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Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

485 points by cvbox ↗ HN
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:

2024 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42373343

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

267 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] thread
Frajedo
Just signed our 3rd customer with TrueCast (600€/month) (https://www.truecast.fr/), which is Granola for tech and non-tech recruiters. Rather than replacing recruiters in the HR process, we want to give them real time hard skills knowledge superpowers so they can better assess candidates before submitting them to their teams. We are convinced that recruiting should remain human-first.

There’s also a bot option, for self-conducted interviews, mostly used for open applications for some pre-filtering.

We are still unsure on how to enter such market, so we are doing direct networking atm, if you guys have an idea on how you’d do it or want a free trial of the product we’d love having a chat with you about it.

mkummer
https://dreamandcolor.com/ has been a fun solo bootstrapped side project for me for the past 2.5ish years - (specialize in converting photos to coloring pages for parents, educators, etc)

I started it primarily wanting to take a shot at productizing an image diffusion model (Stable Diffusion 1.5 when I started) in a novel (at the time) way and it ended up growing legs of it's own.

She's steadily chugging along, growing about 10-20% per month with minimal marketing, exceeding all expectations I had for the project when I set out

jama211
This is fantastic, a perfect example. Good stuff!
JKCalhoun
I'm…

Oh, making or losing $500/month?

Never mind.

kaesve
My wife's Etsy shop (https://www.etsy.com/shop/LittleLanternShop) is starting to pick up. She is leaning into creating digital sewing patterns for decorative felt crafts. We have had Etsy success before with 3d printed products, but managing printers and fulfilling orders can be stressful and time consuming, and she was hoping to build up a more passive income stream. She made over $1000 in the past month, which beat both our expectations

(We'll get back into 3d printing once life slows down a _little_ bit again)

yboris
Occasionally $500/month, but more reliably $300/month in sales of my Video Hub App - lets users browse, search, tag, and organize videos on local / network drives. Aiming to have an 8th anniversary release February 2026.

$5 per copy (Windows, Max, Linux; keep forever) https://videohubapp.com/

MIT open source (build your own copy) https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

huhtenberg
A bit of unsolicited advice -

* Focus on Windows users. Windows desktop share is 10x that of Mac and nowadays Windows users pay almost as willingly as Mac ones.

* Charge several times more.

* Redo the website. In particular get rid of 3D slant and on-hover animations, put larger high-res screenshots, explain each of them well (and not in gray on gray text), put up "Windows / Mac / Linux" in bold friendly and highly-visible letters. Better yet have separate Download buttons for each. Add version and last release date, next to the Download button. Have at-a-glance summary of features closer to the top of the page. Ditto for pricing and trialing details. Ideally, adjust windows chrome in the screenshots based on the web client's OS, i.e. show Windows screenshots to Windows visitors, Mac ones - to those coming from Macs, etc. The last thing you want to show Mac screenshots to Windows people, because it implies that the Windows version was an afterthought.

All in all, the site gives an amateurish/hobby project vibe, and the $5 price cements the impression. If you are to spruce things up a bit, you can potentially live off this app. At the very least and with not much of an effort you can double/triple what you make off it.

yboris
Thank you for all the suggestions! I like them and will try to implement at least a few in the coming year (I end up spending more time towards other exciting projects like writing a sci-fi novel and DIY remodeling my house).
trubalca
I sell laser cut decorative maps

TheMapsGuy.com

jaza
Wow, lovely cartography and lovely works of art! And so many cities to choose from!
soared
Really cool! Huge fan of maps - it looks like there is some amount of processing, so you have that automated or are you manually editing details? Also any advice on someone just getting into engraving?
meetingthrower
Very cool! Also very high value! Suspect you could raise prices.
mvkel
https://www.repth.com, an AI cycling coach that I vibe-coded back when gpt-3.5 was hot and vibe coding wasn't yet a thing. We've come a long way!

Free for athletes, but I license the underlying "coach" logic to actual, human coaches.

strongpigeon
https://fivethreeone.app/ a weightlifting app for 5/3/1 has been earning me ~$1000 a month for over two years now.

I'm actively working on a successor that allows you to create your own custom workout programs using formulas: https://vis.fitness

Libidinalecon
I assume you have some kind of partnership with Jim Wendler?

The periodization sounds really cool but the success of the app I would think is based entirely on the good marketing Wendler and Elitefts did with 5/3/1.

asimovDev
Nice! I used to use it when doing BBB 5/3/1. Sadly I stalled and got depressed.

Recently started GZCLP after getting sad at how bad I started to look with no activity

My one complaint was that there weren’t more sophisticated training regiments. I didn’t work 5/2 weeks so I just went to the gym every other day and I just clicked whatever in the app when working out, while I would prefer to track my days. Otherwise solid app, thanks for the hard work.

dumfries
This is a perfect example of taking a simple idea and elevating it/ executing it well. Well done!

As someone that has used 531 for a while, I thought an app like this would not add much value. I mean, we can all track our progress in a spreadsheet. But I must say that it looks great.

This stuff is inspiring to see..

andysinclair
Looks really good, will try it.

What is your revenue split, tip vs non tips? I've always wondered if putting a tip button on a free app could generate significant income.

ahhmki
"This app isn't available for your device because it was made for an older version of Android"

Using android 15 on a Nothing Phone 1. Any chance to get it working?

rriley
https://unrav.io . Lets users reshape any article, paper, or video into the form that actually helps them think, mind-maps, summaries, podcasts, or interactive Q&A. Launched as part of the Bolt.new hackathon in August and growing steadily. Going from a 100% vibe coded web app to a full production system has been quite a ride!
nefrix
This is such a cool idea; i am afraid in a few years people will stop watching full videos, instead they will ask ai bots to summarise it.
crobertsbmw
I’m still selling Computer Engineering for Babies. And I just launched a new book called Simple Machines Made Simple on Kickstarter a month or two ago. Both books are basically just simple interactive demos for kids and adults.

https://hackylabs.com

nefrix
I am commenting on this so i will fi d it easy when i will need to buy a present for one of my friends’ babies. :)
navaed01
I have this book for my kid and love it!
kelvindegrees
One of my favorites! The baby likes it. The grandparents are confused by it.
cunac
This is insanely good. Can't wait for grandchild :)
BrokenCogs
This is amazing! Do you ever run a sale (christmas, boxing day, etc)?
matart
Thank you! As it has become popular at baby showers to bring a book I always send my partner with the original 2. We have probably gifted 5 or 6 sets now.

We are excited for the next version.

kaeruct
Just bought a German copy. Spanish would be nice as well :)
thebiglebrewski
My nephew loves this book thank you for putting it into the world!
czhu12
https://canine.sh - makes it dead simple to turn your Kubernetes environment into a Heroku like PaaS.

Mainly used in organizations with developers who want to deploy to a corporate Kubernetes environment, but don’t want to deal with the complexities.

It’s fully open source so we’re covered by sponsors, the largest being Portainer $5k+ / m from sponsorships.

Makes it possible to keep the cloud offering totally free.

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mesmertech
Got two websites but the second one is basically a clone of the first with better visuals and better tech stack that I actually want to work on

https://aieasypic.com - 3k per month (declining cause not working on it a lot, just maintenance) https://bestphoto.ai - 2k per month (increasing cause of better SEO)

Now trying my hand at an actual non-consumer product, not that b2b but something to make making ads easy because that’s where I find myself getting stuck on when doing fb ads or TikTok organic stuff : https://admakeai.com

rsanek
It doesn't seem like any of the photos on bestphoto.ai load for me. This is on Firefox on Mac; does seem to work in Safari.
tndibona
Trendyzip.com Home sale trends to help buyers make informed decisions. A basic report is $5
abe-101
https://mergecal.org - First project I built when learning Django a couple years back. Takes multiple iCal feed URLs, merges them into one feed. Turns out people actually need this!
tecleandor
I almost built something like this a short time ago. Some devices/softwares (in my case it was the Supernote calendar app) only allow for one calendar as a source, and I had to merge my work and personal calendars to show up in my device. :)
upmostly
https://dbpro.app

I’m building DB Pro, a modern desktop database client for developers who want a fast, local-first workflow.

I started in October 2025, launched v1 at the end of November, and just crossed $1k MRR.

I also post devlogs of life building and marketing DB Pro and am about to post devlog #4. The latest one is here if anyone’s curious: https://youtu.be/-T4GcJuV1rM

Still very early, but it’s been fun seeing something fairly “boring” resonate once the UX is treated seriously.

scrivanodev
How do you enforce licensing? Did you build your own solution?
macaskar
semrush shows that your organic visits significantly increased this week. Well done. Great product. Succes!
posed
What did you use to build the frontend? It looks cool!
benhurmarcel
For what it’s worth, I think there’s space for such an app for Duckdb databases. It’s growing in popularity and not very widely supported yet.
and-not-drew
I've got 2 that are kind of intermingled. Each averages a little over $500/mo on their own though.

Sportsbook API (https://sportsbookapi.com/) - A single API to get odds data from a number of US Sportsbooks

Odds Assist Pro (http://pro.oddsassist.com/) - An odds scanner tool that shows both current odds and things like arbitrage, plus ev, middles. This actually started as just a UI for me to quickly do sanity checks on the API data and eventually grew into a full site. The site is on a subdomain of a site my business partner had built long before we met, so it's kind of positioned as the plus version of that site.

API revenue is really stable and has been pretty consistent slow growth. Pro's revenue is all over the place since it's almost all referrals and promos with big spikes around major sporting events. Probably averages at least $500/mo if you look at the entire year.

huydotnet
I started my project in 2023 and posted here, made 20k that year. The traffic has been slowly decreasing during 2024, and last October, I was officially entering losing territory, where the cost of running it exceeded the total earnings (mostly due to free trials).

It's been a good journey. Thank you so much to whoever keeps running this thread!

tecleandor
Just a small comment, as I don't know if you're planning to wrap up or keep maintaining the product...

I can't find the pricing of the product on the site, I only find that I get '10 free credits', but I don't know how much a credit is and what can I do with it.

Home page says it's one credit per diagram, but then the docs say it's a certain amount of credits per modification (that could be correct or not, I guess...)

I usually skip if I can't find the price, but it could also happen that people create the trial account, spends quickly the credits, then they find the price and it doesn't fit them. Of course, there's always people coming just for the free credits.

I don't know if this is helpful to you or not, but I hope so :)

whitefang
Formester started as a side hustle but today we make $7000/month.

All I wanted was to build a good product which our users feel like using. Help them with exceptional customer service and build a team and a company worth waking up to.