Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell
It's the time of the year again, so I'd be interested hear what new (and old) ideas have come up.
Previously asked on: 2023 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38467691
2022 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34190421
2021 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095
2020 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167
2019 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20899863
816 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 334 ms ] threadEarlier in 2024 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39110194
2023 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38467691
2022 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34190421
2021 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095
2020 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167
2019 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20899863
2018 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17790306
2017 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148804
Steve Krug's "Don't make me think" is old but still applies to the modern web.
Right now my work is Apple platforms only (revenue through App Store), but I'm actively looking into ways to expand to other platforms.
As a long time photographer, my philosophy is to make tools that are useful to me first and foremost, and to build smaller scope things that compose well (UNIX philosophy). I've got some exciting new things planned for 2025.
These are all side projects right now, as my official full time occupation is Japanese language school student (I moved to Japan at the end of 2023 year after almost 15 years in SF Bay Area tech companies/startups, becoming a full time student at 34 surrounded by 21 year olds from a very different background has been an interesting experience on its own).
Since the revenue has been increasing the last few months, I incorporated to keep things organized, but for now these projects are still "side projects". It'd be cool if I could justify financially to do this full time after I finish language school in 2026.
And yeah, it’s super interesting how when a new recording technology is created, we seek to avoid its limitations; but later on, those limitations get embraced on their own merits for aesthetic value!
Always a pleasure discovering a portfolio of apps from an indie developer that genuinely do one thing well, are well designed, and all have the coveted “Data Not Collected” app privacy card to boot.
It went from side project to my primary job in less than 6 months.
Everyone was saying that $99 was too much for “an API wrapper”, but here we are, 2 years later and with hundreds of small to enterprise companies using it :)
Some folks just can't imagine buying what some folks are selling.
weird.
Could also be that some of those people just don't expect to get enough use (or some other kind of 'enough') out of a service for a given price point. There are loads of people who have no problem paying for YouTube Premium, while others find the price too high.
Some people pay for the highest-end smartphones, getting them as soon as they come out. I think they're crazy. (-:
Then I started sharing the progress on LinkedIn/X, my co-workers shared on their network too which also helped.
After 4 months I put a price on it and sold it with a 50% discount for early adopters. A lot of people bought it, which to me was a signal that I was into something that could become bigger if I invested more time on it.
Is that because you don't want to provide a product in advance of payment or just the overhead of creation/tracking?
I only get PO from larger companies, and I only do it if they’re buying a lot of seats, or if it’s a strategy customer
Lens shows me repeats of log lines when I'm trying to scroll down in a live log. It has checkboxes but no means to operate on checked boxes. If I have my Secret set to show b64 decoded, and paste in a new secret that is very clearly non b64 encoded, it tries to push it as-is and fails quietly. It shows things as Healthy whose only sub resources are not healthy, but that's par for the course in Kubernetes land. I also have to fully quit it (not just close the window) on my new MacBook whenever I make the mistake of looking at it after a gcloud auth timeout, even when simply running fresh kubectl commands in the background every time would outperform the garbage Electron tab changes.
Plus, this new thing has resource diffs, which I was surprised Lens didn't have. Frankly I was surprised how little Lens has once I started actually using it and figured there'd be easy money in building the community's new favorite editor. But I'm glad to have seen this post, here's hoping it becomes the new standard.
My intern somehow managed to get it running inside docker for our dev systems.
It's been a consistent passion project for me now over the years and I love getting feedback and suggestions from people using it. It'll never have ads (I hate them) and only data collection is optional crash reports.
https://portdroid.net
Last month, I released SmoothTrack 2.0 which includes basic eye tracking and camera control gestures.
https://smoothtrack.app
I think you meant to write 'an artisanal and bespoke infra-red bandpass filter in front of an old webcam'.
Precisely this. You keep your eyes on the screen and just nudge your head in the direction you want. Your brain “gets” it real quickly and it feels very intuitive.
Also, FS2024. Wow.
Most people use a desktop webcam which can do decent tracking or an iPhone which does really good tracking through ARkit, but there isn't really a decent solution on Android.
It could be a good new market opportunity for you on desktop, iPhone, or Android - but especially for Android users since there isn't really any alternatives. There is a steady stream of new people getting into being a vtuber and I think a $15 app might be an easy sell considering people can end up spending up to a five-digit amount getting custom character models commissioned. If you are able to improve the eye/face tracking past the basic level you mentioned the 2.0 version having, it would be even more appealing.
VtubeStudio only supports the nicer 2D avatars and as far as I know has no intention of getting into the 3D side of things. There are a few decent programs people use with 3D avatars(links below), but it seems they aren't really as high quality as VtubeStudio so they don't have the market cornered like VtubeStudio does for 2D.
As far as tracking goes, on the camera side of things there isn't really any difference between 2D and 3D that might limit you to one or the other.
There is a pretty large demand for tracking apps on Android because there are no widely used apps currently available. Big-time vtubers usually get iPhones so they can use the ARkit tracking that is Apple only, but a lot of people just starting out have Android and are currently forced to use a regular PC webcam that tends not to be as accurate and also doesn't allow people to offload the computing resources needed for face tracking to their phones.
Vroid Studio(the main app people use with 3D avatars): https://store.steampowered.com/app/1486350/VRoid_Studio_v201...
Warudo(this one is a lot newer than Vroid Studio so it has a lot less users, but is probably the second most popular 3D app): https://store.steampowered.com/app/2079120/Warudo/
I released this fairly simple ChatGPT/Claude wrapper a few months ago. Currently it’s doing about 15K/month. It’s an invisible Electron app that can be used to cheat in coding interviews / OA’s.
I honestly want everyone to cheat on these leetcode style interviews. I want that process to be broken and for the whole system to become completely ineffective, so that companies are forced to go back to actually putting some thought into hiring.
I doubt it'll happen and instead surveillance during these interviews will probably just increase instead, but perhaps you've kicked off a game of cat and mouse here, which may make some hiring managers reconsider leetcode.
System is broken, therefore let's make it 100% obvious that it's broken, so it can be totally rebuilt.
We're selling them mainly on our custom lightweight online store. It's done with minimal JS and Node as backend, Stripe as payment provider. We have a Meta pixel to help us track our advertising conversion, but we've disabled cookies, they just felt somehow dirty... It's nice to have power over these things when running your own business. As a next step for the website I'm thinking of including a templating language in the workflow, now I'm still doing edits with search and replace, sometimes missing things... but I do enjoy the simplicity.
The actual business has two main challenges: First is discoverability. It's a pretty unique product, an adventure escape game in a magazine. It doesn't sell well in physical game shops since it doesn't look like a game. We sell well in conventions where we get to explain what the product is, but we also want some weekends for ourselves! Meta ads for our online shop are working surprisingly well though.
The second and bigger challenge is shipping. Our flat is filled with boxes, and the time I spend sorting magazines, enveloping them, printing address labels, carrying them to the post office... it's really not worth my hourly rate as an engineer (Nor my wife's, but I do it since my schedule is more flexible, and I've automated some parts of the process with a string of incredibly user hostile shell scripts). And the shipping costs are downputting to many, we're quite cornered here in Finland. We are slowly gaining some distribution partners in Europe, but we should also be looking into better shipping options, like perhaps some kind of shipping warehouse exist? Our volume is slowly getting big enough so that it might be feasible. I've only done some cursory googling on this but don't exactly know what I'm even looking for, and there's only so many hours in a day.
A lot of work, small margins (ads+printing+misc takes a big slice), but around $500 profit per month. Feels absolutely fantastic to have an actual concrete business we own!
https://cluehound.com
- Start on page 1, read the story and decide if you want to take path A or B
- A = go to page 2, B = page 3
- then there was another decision making, and the story goes on...
Until you either escape the dungeon, or die (different ways of dying lol).
It was so cool!
Def interested in these! Thanks for posting!
[0] https://usborne.com/gb/agent-arthur-s-arctic-adventure-97818...
On an early version of my personal website, I created one of these, but as the reader, you could reach an unwritten section. Your reward was that you got to write that page of the book, and the choices (or ending) that the character received.
I seeded a few pages to set a story, and then let the readers go wild. It was pretty fun.
https://gifmemes.io, haven't touched the code for years, makes between 100-300$ a month, depending on the season.
https://vocabuo.com - a side project I hope to turn into a business, so I work on it around two days a week, made around $3.5k in revenue last month but most of it went back into ads.
Gifmemes - you can buy a 10 USD watermark removal Vocabuo - freemium and you can buy classic Appstore/Playstore subscription to unlock the other 80% of the features
Who'd have thought that a CMS could still make money in 2024, but this one is around £500 a month.
It obviously doesn't pay the bills or the mortgage, but it works. All my clients are word of mouth, I do not advertise at all (a combination of costs and insanely opaque / fractured advertising models by Facebook and co...I don't have time to get a phd in your ad platform to see if any of my money is actually doing anything)
I build it originally because I was fed up with Wordpress / Squarespace / Weebly / Wix, because all of their interfaces are slow and don't work on mobile.
This CMS is fast and works on mobile.
It's also pretty cheap nowadays, as I've not been raising prices like everyone else.
It won't do super-flashy websites. It's mostly about having low-JS, good SEO, easy access to information, which can be managed by very inexperienced users (I live rurally and we have a fair few pensioners as clients, they all get along with the system very well).
There are just about a billion things I want to do with it, but it never made enough money to become my full-time job, so it mostly just sits there and does its job.
Nice!
I shared in the parent thread about my tool which spell checks sites, it found a few small issues: https://www.spl.ing/report-card?website=pinkpigeon.co.uk&uui...
Did you already have a relationship with this company somehow or did you have to go and sell them?
Maybe I'm reaching here, but as a guess, are you able to offer your partner's services out the cut you take to smooth over issues? I'm just thinking that you have fantastic incentives to do stuff like that (prioritize long-term money) that a support person working as an employee of the company directly would not have real incentives to offer...
In a former life I was a support drone. Days were full of us taking calls from abusive a-holes who just wanted to get over on someone and also people who had legitimate grievances and deserved relief. We typically weren't empowered to do anything about either of them.
Scraper of job listings directly from company websites. I found my last day job by using a scraper that visits company websites in search of job listings. Now I've turned it into an app for others to use and access jobs that are posted on company websites (rather than paid employer ads on Indeed or wherever). This gives the job searcher an advantage to find jobs not listed on job search sites and show the company you have taken time/interest to visit their site.
As a competitor, getting alerts about roles another company is hiring for can be very interesting. Combine it with trends of postings over time…
The company data was gathered online for a long time until I found https://www.thecompaniesapi.com/ (which now is the source for much of that data)
I would love a map of job postings to see where it might make sense to move to in the future. If there's 10 jobs within 50 miles... that might be a good place to buy a house.
Additionally, if I filter by 'north america' I still get jobs from canada and india because they're remote only. I would LOVE to be able to filter out those positions. Also I would love to be able to AND 'remote' and 'north america'. I would like to work remotely, but only for US companies
love your site <3
So the inclusive vs exclusive filtering is something that I struggle to perfect here. I'm tempted to throw both in the UI (since its ready to go on the backend) but its hard to explain to users. One thing you can do that is not so obvious is add a tag for "Canada" but click on the tag again which will put a line through Canada and exclude that location from your filter (still need to have helpers to show users how to do that). The 'remote' tag is probably the toughest one to parse of a job listing because it might appear anywhere within the text, so there is some inaccuracies for sure but its improving I hope!
Ah I could probably add filters for company locations specifically too (so you can filter US companies), that's an interesting use case too.
Thanks for the compliment too, it has been really fun to build
* Job listings for "Quality Assurance" and "QA" are split into different listings in Job Search.
* I really like the green highlight for Salary range! Personally, I would sort by jobs that list salary first, then by location (or relevance, or whatever).
* The filter was a little confusing to use. I see you talked about it with other users in here. It needs some love, but it's getting there. :)
* If you are going to target job searchers, it would be very helpful too see metrics based on the results. Here's a few examples I came up with
Example 1: I select Help Desk -> Chicago
I see a short-term graph showing whether demand has gone: up, down, or stayed the same - included is a red/green/yellow arrow giving me an idea at a glance. This helps me understand how many Help Desk postings are in Chicago
Example 2: I select Cybersecurity -> I also select Information Security -> NYC
I see a short-term graph showing demand for Cyber vs IS in NYC. This helps me understand if which job has more postings in NYC.
Example 3: I select Python Developer -> Boston & Dallas.
I see a medium-term graph showing demand for each location for Python Developer. This helps me decide whether demand is more consistent in Boston or Dallas.
Example 4: I select Asia & Canada -> Advertising (Under Industry)
I see a long-term graph showing the overall trend for that industry in each of those countries. This helps me track whether jobs are being outsourced, what I should expect in the coming years, and/or which country is the most competitive in that industry.
Hope that helps! Good luck. :)
Yea there is a much better version of the search bar soon-to-deploy (which accounts for aliases like QA -> Quality Assurance) and it will match by word rather than the entire phrase (currently "software engineer" will not query "software test engineer"). Appreciate the callout here
You can find a toggle switch for "has salary" under the "other" filters which will show only those w salary, but good call perhaps that should be part of a sort feature (beyond just date)
The filters do need more love for sure. I like your examples for various metrics displayed in the UI. I did think it would be cool to have a Github-like array of squares that represent units of time with colors that show how it has been changing over time, would have to figure out how heavy of calculations those would be in real-time but I really like your idea here. Or a line chart might be better.
Many thanks for all the input!
1.) Imitating a good design can take a lot of developer hours. Many landing pages have fancy css effects and support many screen sizes and it can take quite some time to build.
2.) Finding a good designer is not easy. I have tried hiring on most freelancer sites with very poor results. The applicant pool is typically of low quality.
So I am wondering if others have found efficient/effective ways of going about #1 or #2, either by using certain tools or templates or by having a more clever hiring method.
In any case, I suggest looking into frameworks such as Bootstrap or Tailwind. Of course, there are also high-level solutions that don't require as much coding, e.g. WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, etc. WordPress plugins can make it very easy to apply fancy CSS effects without writing any CSS.
As for finding freelancers, I agree that's also a difficult task. I don't have any magic bullet there, other than to prioritize people with good, timely communication skills, and to avoid people on the low end of the price range since they will usually be less experienced.
CSS - https://tailwindcss.com/ Components - https://tailwindui.com/ Logo - https://pixlr.com/editor/ Icons - https://heroicons.com/ - https://lucide.dev/icons/ Animations - https://www.framer.com/motion/ BG patterns - https://heropatterns.com/ - https://dev.to/bybydev/top-10-svg-pattern-generators-16h
Otherwise its just React
I don't have a website for obvious reasons, but if you're in the biz you've no doubt heard about my tool :)
Colocation wise, you pretty much buy the space, show up with the server and rack it yourself into a locked cabinet, not much else
The conversations aren't even overtly sexual in nature, mostly just guys sending "hey hope you're having a good day" during work hours. Llama is good, but honestly I think anyone would probably know they're talking to a bot after a few days, but they still keep talking to it anyways.
I actually think that's worse.
Ed: but props to you for filling a technology niche.
They aren't even getting any sexual gratification from it. Just lonely little unrequited missives. Hoping and failing to make a connection and not even realizing they haven't.
[edit] 20 jpegs into a 150MB LoRA
There are lots of sad, lonely guys out there and that's not GaryNumanVevo's fault, he's just catering to them.
That said, if shame were brought back into the mix on a large scale, a lot of this profiteering would evaporate away, and push this industry underground.
I currently do 3 festivals a year which all pretty much fell in my lap, I’ve yet to start any sort of sales/marketing due to being busy with my day job/life and not wanting to grow too fast.
I started back in 2021 when a local company I’ve worked with to make apps came to me looking for a solution for their food/music festival that didn’t require handing out and (almost as importantly) counting all the tickets/tokens that people bought to spend at the vendors. I did a quick turn around of a couple months to get a v1 out and working in time for the event. In the next year I essentially rewrote 90% of it and added in-person payment support (previously had just supported recording in-person payments made through a CC terminal.
Each new festival has new needs but I’m starting to get fewer feature requests and less I need to build for each new client which is nice.
It's QR-based, so customers create an account, load money onto their account, then show their QR code to vendors who scan it to charge their account. We also provide plastic cards (think: gift card) for people who don't want to use their phone but we see 80%+ of people interact completely on their phone/online. We have an app and website (same codebase, Quasar framework) and for in-person payment (entry, bar) we provide iPads with connected CC readers.
My best advice is this: your hardest challenges will not be technical in nature. The hardest part is the equipment, dealing with customers, hand-holding the festival organizers. I don't say any of that as some gross thing or bad thing, just reality. In fact, I think I've succeeded larged based on the in-person aspect (We travel to the event and are on-site for the event) and being the "I have all the answers for your festival payments"-person. Rolling with the punches is a huge part of it.
The whole thing runs on AWS Lambda with a postgres DB from Neon.tech. I'll be honest, it's incredibly over-architected, the whole thing could run a a couple (or even 1) servers as a traditional NodeJS app without issue (and with less complexity) but I used this project as learning experience and a chance to try our some technology I was interested in. Lambda is incredibly cool and I think I might have one of the best use-cases for it (incredibly spikey load: no traffic for 9 mo, tiny traffic for presales for 1-2 months, 1 month with higher sales, then 1-2 days of the event with crazy sales) but the debugging story isn't the best. SST makes it 10000x better than anything else I've tried and the developer experience is bar-none for writing lambdas but all the other crap (CloudFormation, logs, monitoring, etc) is so much overhead. If I was writing this again today I'd probably look at something like NestJS but I won't let myself re-write the code (again) without a pressing reason and if I need to spend time anywhere it's sales/marketing.
Here is my, crappy, "marketing" website: https://grubbux.com/
So let me just say I love these honest no-bullshit posts!
I love geeking out over my "stack" or talking about the business stuff, it's been rollercoaster and a huge learning experience for me. Really upended a ton of preconceptions I had about a number of things.
Sorry, I don't understand your offering at all and the questions just sort of keep coming!
I see you combine payments, but I'm struggling to see the real-terms benefit over a tap-payment (card, watch or phone)? For a food stand, it would seem, not taking the money directly is a relatively large potential liability. Is the point to enforce a contract between vendors and the festival?
Does the festival pay the food stands [something] up front?
How's your liability insurance? Or do the festivals underwrite you for when Amazon/wifi is down and no-one can pay for their meals? (I did see you tout live updates, so transactions must be networked)
Sounds easy to abuse (show someone else's code?), have you had much fraud?
You're in USA? Did you need a banking license?
Small festivals in UK would be 4-8000 people, say; average food spend is probably £20+ per day -- are you carrying a debt to food providers for £500,000+ over a long weekend (consolidating payments)?
Fascinating.
Do you do non-food transactions too - souvenir stands, onsite shops, [festival] activities? Like some festivals include a number of tokens and you can buy activities with them at the festival.
> Festival-goers can just pay for their food direct as well?
In a word? Data. Festivals normally charge vendors a percentage of sales to be at the festival and they need a way to track sales. "Trust me bro" doesn't quite work since restaurants/vendors will lie or shave their sales numbers so they pay out less. One festival told me about a time they had a vendor steal another vendor's tickets they had collected and try to turn them in as their own. I don't think all or even most vendors are dishonest but the ones who are mess it up for everyone. So instead the festival requires all payment to go through their festival currency (1 to 1 with USD). This gives them realtime data of all vendors and they use that data to decide which vendors to invite back and how much to pay out at the end.
> I see you combine payments, but I'm struggling to see the real-terms benefit over a tap-payment (card, watch or phone)? For a food stand, it would seem, not taking the money directly is a relatively large potential liability. Is the point to enforce a contract between vendors and the festival?
Yes, the point is to enforce the contract between the two. For a lot of festivals the food price is low (think $3-5) since it's meant to be a way to sample a lot of things. The $0.30/transaction (that Stripe charges) eats into total percentage quickly at lower price points. Also this lets all vendors take payment without needing any special equipment (other than their smartphone). Yes, some/most of them have their own POS but this lets the festival and festival-goers keep all their transactions in one place. Also the vendors have access to reports as well.
> How's your liability insurance? Or do the festivals underwrite you for when Amazon/wifi is down and no-one can pay for their meals? (I did see you tout live updates, so transactions must be networked)
All our contracts state that we cannot be held liable for internet issues, we operate completely on LTE/5G and do not provide WiFi at the events (that's a huge PITA if you've ever looked into it) and very often there isn't even an ISP we could work with to provide the internet service so if we are going to rely on LTE anyways might as well have each iPad talk directly to the towers instead of through extra infrastructure we need to manage. So far this has no been an issue but we do a cellular survey of the area when we take on a new festival to check how good the signal is.
> Does the festival pay the food stands [something] up front?
No, in fact often the vendors pay a small amount to reserve the space (mostly to make them have some skin in the game and show up, the number of no-shows always surprises me a bit). Vendors in general are very hard to wrangle. You can send them all the info ahead of time multiple times, in multiple forms, etc and at least 20%+ will show up and have no idea what's going on. Thankfully we can train someone on the system in well under 5min and they rarely need follow-up help.
> Sounds easy to abuse (show someone else's code?), have you had much fraud?
This was a huge concern of mine up front but in practice it's been non-existent or at least non-reported (and trust me, I've dealt with every other type of support ticket), In fact couples/families will often just load 1 account and share the QR between them. We also offer in-system transfers which isn't used as much as I would have expected but people do it that way as well.
> You're in USA? Did you need a banking license?
Yes, thankfully no license needed. I've worked/founded startups that needed Money Transmitter Licenses and I wouldn't touch those businesses with a 10ft pole (so much insurance and each state is done differently, no thanks). No, the money never touches my accounts, I use Stripe Connect so I help the festival get their own account setup and all the money dumps directly into their Stripe account (and then their bank a...
That sounds _brilliant_ -- being able to show a physical QR code card rather than dig out the phone sounds like it would help a lot with preventing damage/loss of phones.
As for the network we rely completely on the cellular network. We use an extremely small amount of data (a tiny fraction of what an image a user might be posting to FB/IG/SC/etc would be) so unless the networks are completely down we can manage without issue.
We check out venues/grounds/etc for cellular reception/speed ahead of time to make sure we are a good fit for a festival to try and avoid internet connection issues.
Can I suggest you add a marketing video or some graphics to explain how easy it is for the festival company and the vendors?
Props to you for getting everything working!
I keyed on this because I've only ever really seen the reverse in the wild, where a vendor presents a bill with a QR code, and then there's either a confirmation or record of some sort that can be easily checked. Though I don't actually make these types of purchases myself, so I'm just going by cursory observations.
Solo Developed VR starfighter combat sim for Quest, PCVR, and soon the PICO4
Meta, send me a free Quest 3, please.
Would not recommend doing a game, let alone a VR game as a sideproject for anyone
My day job is Machine Learning engineer, so I really should've picked an AI sideproject facepalm
Here’s my reply from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15150205
https://www.storytreasure.ai/
That's awesome. Just did one.
I write a book and give it away for free on https://book.railean.net, but it wouldn't hurt to turn it into a revenue stream.
https://sparkfxstudio.com/
If you have kids, it makes a good holiday gift for the grandparents if you're stumped on what to get them.
I've since moved on from it, but my brother makes enough to work on NanaGram full-time now. It's also just been really cool to see the project grow over the years and bring happiness to thousands of grandparents all over the world.
Thanks for sharing brother!
I've actually been looking at releasing a 4"x6" photo printing API of my own since we've developed some pretty neat shipping tricks as well as the ability to print on both sides of the photos.