudpress.com/ - Allows you to export content from Google Docs and Notion to Content Management Systems like WordPress, Webflow, Contentful, etc. I will export the content with the correct formatting, export images, and also handles other elements like tables, embeds, and more.
I run [link redacted] as a web based saas.
It is a relatively lightweight web app that tracks food in your pantry. It gives you an estimate on how long you could survive on it. It is intended as a tool for preppers but also works for anyone with OCD about their pantry contents.
Business has picked some this last year. I'm working on expanding the product data, general usability, and some actual marketing.
I've created the Obsidian Starter Kit [1] and make ~1K per month with it. I don't think it will last for a very long time, but I enjoy sharing my approach and helping others spare some time.
[1]: https://developassion.gumroad.com/l/obsidian-starter-kit
Thank you for starting this thread and providing us with the opportunity to share. I have developed several plugins for Magento 2, an e-commerce platform. Some of them can be found at https://www.magepsycho.com/extensions/magento-2.html.
https://www.arbeitnow.com - a job board for Germany. It's been up for two years this January and it keeps me going! Revenue and traffic fluctuate a lot, does not really matter to me as long as people keep finding jobs through it so I'll keep working on it as long as I can.
In early 2018, GraphQL was new and hot tech, and I worked for a startup that kept breaking their GraphQL API. One day a field might be a string, the next day it might be an object.
I got mad, so I built a service that snapshot tested the API response every 60 seconds, and sent a Slack alert whenever it failed. I called it OnlineOrNot.
I spent a year trying to sell that MVP to startups around Sydney, but there were maybe a handful of other companies using GraphQL at that time, and they weren't willing to take a chance on a part-time business solving this problem.
Fast-forward 2 years, and several other failed projects, I decide to rebuild it from scratch, but this time as a general uptime monitoring service.
The URL is https://onlineornot.com, I've been iteratively working on it for around 2 hours per workday since early 2020 (I ruthlessly cut features down into 2 hour blocks, and use feature flags to deploy safely).
These days it's more of a status page, with built-in uptime monitoring (and has integrations to other monitors).
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Folks tend to ask what makes OnlineOrNot special, trying to figure out what the moat is - it's me.
I've worked on the web for Atlassian and Cloudflare, I've seen what works and doesn't work for self-serve web apps. So OnlineOrNot has:
- a business model that won't suddenly fail (I'm full-time employed so that I can work on OnlineOrNot, I'm not going to shut it down for not making enough money)
- docs written in clear English that load fast, and are up to date
- a modern, responsive web UI with errors that don't make you feel dumb
- uptime monitoring for websites, web apps, and APIs that Just Works
I am building a book discovery website. I want to introduce more serendipity into the book discovery and exploration process -> https://shepherd.com/
Working to add genres and age-groups now :)
Been super fun! I've asked 7,000 authors to share 5 books around a topic, theme, and mood. :)
I built a curated list of job boards with multiple filters to help job seekers find jobs (listing around 1200 job offers)
Also helps job boards founders to get traffic as the website last month got 48K unique sessions.
On average since included paid options it made $1.3K/mo
https://mailwip.com email forwarding with extra stuff like webhook, full inbox log, SMTP support, and "email to blog"
I made this because every time when I start a project and bough a domain and setup email. first thing. So I scratch my own itch :).
https://tomotcha.com/ — a Japanese tea subscription service. Although we had to suspend our activities for the better part of 2022, we've been able to resume in January 2023.
Logistic is brutal in what is starting to look like a post globalization world: shipping fees are through the roof, delays are long, regulation (especially in the EU) is ever more stringent. COVID-19 pretty much killed bemmu's Candy Japan (https://www.candyjapan.com), and EU regulation just killed Candysan (https://candysan.com): they threw in the towel one week ago.
And yet we keep going... gross margin is around $800~$1000 per month.
Not $500/month yet, but I'm already having a few paying customers: https://noisycamp.com/
NoisyCamp is a platform for music studios to manage their reservations. It also helps musicians to find place to rehearse.
My app, https://easyteegolf.com/ is a niche SaaS that I built in my free time during COVID. MRR varies because I don't charge customers during the winter, but it made about $6K last year.
I earn a bit north of $5@@ monthly writing and selling puzzle books on Amazon.
(I suppose it’s relevant as, at its core, the books are made via one-off programs I write for each kind of puzzle. In addition to the LaTeX crap that turns the output of the program into a nicely formatted puzzle.)
Curiosity question for those answering here. How many unique visitors a month do you have to get your income? I am working on monetizing via a site that is growing in terms of visitors, and wonder what scale I will need to reach to start having things make sense.
I have 2 rehearsal rooms for musicians, with good acoustics and some basic music equipment. There are 10 bands sharing the rooms and paying monthly giving me 500$+ with ease. I will do more as the market for such places in my city is not saturated yet.
I have kept building on https://blunders.io - a profiling tool for the JVM. Will soon no longer be a side project though, looking forward to spending more time on it!
I do payment processing on the side and help friends, family, and referrals with getting the best deal and use the best tech, kind of like a broker. I'm still blown away how many businesses in the US still make people tip on a receipt. It's ridiculous. I can do deals in Canada and USA.
Shameless plug, but if you are brick and mortar store or restaurant / bar. Contact me.
I'm launched closed beta for a very very niche product to help gateways get payments into quickbooks as sale receipts. No need to create invoice and mark it as paid.
I'll be making a post about it when it works with most payment gateways. And I have basic pricing.
I make roughly $2500 - $5000 a month.
https://learninpublic.org - i did a livestream with stripe about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-UxzCtpB74
its 3 years old and still making 2-3k a month but i've gone from happy to guilty - i havent had any time to make updates to the book but i really want to and every single month that goes by that I don't I lose credibility. I'll still do it but its so hard to go back to something when I have a day job and my interests keep shifting.
I acquired a side hustle in late 2022. It’s doing $1k/month. I’ve been enjoying it so far. Basic queues using http as input and http output.
I have a couple of projects live, each doing $500+/mo:
- https://www.partly.ai - AI profile picture/art generator. - https://tayl.app - convert all text to audio and listen as a podcast. - https://www.podopi.com - similar to the one above, but marketed towards website owners.
Basically WireGuard as a service but we give a dedicated IPv4 and IPv6 with Reverse DNS.
I made a cross platform desktop app for people who upload their photos and videos to microstock agencies called Xpiks (https://xpiksapp.com). Initially I was selling one-off forever licenses but last year started moving them to subscription. So far progress is steady and I keep working on it. The app is made in C++/Qt and I’m looking for people who might be interested to join.
Nothing really to show visually but I make about that passively selling/trading high end watches. More a hobby than anything just to wear them but some easy cash.
Last year recruitment was a pain. This year, it's slightly better, still the process hasn't changed much. After spending an inordinate amount of time interviewing, I brainstormed and launched nitrohire.co last month after a few months of alpha usage. Nitrohire helps hiring managers get quick and useful information about candidates without any effort.
Currently doing on and off in the vicinity of a grand a month.
I've got a few
Free blog setup service to help people star their own blog → https://startablog.com
Meal Planning web app & service → https://ultimatemealplans.com
Mobility training and exercises → https://movewellapp.com
I created http://www.bithacker.io during the pandemic. It’s a live interviewing platform but for RTL design candidates. It supports Verilog simulation with an interactive waveform viewer as well. We’re also working on enabling synthesis soon. So far we’re getting some early traction and excited to grow it more in 2023 :)
Developed a few websites that I do monthly support and maintenance on.
I’m averaging about $600.00 MRR which is down from the $1200.00 MRR I was making for a better part of last year.
The beauty of it though is it only requires about 1-2 hours tops of my time each month though.
Combining both some additional contract work with this MRR outside of my FT job I’m doing about $1500.00 to $2,000.00 month.
Working on a few ways to increase this.
I have been working on getting stable diffusion and image generation working for non developers. It has been really awesome to help non technical people. I'm still trying to figure out how to grow it larger, but its slow and steady progress. This is the site: https://88stacks.com/
Built lifeofdiscipline.com, a habit tracker inspired by GitHub’s contribution calendar. Took me a year to break the 500/mo mark.
I'm continuing with my project Newsy
A modern take on domain parking. I have ~50 un-used domains. I wanted to make some good use out of them instead of just parking them. So I built Newsy to convert them into automated content aggregators.
I’m a big fan of quotes. Asked my wife (Swift dev) to create iOS app with my favorite quotes, so I can see them as notifications and widgets.
The app makes ~$1000/mo.
Cool idea for a thread.
I’m still building https://www.ieltsielts.com/ which offers original resources and coaching for an English language proficiency exam called the IELTS. It makes over $500 USD per month.
https://seniormindset.com/ – book and workshop helping people with the shift in mindset that goes into being a senior [software] engineer.
You can tldr my philosophy as “business results trump technical excellence”
No MRR but made about $40k in sales last year. Biggest challenge is figuring out how to turn that into stable revenue. Biggest opportunity is that unlike my previous (technical) infoproducts, this one doesn’t expire in 6 months.
I have 2 projects. One is already out in the wild getting used and abused by some. It is an SMTP server that can be used for testing and also simulating errors and delays. https://mailsnag.com
I made a simple app for tracking stock prices on your desktop: www.stockdesktopwidget.com
I started a tech blog as a side project 5 years ago. Now it's making $3,000-5,000 a month. It currently has around 600 articles.
Display ads make the bulk of the income. Affiliate links are a distant second.
I make far more than $500 per month in cryptocurrency staking and various types of lending pools. For the curious it’s like a hobby that can make you a lot of money.
Started trading back in 2020 and realized how bad I was it, and how much I needed a strict system to eliminate emotions! Had a degree in CS so spent a few months reading up on quant related stuff and realized how negligent I and other retail traders were, and how much data driven insights could help (ran over a million backtests the last 2 years)!
Built a simple analytics tool to show dozens of correlations & analytics between a wide variety of financial data points, and bootstrapped it to $120k/month! We grew from 0 to 54k users in two years, all organic. Has completely changed my life.
tradytics.com
macOS applications https://loshadki.app $1,500-3,000 USD /month
mexicantrain.online - My pandemic project continues to bop along nicely. Donations are generous. It makes people happy.
Social Link Pages (sociallinkpages.com) - a WordPress plugin to add link-in-bio pages to a WordPress install.
I developed a meme token launchpad (reflections, taxes, anti rug pull measures and stuff) and had it purchased by another startup.
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I'm amused when this is asked here. If you answer you're begging to get a surge in copycats, and by folks who might execute better and bigger, with more resources backing them.
During COVID I was in Mexico. At some point I wanted to go horseback riding. I was researching places to go horseback riding and I was not at all surprised to see I would have to make some calls to book.
Fast-forward a few weeks, I become pretty good friends with the owner at the ranch I went to. We grab tacos one night and he shares his concerns: They're not doing so well financially and are worried about whether or not they'll be able to afford feed in a month.
I got involved and we solved that problem and a few more: revamped the website (it looked and felt like it was from 2006), I whipped up a booking/reservation system to get more customers through the door, and exit surveys to make sure everything was perfect (and figure out what went wrong if it wasn't).
Bookings this month are up 490% from 2018 (according to the paper waivers they had) and that's without a single dollar spent in paid marketing. I answer a few emails every day from prospective riders and make sure everyone's happy. I get a percentage of each reservation which is cool, but the coolest part is that I get to say I am a co-owner in a Mexican horse ranch.