[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in ...
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Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 - Show and
tell
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
Author : program247365
Score : 83 points
Date : 2024-01-23 21:33 UTC (1 hours ago)
| mikece wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| At least $500 would pay for my mortgage almost just as well as
| when I got it.
| mikece wrote:
| $500/month doesn't even pay property taxes anymore, sadly.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| you must have bought a long time ago
| program247365 wrote:
| 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. :)
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This is super neat, and looks way easier to set up than a lava
| lamp wall.
| sarora27 wrote:
| 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
| ganarajpr wrote:
| Do you have a blog or a write up explaining how you went about
| doing this ?
| gardenhedge wrote:
| Where do you find customers for this?
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| I'm curious too.
| lukebouch wrote:
| Same here
| whyleyc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You sir.... are a paragon among men.
| mateuszbuda wrote:
| A web scraping API: https://scrapingfish.com/
| pjot wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| They seem to handle all the more annoying parts of web
| scraping: bypassing anti scraping things such as rate limits
| and captchas.
| nomel wrote:
| Being tech savvy, there's no way I'm implementing that for
| $0.002 per request. $150 gets you 75k scrapes.
| goenning wrote:
| 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 ~EUR5k/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 >EUR1000/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
| silisili wrote:
| This is awesome. Not using k8s in my current role, but when I
| was, that would have made my life a whole lot easier.
| codergautam wrote:
| https://swordbattle.io
| PinkPigeon wrote:
| 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.
| kLama wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Could you link it here? It's hard to say without knowing what
| we are talking about.
| bdominy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| taylorbuley wrote:
| 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.
| julianpye wrote:
| 'ds' is still perfect advice:
| https://www.paulgraham.com/ds.html
| lgats wrote:
| discussed 2 weeks ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38935714
| kebsup wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| FriedPickles wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| aetherspawn wrote:
| 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.
| callalex wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| kube-system wrote:
| The grounding lug exists on the charger body itself because
| some of Apple's first party plug adapters _are_ grounded.
| jmhmd wrote:
| 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.
| domlebo70 wrote:
| This is great. I run a very very similar platform. How are your
| prices so cheap? 120$ for 500 studies a year?
| rozenmd wrote:
| 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
| thyrox wrote:
| 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.
| taylorfinley wrote:
| I love these threads fwiw and will come back to them from time
| to time to read about what others are doing
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| I do. It is always interesting for me to see what people come
| with.
| hackan wrote:
| 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.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| 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.
| callalex wrote:
| 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.
| WhackyIdeas wrote:
| I am making an uncountable amount of money with my side project
| of being a 'gentleman of the night'.
| curtisblaine wrote:
| What does it mean?
| crs_gentleman wrote:
| Ha! I've considered this, and would really value pointers, if
| you're able to share?
| cperciva wrote:
| 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.
| mgl wrote:
| 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.
| jonwinstanley wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I guess it depends on the employer. Mine is fairly chill with
| it.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| 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
| mixedsignals wrote:
| 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).
| j0hnyl wrote:
| Funny, I've been thinking of building this automation for
| myself.
| ssz wrote:
| I'm making some money by putting all my nonfiction book notes on
| https://littlerbooks.com/
| predmijat wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2024-01-23 23:01 UTC)