HN Explorer

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

148 points by program247365 ↗ HN
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

221 comments

[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] thread
mikece
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
At least $500 would pay for my mortgage almost just as well as when I got it.
mikece
$500/month doesn't even pay property taxes anymore, sadly.
Sohcahtoa82
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.

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program247365
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
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
This is super neat, and looks way easier to set up than a lava lamp wall.
Havoc
Unique idea. Well done.
sarora27
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
gardenhedge
Where do you find customers for this?
TheCapeGreek
I came upon KBee 'organically' last year. I came from a Notion org to a Google Doc org and I hate Docs and the siloed nature of it. General Drive search is a mess when you're searching for knowledge and not files. Suggested KBee to bring some of the discovery back in to the org.
adobrawy
Sounds very cool. I passed it on to a friendly organization.

This organization is in the Google Workspace ecosystem, but Google doesn't have documentation as accessible as Notion. We could try to implement Notion, but this will scatter the data storage and then there is the problem of archiving if the experiment fails. This looks like a plug-in solution to our problem of having Notion-like lightweight documentation and not scattering data.

Do I understand correctly that you charge a fee per organization regardless of the number of seats? This is important for this organization because it is a non-profit association, so there are many members, the board must provide access to information to all members, some members are minimally active, so per seat licenses seem to be often a blocker due to the large loss on inactive members.

sarora27
You are correct that we charge a per org fee regardless of number of seats. For non-profits, we offer a 50% discount on the subscription price. All the nonprof needs to do to get the discount is email me at sai@kbee.app
alexanderhall
Is the Google drive thing only a way to import data - or can the data be stored in Drive but edited in your service?
sarora27
All data is stored & edited in Drive. Kbee simply renders it in an easy to search/consume manner
pestaa
https://roadmap.kbee.app doesn't load for now. Will check back later! :)
sarora27
Ahh yes, this is down. We are still deciding if we want to bring back the public facing roadmap :)
mateuszbuda
A web scraping API: https://scrapingfish.com/
pjot
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
They seem to handle all the more annoying parts of web scraping: bypassing anti scraping things such as rate limits and captchas.
nomel
Being tech savvy, there's no way I'm implementing that for $0.002 per request. $150 gets you 75k scrapes.
kube-system
And if you're not doing it yourself, $150 does not get you very much labor.
goenning
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

silisili
This is awesome. Not using k8s in my current role, but when I was, that would have made my life a whole lot easier.
monroewalker
Looks really well done! What did you build it with?
goenning
The app is built with Tauri
mattfrommars
Could you please explain how did you make the UI of the application very modern and startup vibe. I am really into UI like that and I have no idea how its built. this is beyond bootstrap UI, is it true?

I geniuely thought after looking at the screenshot, I would need to learn Swift and understand how apps are made in Mac to make an app to look like that.

My background is in Java and C Sharp. Looking at Microsoft UI framework, it does not look at all what you made.

Could you please show a good place to start to make and mock UI like that ? I find your work more interesting since your background appears to be backend/cloud!

goenning
It’s all built based on tailwind ui and shadcd ui
ilamparithi
Sounds great. How do you handle the licenses for the desktop app? Custom solution or is there a library for it?
goenning
It’s a custom solution, zero regrets building it. Gives me total control over how it’s done and didn’t take me that long to implement
isaackrasmussen
Thumbs up for "Not another Electron app"! And multiplatform.

Coming from a very unreliable Lens, I'm looking forward to try out your app. Its already so speedy!!

goenning
Awesome! Glad to hear you liked it :)
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codergautam
https://swordbattle.io
program247365
Nice! What's your tech stack here?
codergautam
NodeJS, React, Postgres (for accounts), uWebSockets and Phaser
jeremywho
You make $500+/mo from that game?
codergautam
Used to at least, still gets a lot of traffic mainly from web game portals but not promoting it rn.
PinkPigeon
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
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
Could you link it here? It's hard to say without knowing what we are talking about.
bdominy
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
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
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.
Lionga
If they dont respond it just means they do not really care about what you provide. People will respond if they really need what you provide. Best case you just write to the wrong people, worst case nobody needs your service.
JohnCrickett
Build an audience first, then build the product that they want.
brysonreece
Seems akin to “to be a billionaire, start with a million”. Are there any decent resources out there related to growing a genuine audience? Shitposting on Twitter seems to be a skill I never picked up.
lgats
discussed 2 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38935714
program247365
Wow, search failed me. I did not see this. :(
em-bee
well apparently neither did anyone else because out of more than 160 users that wrote comments only three!!! users were commenting on both submissions. (four if you count this post of mine now)

maybe this should be posted more often?

kebsup
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
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
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?

kebsup
I think it would be quite cheap. The only reason is that I was using Gfycat which shut down.

The reason I did not implement my own was that Gfycat was integrated with reddit, so that posting the link would automatically show the gif.

jasondigitized
Ok, I'm gonna need you to break down the motion tracking for me. Are you using MediaPipe?
kebsup
No external libraries are used. I just greedy search the image from a grid of starting points to find the best match.

The similarity function is a sum of squared differences of the pixel values.

FriedPickles
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
> 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.

FriedPickles
Can't say I personally believe that claim, but there are a fair number of people out there who do. One person even sent formal test results showing that the adapter drastically reduces EMFs coming off the case. Not sure what to make of it but I found it interesting.
kube-system
The concept of grounding devices is a safety feature, broadly speaking. /shrug

It's a stretch, maybe an oversimplification, but I don't think it's a lie.

aetherspawn
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
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
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
The grounding lug exists on the charger body itself because some of Apple's first party plug adapters are grounded.
FriedPickles
Exactly. The Apple extension cord is grounded. They likely didn't include a grounding pin on the stock adapter because (1) it'd be really hard to make it fold down and (2) you lose the option of which direction to plug it in (potentially blocking a plug). So it's a design call.
aetherspawn
Note only USA adapters are bi-directional like you say.
deepsummer
Wonderful idea! I never considered that a grounded power adapter could solve the buzzing issue. But now that I think about it, that's the reason why I don't get the buzz when my MacBook is connected to my monitor.
neurostimulant
You should made this for other plug types as well and sell it in other countries!
gadders
It looks like you've invented British plugs.
royaltjames
Amazing! I feel the tinge on my left palm when it's plugged in. Bought.
homero
I know it grounds inside the brick but does the connector have a third pin?
FriedPickles
The adapter connects the outer metal part of the connector for both USB-C and Magsafe to to ground, thus grounding the metal shell of the MacBook.
cici1970
Glad they are selling for you. It's a known issue, so I just went to the Apple store and since my MacBook was brand new, they gave me a three-prong adapter for free.
blopp99
Can you share more info about the creation? Did you register a patent? What was the MOQ? Have you sold out? Did you have to comply to any electrical regulation?

Kudos!

jmhmd
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
This is great. I run a very very similar platform. How are your prices so cheap? 120$ for 500 studies a year?
jmhmd
S3 is really cheap, and from the beginning I spent a lot of time optimizing for simplicity and efficiency, so I don’t have much overhead. Since this is targeted towards residents and academic radiologists, it’s important to me to keep the price as low as possible. What is your platform if you don’t mind sharing?
shipwright
That's rad, lack of lock-in and sharing in a niche is a big green flag- Hope adding ultrasound to the list of modalities goes as planned, would gladly lend a hand at no cost if it's high on the priority list!
rozenmd
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
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
I love these threads fwiw and will come back to them from time to time to read about what others are doing
hsuduebc2
I do. It is always interesting for me to see what people come with.
hackan
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
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
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.
acuozzo
Around these parts "ideas are cheap" is often repeated, but I've failed to come up with a marketable idea for the past ten or so years.

My hobbies & interests are too niche and the problems I have in life can't be solved by tech, so I have yet to run across an idea I'd be intrinsically-motivated enough to pursue.

With that being said, I'm hoping I'll run into someone else's idea which will help me see through the kind of blindness which prevented rsync users from seeing Dropbox as something worth building, so I find exposure to these "little" ideas useful since reading through threads like these is somewhat like speed-dating for startup ideas.

rozenmd
These threads work.

Both as a seller and a buyer, I've found customers and products I wouldn't have found organically.

jasondigitized
Absolutely. I love seeing people find success with their creations.
abetusk
Yes, I get something out of these threads.

I'm relatively technically inclined so the "tech stack" used is not really all that interesting. I don't really care about what React widget was used to create a customizable overlay text on an animated gif meme, I care about how the person found an audience and managed to monetize it.

GitHub, Reddit, "Show HN" or other areas of the internet are much better at highlighting interesting projects. This thread is specifically about monetizing small to mid range projects, so the focus is on how to acquire a meager income stream both in targeting audience and monetization strategies.

The best responses in this thread, in my opinion, are the ones that talk about how they managed to get to $500/month by identifying what problem people would pay money for, how they found customers and the specific type of transaction (purchasing something physical, subscription, one-time removal of watermark, etc.).

deepsummer
Yes. These are the posts on HN that I enjoy most. Tech stack etc are also somewhat interesting, but not that relevant since for most people is best tech stack is the one they are familiar with.
a_petrov
Yes, I love that thread. It helps me with brainstorming on new ideas.

Also, it's pretty nice to share with the small team I'm part of. We're currently working on custom client projects and we'd like to build our product. Seeing how people do it is a nice morale boost, especially for a team that lacks experience in building.

HeyLaughingBoy
I do. I don't care about the tech stack, but I'm always curious about what got people started building something. What opportunity did they see and what led them to that point.
realprimoh
Yes, these are some of my favorite threads on HN.
WhackyIdeas
I am making an uncountable amount of money with my side project of being a ‘gentleman of the night’.
crs_gentleman
Ha! I've considered this, and would really value pointers, if you're able to share?
WhackyIdeas
I haven’t managed to make ends meet yet. It really is uncountable.
cperciva
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.
johnwheeler
Really admire what you’ve built with Tarsnap. Seems like a very durable business with a great reputation
mgl
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
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
I guess it depends on the employer. Mine is fairly chill with it.
wahnfrieden
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
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
Funny, I've been thinking of building this automation for myself.
mixedsignals
Cool! It's been super useful personally and hard to describe without sounding scammy because people don't believe there's free money just sitting out there.

Need to put some more work into it, but there's so many sites that could be added and the bonuses really tally up if you collect from all of them (I have a running list and right now it's around $20/day in bonuses if you collect from every site on the list).

zurtri
So how do you withdraw the funds? Or do they sit in the online casino's site for you to put a bet on or something?
mixedsignals
It sits in the online casino's site. Some sites require you to play through the bonus once, while others allow you to withdraw directly once you reach a certain balance. For the ones that require you to play through, I just play the bonus through low-volatility slots.
j0hnyl
I think someone maintains a spreadsheet of these that I came across on reddit. I'll come back and post it here later if I can dig it up.
lemerou
Would this work for someone outside the US using a VPN?
ssz
I'm making some money by putting all my nonfiction book notes on https://littlerbooks.com/
program247365
Nice! I thought about doing this at some point. Did you have to run ads, do SEO or anything to start to get traffic?
predmijat
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.

cbluth
Landing page immediately sucked me in, and I'm curious about more. I looked at your blog and I was disappointed
predmijat
Sorry :) That one thing is cool though?
dave333
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

jasondigitized
How have you gotten traffic to these? Genuinely curious.
dave333
Purely organic - have not found any way to pay for traffic with a positive ROI although I have not tried very hard.
kzisme
Is there a different backend/purpose behind each separate domain/site?
dave333
Yes samurai vs normal sudoku, different ranges of difficulty, different sets of puzzles, and a purpose built printables site.
techmiker
I love this because it combines my favourite things! Nice work. Can you share what your income is from the sites combined roughly? Is this your side job or is it your main income now?
dave333
It's always been a side job/income, but comfortably more than the $500/month listed in the thread title.