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Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

934 points by code_Whisperer ↗ HN
Not sure about anyone else, but I enjoy seeing the posts on side projects making money. Often while reading all of the comments I find new products or services I want, so I buy them and contribute further to that hustle's success. But for every hacker making $100 or more per month with their idea, there are hundreds more working hard, making nothing, struggling to get started. Does that describe you? Maybe the community just needs to hear about what you're offering, what you've been working on. If you've got something cool that has not yet gained traction, maybe it just needs to be seen by a gaggle of like-minded hackers and geeks. So share!

1,079 comments

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raptor556
I made a real estate thing that basically scraped a bunch of data and then built a NLP query interface on top to query real estate data in natural language.

Couldn't find a customer so it makes $0 haha. Here's an example of the system working, minus a pretty UI: https://imgur.com/a/ITDKtPC

theappsecguy
Does ruby have an NLP library or are you rolling your own?
raptor556
Built a separate service that used spacy
nullfish
3D dice rolling with friends https://dddice.com

Have some ideas on monetization in the future but for now it's just fun

theappsecguy
This is dope! Whats the tech stack behind it if you don't mind me asking?
nullfish
Thank you :)

Laravel, MySQL (Planetscale), Redis. Hosted on fly.io

Total monthly expenses is somewhere near $30/mo which is less than I've paid for personal hosting at times.

anandvc
Very cool! I'm curious: How did you render the 3d dice? What's the front end stack?
nullfish
Thanks! Frontend stack is React, Three.js, and Cannon.js. We use FBX for the models mostly but started to support GLB files recently which open up a world of new options for customization.
findhumane
I just launched Find Humane, a free website and app for finding humanely raised animal products: https://findhumane.com/

Currently $0 revenue but we have some affiliate links to humanely certified delivery services, so hopefully the ball will start rolling!

code_Whisperer
I think this has potential for a certain target audience. Not a criticism, but feedback: if I stumbled on this site I'd have no idea what it was about based on the current landing page. Will you be adding an intro/description about what the site is for? :-)
findhumane
Thanks, great feedback. I'm using the same code for web and mobile apps (Expo/React Native), but mobile users have gone through the app store landing page, so I agree it makes sense to add a landing page for web users. I'm thinking of a small little pop-up on first visit, but let me know if you'd prefer something else.
jaclaz
Small side-side issue, it seems you have a typo, without Javascript I get:

JavaScript is required to be not enabled in your browser.

Reload

findhumane
Thanks! I'll fix that in the next release.
senko
Bootstrapping a project generator tool for Django and Node: https://apibakery.com

I expect (well, hope for) it to be making some money at some point in the future but don't worry since it's a side project and something I'm passionate about building even if it's just for fun.

courgette
I have an existing Django side project. Very simple app, but cool data. The usage is mostly querying the data in the Django admin and generating some reports.

Very little custom code. Do you think I could realistically migrate and get something out of apibakery?

senko
If you already have a Django project up and running, you wouldn't gain much by migrating, as most of the value (for the moment) is in the initial setup, ready boilerplate and sane defaults.

You could give it a spin tho (signup is free, and you can even create a demo project without signing up), any feedback is welcome!

toyg
This is actually pretty awesome. Unless you attach a cloud deployment setup (with all the complexity it entails in terms of monitoring etc), I don't see a serious monetization pattern for it (even the most hardcore cookiecutter agency probably wouldn't use this more than once or twice a week), but please publish the source if you ever take it offline.
senko
Thanks!

I have some ideas for cloud deployment / testing, without making apibakery into a cloud hosting service (which is a different level of commitment I don't want to do on a side project).

I do know even one-time template projects that charge one-time fee of $200-$500 per template, so the market is there, just need to figure out the best pricing strategy.

itskarma22
that's pretty cool. Have you considered CLI version ?
senko
I did not, that's an interesting idea, thanks!
kilroy123
I don't make a dime off my art newsletter but I still keep it going:

https://randomdailyart.com/

nummerfuenf
I tried to subscribe, but it said there was a problem :(
code_Whisperer
Strange, might be an edge case, I tried and it worked for me.
kilroy123
Interesting.

Would you mind emailing me your address? I've heard others say the same thing and I could never figure out what went wrong. (Email in profile)

johnmaguire
Looks cool - just signed up!

FYI - I'm not able to expand the FAQs to see their answers.

def-
I'm working on an open source online coop 2d platform game called DDraceNetwork: https://ddnet.org/

A lot of keeping infrastructure running, code reviews for the active developers we have, community management, some development: https://ddnet.org/news/ddnet-year-2021-in-review/

The community is the main reason for me to keep it running. We only cover server costs, but no one takes any payment to work on DDNet.

eckza
https://gatesnaplabs.com

Idea: Make software for the Olympic sport of bicycle motocross.

Execution: Flawless. Built the app in Elm + Ionic Capacitor. It looks great and works perfectly. There's even a Web version at https://gearbag.bike

Marketing: lol

Result: I have spent five digits of money (paid my friends market wages for their help, particularly with UX and design) and made $6 from Google AdMob and have ~100 installs.

Worth it. Doubling down on the next project this year.

spion
Can we do projects that we know will stay at $0 but we still hope might gain traction?

OSS: typed-graphql-builder https://typed-graphql-builder.spion.dev/ is a TypeScript based graphql query builder. No more writing untyped strings and running a watcher in the background - generate the builder from the server schema once then write any queries in TS with the help of the language server

It was inspired by tql (https://tql.dev/) but generates a much smaller client and has full, automatic type inference for query variables used in input objects.

(Side note: I feel bad about how similar it is to tql, but the code generation approach was so different (mainly inspired by graphql-zeus) that it felt like poor form to just send a PR changing everything.)

IceDane
This is very neat, and I've actually been planning on building something similar - just never got around to it. I wasn't aware of tql, though, so it's not unlikely I would have just used that instead.

The only "downside" I can see is that all my projects are already set up to use graphql-codegen, and switching to this or tql would just not be worth the effort. This is because 1. it's really not that much of a hassle to run graphql-codegen on the side, since i'm already running other things on the side anyway 2. I'm also using graphql-codegen for other things, such as generating types for cache updates and such in urql.

I might give this a spin in a fresh project, though. But it probably won't let me drop the codegen dependency completely.

cronos2546
Having banged my head against the guilds graphql code gen tool for the past two days, I will pay you 10 in the am, if this thing works and you explain to me how the f to get their config file to read both schema and ops files.
magneticmonkey
My friend and I have been working on a replacement for Facebook events in our social circle. We found that a lot of people are not using FB events anymore and were having a hard time planning social events. Not making any money (yet) but we hope to someday! We designed our app to make it easy to share invites on any social platform/chat group without being tied down.

https://dateit.io

courgette
Look nice. Can someone with a dumb phone and internet on a computer use it ?
magneticmonkey
Thanks! Yeah we support iOS, web and android! We are still adding support on web to create events but you can view and respond.
asdev
how did you launch this? to your existing social circle/friends or did you do any marketing?
magneticmonkey
We started with our friends and family. We have been running ads on the App and Play store. Nothing too crazy. We are starting to look into more local advertising to drum up interest!
thealchemistdev
https://GymTools.io

To be fair. This project isn't meant to generate revenue. Back when I started webdev, I needed to learn how to publish a SPA so I threw something together in preparation for a larger and more complex app.

petodo
I'm not even trying, but my income dropped to like 1/10 from my record levels, I wonder when it will stop dropping. Luckily for me I am very frugal and not splurging, so I didn't need to adjust my expenses at all, since whether I earned 12000 USD per month or 1200 USD I still spend same, I guess will start doing something about it if I will earn less than I spend so I don't need to touch my ~13 years of expenses worth savings.
code_Whisperer
Throughout my life I have found that hard times like what you describe are often the best motivator to start something new. This is an OPPORTUNITY my friend, so don't guess, just get out there and DO. :-)
rain_checker
I created https://dropory.com/ - an app that predict the day with the best weather for any location. Good for finding a good event or wedding date.

Definitely been costing me more than any earnings! :)

JSLegendDev
I'm making a desktop game to be sold on itch.io for 3$ (currently making 0$ because not out yet and it's difficult to make money with games anyway). I'm using JavaScript with the Kaboom.js library and Tauri as the desktop wrapper.

My game is called HARVEST MOVE and it's a grid based movement game where you have to harvest as many plants as possible without getting killed by various animals.

It's a puzzle game disguised as an arcade game.

The game is still in development but I've started posting gifs, screenshots and some art of the game already on Twitter.

Here is my twitter link if you want to check that out : https://twitter.com/JSLegendDev

thomaslord
Disclaimer: This project isn't currently publicly available.

I was using Simple as my primary bank, and their Goals feature made it possible to do envelope-style budgeting really conveniently. Unfortunately the bank that backed them, BBVA, sold to PNC. This lead to my Simple being shut down, and my account was converted first to a BBVA account and then to a PNC account.

When I lost access to the Simple app I first built myself a spreadsheet, and then started work on a webapp called Complex to replicate their functionality. Currently you have to enter all transactions manually, but I eventually plan to integrate with Plaid so I can automatically pull in transaction data. Without automatic transaction imports, I'd say Complex currently falls about halfway between the original Simple app and a spreadsheet in terms of convenience/ease-of-use.

I don't have any kind of business model for this, but if I eventually make it public I'll probably charge a monthly fee to allow automatic transaction imports so I can cover Plaid's fees. There's not much server load required to run something like this, so I expect I'll be able to keep server costs below $20/month even if I pick up a couple hundred active users.

scrollaway
Share your email somewhere, or send me one (cf profile). I'm working on an app which you could be interested in :)
toyg
You'd be competing with the likes of YNAB, that provide a lot of features already today (including auto-import in most countries). Tough job.
jetrink
YNAB is $100/year and though it is polished and well-designed, it's a pretty simple system that hasn't changed much recently. I think there's a lot of room to compete on price, particularly for users like me who still enter all of their transactions manually.
zbhoy
Have you heard of the Lunchmoney app? I found it recently and find it to be a nice in-between of spreadsheet and full automated budget app. Plus it pulls transactions in
reilly3000
Check out Finta.io it’s a nice simple service by a solo hacker and could be a great partner. She wraps Plaid and streams it to popular destinations like Sheets and Coda, where users are given some starter content in their account and are free to go from there. Check it out, the connector is slick, but the budgeting and analysis tools aren’t there yet.
kolanos
A Plaid developer account is free and will let you connect to up to 5 bank accounts.
phoenixy1
It's 5 by default, but you can actually connect up to 100 accounts for free if you submit a request for full development access.
Calvin02
Yes, but it also comes with giving Plaid all the data and history about your bank account transactions.
lancesells
I won't use Plaid to connect bank accounts so entering transactions manually would be my use-case. There are some of us out there. :)
hacker-brews
Man I miss Simple. I'm honestly shocked and saddened that nothing took its place, though they were a major pain about getting my wife an account so we could join finances and then they closed a few months after I switched away.
troublebucket
yeah I also don't want any third party getting ahold of my transaction data. My solution was to have my banks send alert emails to me for any transaction. Then the alert emails are forwarded to a Dockerized email server I set up. The transaction data is automatically parsed out of the emails and loaded into a database. The only cost for me is the server.

Honestly the email server could be gotten rid of if someone was willing to directly access their gmail email account via IMAP, or whoever you use for email. I thought it would be a fun challenge to make an email server x_x

My goal is to make it so people like you could write some regex for their bank alert email parsing, spin this up, and be off to the races with no third party interference.

Here's the repo (WIP): https://github.com/katefike/sage

drewchew
created an account here just to say i would pay for this service if it worked near real time. my wife and i were so bummed when simple went away and we haven't found a bank or service yet that feels like it provides the same feature set effectively.
brimwats
another person who was crushed by simple going away and would love to pay for something like this!
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thejudge22
Have you seen https://dasbudget.com

It's a near clone of the Simple interface with new enhancements like CC Integration. Currently active in the App Stores. Web App is coming soon. uses Plaid and MX for integration

binarymax
I launched one of my games http://anagramica.com in 2013, and has negative revenue and zero maintenance requirements. It’s on an ancient cloud instance. It has an active API that powers several other games (probably more than I’m aware of!). It’s so old that it predates free SSL certs like letsencrypt, and I don’t care enough to spend the time on wiring it up.

I’m also hesitant to post it here because I don’t want it to go down if it gets too much traffic!

alexanderson
https://thoriumsim.com

A multiplayer spaceship bridge simulator game, where your crew each takes a different position on a futuristic spaceship, explore space, meet aliens, complete missions, and hopefully keep your ship in one piece!

If you've ever played Artemis, Empty Epsilon, Starship Horizons, Star Trek: Bridge Crew, heck even SpaceTeam, this is in the same genre. It's pretty much Space DnD, with the option to have a Game Master role.

Still under development, but by the time its done it'll have a 3D universe simulation, crew and ship systems simulation, interactive controls for a whole bridge of friends, and an interactive mission designer.

I've got a handful of donations coming in through OpenCollective, but I just about break even with my hosting and Apple Developer program costs.

ssgodderidge
Glad you're still working on this, Alex! Keep it going
paulryanrogers
Browser Routr is my way of getting some sites to auto open in another browser: https://paulrrogers.com/products/browser-routr
masukomi
i gotta ask. Why didn't you just use Choosy or one of the many other apps that do this?
paulryanrogers
I tried many before building my own. None auto opened with a regular, left click on a link within a browser. They required right-click and picking from a prompt or clicks from outside the browser.

Also wanted same app and config on Windows and MacOS.

logicboard
https://logicboard.com - a collaborative code editor, more like < $0/mo considering no revenue + AWS expenses :)

I call it a side-project turned in to side-expense

tdjsnelling
https://edalerts.app/

A companion tool for the space sim game Elite Dangerous — useless to anyone that doesn't play the game. I have had a couple of donations from kind users.

biggins
Just kicked off the beta launch of Flourish, a performance review/management platform that uses a radial based approach to growth frameworks instead of the traditional ladder based. It aims to reduce the impact of bias in performance reviews and reward your individual skillset.

https://joinflourish.io/

interestica
I'm working on something that uses immersive/360/vr video for seniors who don't have the ability to travel or see loved ones easily. I'd love some help if you have an interest in the VR space or helping an aging population. SLVR.ca
winddude
My question to those that are not making money or loosing money? I've been there before. How do you stay motivated to work on it?
__MatrixMan__
I keep seeing problems in the wild that it solves and it's like an itch that I can't scratch. If I don't occasionally put work towards it I get all depressed and start having dystopian nightmares about the unscratched itch.

It's not exactly healthy.

code_Whisperer
It can be a struggle, for sure. Personally, I am driven (for some unknown reason that seems bigger than potential income) to create new things, and am swamped (plagued?) by dozens of new ideas every week. Not just in tech, but also in art, writing, music and more. I'll be the first to admit, I've had plenty of stinkers, and on occasion it took someone I trusted to be bluntly honest with me before I would give up on an idea. For an embarrassing, personal example of this, see nubbers.com, which made exactly THREE sales over 3+ years before I finally shut it down. Although my friends and family still use the product - for free, of course.

But I guess in the end, it comes down to what you believe. Do YOU think it's a good idea? Are you willing to fight for it? If your answer is "yes", then keep going. Ask yourself what you would do if someone cloned your product overnight and started selling it... what would you do to make your original product or idea better and compete against them? How would you reposition and regroup to fend off this tedious interloper? Or would you just throw in the towel? Ask yourself if you might be able do some guerilla marketing. Take a group of your friends to pertinent trade shows, all of you wearing shirts emblazoned with your website or product name, just wandering around. Make business cards with special offers and leave them in random office building restrooms (or bars or clubs or whatever makes sense for your product). Find a related product with whom you can partner and ride each other's coattails. Hire some social influencers to mention your brand. Create giveaways and contests. Yada^3.

If you believe in it, don't give up and do what it takes!