My work came up with a bonus structure around a certain set of industry certifications. I looked at all the certifications available and worked out a strategy to max the bonus each year. It comes out to about $2.5k/month.
So my side hustle is studying and taking tests. Over the last 5 years or so of taking tests + investing I’ve built a nice chunk of change set aside to help pay for college for my two boys (age 14 and 16).
The scoring system is complicated but it comes down to passing about 4 new ones per year and then passing the renewal exams for all my current certs. Each exam takes about a month for me to be ready, maybe a total of 40 or so hrs. I have a family and my day job is very demanding so not a lot of free time.
There’s about 60-70 available certifications but they have various prerequisite certs so you can’t just go down the list. I was fortunate in that when the bonus structure first came out I had a lot of experience but not many certs so it was easy at first but now I’m running out of certs to get that are related to my actual day job.
However, I get the feeling the cert bonus thing is going to be cancelled next FY anyway. Sucks but at least I maxed it every year it was available and I have probably 75% of college for my kids paid for.
It's useful for both me and the company, I work in consulting and these certs are an easy metric for clients to understand. The bonus structure was setup so that we can go to market with "X people certified in Y" as a feather in our hat. A certification by itself doesn't say much but when backed with a few years of project experience it's a powerful combination. So I take these tests for the bonus but they're also valuable to my firm and to me too, i'm always learning something new about a technology i thought i knew like the back of my hand.
/i've replied to every comment, i know this isn't an AMA and I hope it's not too off topic.
I do actually enjoy them and they’re pretty much all in my wheel house. Well I enjoy them when I have plenty of time to sit down with a cup of coffee and study. A few times I’ve been under basically deadline pressure to get the exams passed in time to qualify for the bonus, that’s not fun at all. Over about 20 certification attempts I’ve only failed one :) (they’re all pass/fail).
A friend and I host a monthly dinner club for people interested in exploring ethnic cuisine on Long Island. We work with one restaurant each month to create an 8-12+ course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is usually served family style (the ambitious ones individually plate everything) and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues and Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use business.
We started this in 2023 with 13 of our friends as guests. Since then the group has grown to over 1,200 members and well beyond our circle of friends. August was our 52 second restaurant. In 2025 we served 1,099 guests and generated $126k in revenue.
Love this idea! Any time I visit a place that specializes in a cuisine I'm not familiar with, I tend to struggle with what to order because I don't want to commit to just one entree. Having a curated tour of tastes, so to speak, targeted to folks exploring the cuisine would be absolutely perfect. Wonderful!
Thats the goal! A little taste of what tells the story of where we are traveling that month. Sometimes restaurants will make off menu items for us, which is a lot of fun and usually something a little more adventurous.
Two weeks ago, I released the tactical map-based WW2 submarine sim Silent Shark (which I got feedback on from HN for beta test a few months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48180924 ) and it's gone extremely well for a side project - I've had over 100 Steam reviews, 99% of them are positive, and I have sold a few thousand copies so far.
I began working on this game just 6 months ago and have only worked on it in my spare time in evenings and on weekends, instead of playing computer games. I made the early decision to use Codex for 100% of the coding, that has been a phenomenal experience.
The only Image Gen AI I've used has been to clean up 2 old and weathered historical maps I found, to make them readable.
Still have over 25,000 Steam wishlists and growing. I'm super thankful and having a blast.
The world is changed - given the low cost of reverse engineering and implementation, it would be product suicide to openly call out a money making product.
I don't expect too many actual >500$ moneymaking projects to be listed. Would love to be proven wrong.
Yeah, the only time I see people talking about money-making side projects is when it's practically impossible to copy them. I can't see the advantage of bragging about a side project if the threat of losing marketshare for it is on the table.
My side project isn't software and doesn't make $500/mo, but I still just don't talk about it.
My side-project makes money because it's in a specific niche: It requires trust that the service will still operate tomorrow, and the fact that it's been going for nearly 20 years is a selling point you can't just have Claude copy.
It helps that it's cheap, I guess, but it also operates in a market small enough that anything with less than minimal time commitment will lose money. That's why there are tens of former competitors who have all shut down now.
My first instinct was that side projects can’t make good money anymore. Monthly new repos on Github increased 5x. Also any good project can be cloned immediately. Maybe people
here can confirm if it’s a good time to start indie projects.
I also feel the same all the masterclass about making money using x,y,z is either showing things in past which no longer work or very steep upfront cost/efforts.
I offer some absolutes in reply and would also love to be proven wrong.
The cost of engineering and implementation has always been low. Passive income has always been a subtle lie. The money has always been in providing a well-supported service.
No customer has ever cared about implementation details beyond what is outlined in the contracts they have with you and the nth-order effects of the contracts they are under with their own clients.
Advertising is the opposite of suicide, but since we have so much negativity on HN in the past few years this is no longer the best place to do that. Every potential customer here is vastly outnumbered by people who belong on reddit.
How do you think startups and passion projects used to work before LLMs? The cost of labor is irrelevant when it's just your own time and already have your day job to pay the bills.
Paying for an LLM is always more expensive. If you're attempting to create a startup without knowing how to write code, you've always been fucked and still are. Every time you avoid getting your hands dirty, you incur cost. How can you already incur cost from just the code? Really bad start.
I run Akariq [0] which sells travel eSIMs in 190+ countries and regions in the world. It does not require an app or account. Customers like it for ease of use. Many HN users have bought eSIMs including countries like China, Japan, Australia and USA. I have overall received positive feedback.
Recently, I have a few Digital Nomads in Europe switching over from Nomad to me due to very good pricing [1]. A lot of customers have also come over from Airalo due to customer service. For example, recently major eSIM providers had a huge incident and left customers stranded for Internet. Akariq had backup resources and replacement eSIMs during those upstream telecom providers issues. I even wrote an Incident Report here [2].
Customer satisfaction remains my highest priority these days.
Pretty basic ones, I got into AI images cause of that viral AI avatars thing that levelsio made 2-3 years back and have just been iterating on that idea(even though I think if I went into the AI text side of things, I'd have been much bigger at this point):
https://admakeai.com - Recently got this to 800 MRR , kinda trying to make it the main thing since the LTV on it is the highest. So if I could just figure out ads, this has the highest potential
https://aieasypic.com - First project that I made that made money from subs vs making money from ads, whole reason I continued to indiehack. Its kinda dying but core users still bring in 3-4k/mo , altho actual MRR is 1k/mo
https://bestphoto.ai - Made this after I got frustrated from the bad decisions I made on above, basically a tech rewrite + clone + simplification of aieasypic. Currently makes the most but at a lower margin than aieasypic. Not gonna say exact numbers, but lets say 5k+/mo
Also honestly if you have a thing that works, I'd say don't even share it. Its too easy to build a clone and start copying, which ofc was also possible a few years back but then it took actual effort and someone had to maintain it.
The only reason I'm sharing these is cause AI image generators are already like thousands in the market, so I mean if someone wants to go through the hell, I don't think its really that easy a market to succeed in anyways.
We started with the website, and now we are building a full app: a private, personal way to track your reading and get personalized recommendations based on your tastes.
We are aiming for a soft launch in a few months :)
If you want to be an early user and give us feedback, sign up here, and I'll get you going with the early version. We are adding imports from Goodreads now, and user folders to organize books how your brain works.
Last month I made about $1200 US from a tabletop roleplaying game I published around five years ago. This is an outlier and only because the game is about Greek mythology which is at the front of everyone's minds due to the release of the Odyssey. Most months I make $100–200 US, which is nice but not enough to let me quit my day job any time soon.
Launched this a few months ago for free to gather user feedback and iterate, but didn’t get much traction.
Finally got burned out last week and decided to charge $10 for it, thinking I could at least justify abandoning it once my downloads went to zero. But was pleasantly surprised to see I still get 3-5 downloads a day. And these paying users are much more likely to actually provide feedback.
May rethink monetization model later, but currently happy charging a flat fee and just having people use my stuff.
https://uruky.com has over 250 monthly active accounts (that's over €1k / month revenue). No subscription, no AI products/features. Just ad-free private search that you can tweak to your liking. There's a FAQ for most questions you'll have.
I'm making about $260 monthly playing play money poker, adjusted for price level it's like $400 in the US. I sell the virtual chips I make to other people. My side project is automating this and scaling 2x.
I built a project called Resonant - it's a local speech to text tool using NVIDIA Parakeet and supports a few other languages. Originally started as an experiment to see what could I, and how far could I go building with LLMs to replace my own software stack.
I spent a lot of time on positioning and design. The thing is like 10% model 90% unique, random, obscure features I had to run into walls for days to identify how to solve. Even with AI.
Lots of respect to the leaders in this space. So I ended up open-sourcing the core.
https://overseer.studio - Infinite canvas for apps, browser tabs, PDFs, and more. Primarily focused on Game Masters for TTRPGs but I've heard from many that it would be an excellent general purpose digital binder.
Started last year with a problem I faced personally playing TTRPGs with newcomers. Built Overseer over a year to where it is today.
Solo iOS app that I have been working on since January: https://bhol.app - crossed 500 MRR in June. Seeing the traction and feedback from users is the best form of motivation to keep going.
Now working on scaling it via UGC/social media, landing deals with local language schools, and upping the design with more Rive assets.
It's well on the way to make $600+/month now, almost doubling since last month.
I've realised given the ease at which software can be ideated and maintained, i would rather focus on having a more dataset-intensive moat.
It's a database of website section screenshots I've been hand collecting with others for almost 2 years now (it's crowdsourced via a seperate chrome extension), each section has styling metadata linked - typography usage (leading, weights, tracking, sizes,etc), font details (foundry, designer), colors and alot more.
What really helped was my positioning, instead of trying to compete with established players (mobbin, landbook, refero), decided to focus on the MCP integration; the giving LLMs design taste angle.
I've been running https://simplescraper.io for a number of years, so not exactly a side project but it started out that way.
If time allowed, I'd focus on the AI photo and video generation. Have seen friends hit $500 relatively quickly by targeting niches.
Sounds like a played out category, but if you look closer it's a bit of a potemkin village - many incumbents are not that good or haven't kept up with the latest models.
Each year it gets more crowded out there, but almost always room for better.
Building a multiplayer game platform. Built a multiplayer pong game to dog feed the platform, and it got viral. Decided to make presales for it and got a little over $700 sales so far . if you want to give it a try, play it here https://antics.gg/p/side-out-94df7d
nokeep.ai - private, uncensored AI -- launched it cause most folks who want privacy or less censorship attempt to run models locally but that obviously doesn't work unless you invest in hardware / want speed etc.
I am working on making the Dropbox launch first comment a reality: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash It gives you the Dropbox experience on any storage you want inclusive of FTP but also let you access your Dropbox storage via FTP, SFTP, S3, ...
I had an idea in 2008 to make a website that emailed your friends when you die. I built https://www.deadmansswitch.net/ in a weekend, and it's been making money since. Around $1k/mo now.
I've wondered about this before, not just telling people, but what about my code projects etc... Something like "make all my github repo's public when I die" (assuming anyone would care about them).
Thanks! Now with LLMs it's really easy, I've added attachments, improved check-ins, a better app, lots of stuff. I really like how easy it is now to do the gruntwork of maintenance!
Of course, lots are sent every day. I don't know if they're from deaths, but lots of messages get sent. I know people have died because the police or FBI contact me sometimes.
Once, a girl had committed suicide and used the service to send accusing emails to her friends and family two months later. That was tragic all around.
I am building an RSS reader and like the idea of being able to tie articles back to verified individuals who have a crypto address and contact information. Even having encoded images would be interesting. "Oh, that's the guy with the funny duck picture on everything he makes." - But it's actually a steganography identifier.
So building a DNS for people... is just having an email address enough?
So imagine you are a freelance writer and at the bottom of an article you put some unique string or pic that leads people and agents back to a home page that contains a crypto address and contact details.
One application: even here on HN if some article gets over say 100 points, how would it be possible to invite the author into the forum for an AMA type discussion. You'd check the article for some type of identifier string first.
Also, with an RSS reader, an author or feed owner could be invited to claim a direct connection with their readership and end up collecting tips from them.
I'd use the term "Atom Reader," but someone may think I'm talking about a quantum physics laboratory. At least RSS has no similes.
I've grossed 17,531.33 so far this calendar year. You know those cold emails you get sometimes where they want you to get contract jobs and them do the work? I've been doing that for 18 months now and I average roughly 2 hours/week throughout the year.
There are some weeks where I'm doing almost no work at all, but then there are some weeks where I'm interviewing daily and maybe have a video call with a client. I've found that the interview process to get contract jobs is MUCH shorter and simpler than getting full time jobs. They are often done by a non-technical person and are 30 minutes long. There might be another 30-minute interview, sometimes by a technical person but not always. This means that I can interview daily without it causing much disruption to my regular job.
I won't lie, it is stressful at times trying to juggle so many things, and the cognitive dissonance of lying to people is not great. I used to get really anxious about interviewing, but this experience has helped me a lot with that.
I recently got one of those emails, interestingly leading with "I came across your profile on Hacker News".
Once I understood the proposal, I thought this would be horror job cognitive dissonance-wise. So unethical.
I also had a conspiracy theory – perhaps the "we can't pass interviews, so you do the interviews, and we do the job, win-win" is just a cover for the real play – shady anonymous orgs getting access to infrastructure and data of various western businesses, using you as a facade.
Do your contracts allow sub-contracting the work? Most of mine do, so there is nothing unethical about that kind of setup. Unless you are lying about it. But openly sub-contracting work, as long as you maintain accountability for it, is completely fair game.
Fraudulently doing so probably opens you up to a decent amount of legal risk.
Doubt so, none of the links is working on the site. It doesn't inspire trust, wouldn't spend money, yet even create an account, on a site that has no privacy policy or terms of use.
Generally the reason you have a links section in the footer is for them to be actual links, not text. I wouldn't trust this product as far as I could throw it given how many issues the site seems to have
My work came up with a bonus structure around a certain set of industry certifications. I looked at all the certifications available and worked out a strategy to max the bonus each year. It comes out to about $2.5k/month.
So my side hustle is studying and taking tests. Over the last 5 years or so of taking tests + investing I’ve built a nice chunk of change set aside to help pay for college for my two boys (age 14 and 16).
This is unbelievably cool. And you look like a skilled go-getter to the corporate hiring machine.
How much time are in investing in these certifications on average? i would imagine running out of things to study/certify in such a long time
The scoring system is complicated but it comes down to passing about 4 new ones per year and then passing the renewal exams for all my current certs. Each exam takes about a month for me to be ready, maybe a total of 40 or so hrs. I have a family and my day job is very demanding so not a lot of free time.
There’s about 60-70 available certifications but they have various prerequisite certs so you can’t just go down the list. I was fortunate in that when the bonus structure first came out I had a lot of experience but not many certs so it was easy at first but now I’m running out of certs to get that are related to my actual day job.
However, I get the feeling the cert bonus thing is going to be cancelled next FY anyway. Sucks but at least I maxed it every year it was available and I have probably 75% of college for my kids paid for.
That is very nice of your company to pay for the workers' certifications. Do you think it is useful to your work?
It's useful for both me and the company, I work in consulting and these certs are an easy metric for clients to understand. The bonus structure was setup so that we can go to market with "X people certified in Y" as a feather in our hat. A certification by itself doesn't say much but when backed with a few years of project experience it's a powerful combination. So I take these tests for the bonus but they're also valuable to my firm and to me too, i'm always learning something new about a technology i thought i knew like the back of my hand.
/i've replied to every comment, i know this isn't an AMA and I hope it's not too off topic.
I really appreciate your company’s mutual benefit bonus structure. It benefits all parties in a number of ways that is sadly uncommon these days
> "X people certified in Y"
Let me know if your company wants to put me on staff at $0 salary and just get paid for the certs.
That's clever and entertaining. Have you actually enjoyed any of them?
I do actually enjoy them and they’re pretty much all in my wheel house. Well I enjoy them when I have plenty of time to sit down with a cup of coffee and study. A few times I’ve been under basically deadline pressure to get the exams passed in time to qualify for the bonus, that’s not fun at all. Over about 20 certification attempts I’ve only failed one :) (they’re all pass/fail).
A friend and I host a monthly dinner club for people interested in exploring ethnic cuisine on Long Island. We work with one restaurant each month to create an 8-12+ course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is usually served family style (the ambitious ones individually plate everything) and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues and Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use business.
We started this in 2023 with 13 of our friends as guests. Since then the group has grown to over 1,200 members and well beyond our circle of friends. August was our 52 second restaurant. In 2025 we served 1,099 guests and generated $126k in revenue.
https://www.deadchefssociety.com/
Love this idea! Any time I visit a place that specializes in a cuisine I'm not familiar with, I tend to struggle with what to order because I don't want to commit to just one entree. Having a curated tour of tastes, so to speak, targeted to folks exploring the cuisine would be absolutely perfect. Wonderful!
Thats the goal! A little taste of what tells the story of where we are traveling that month. Sometimes restaurants will make off menu items for us, which is a lot of fun and usually something a little more adventurous.
Two weeks ago, I released the tactical map-based WW2 submarine sim Silent Shark (which I got feedback on from HN for beta test a few months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48180924 ) and it's gone extremely well for a side project - I've had over 100 Steam reviews, 99% of them are positive, and I have sold a few thousand copies so far.
I began working on this game just 6 months ago and have only worked on it in my spare time in evenings and on weekends, instead of playing computer games. I made the early decision to use Codex for 100% of the coding, that has been a phenomenal experience.
The only Image Gen AI I've used has been to clean up 2 old and weathered historical maps I found, to make them readable.
Still have over 25,000 Steam wishlists and growing. I'm super thankful and having a blast.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4705650/Silent_Shark/
Do sharks normally make sounds?
Think not but “Normal Shark” just didn’t have the same ring to it
”Steel Shark”, maybe?
The world is changed - given the low cost of reverse engineering and implementation, it would be product suicide to openly call out a money making product.
I don't expect too many actual >500$ moneymaking projects to be listed. Would love to be proven wrong.
Yeah, the only time I see people talking about money-making side projects is when it's practically impossible to copy them. I can't see the advantage of bragging about a side project if the threat of losing marketshare for it is on the table.
My side project isn't software and doesn't make $500/mo, but I still just don't talk about it.
My side-project makes money because it's in a specific niche: It requires trust that the service will still operate tomorrow, and the fact that it's been going for nearly 20 years is a selling point you can't just have Claude copy.
It helps that it's cheap, I guess, but it also operates in a market small enough that anything with less than minimal time commitment will lose money. That's why there are tens of former competitors who have all shut down now.
Precisely what has effectively killed off the "building in public" trend that was all the rage just a two years ago.
It's been like this a long time. Kickstarter was just a platform to test product viability and public response for the big guys.
My first instinct was that side projects can’t make good money anymore. Monthly new repos on Github increased 5x. Also any good project can be cloned immediately. Maybe people here can confirm if it’s a good time to start indie projects.
$500 MRR is so low that I doubt competition matters at that point. Plus, implementation is rarely the differentiating factor for a successful product.
I also feel the same all the masterclass about making money using x,y,z is either showing things in past which no longer work or very steep upfront cost/efforts.
I offer some absolutes in reply and would also love to be proven wrong.
The cost of engineering and implementation has always been low. Passive income has always been a subtle lie. The money has always been in providing a well-supported service.
No customer has ever cared about implementation details beyond what is outlined in the contracts they have with you and the nth-order effects of the contracts they are under with their own clients.
Advertising is the opposite of suicide, but since we have so much negativity on HN in the past few years this is no longer the best place to do that. Every potential customer here is vastly outnumbered by people who belong on reddit.
> The cost of engineering and implementation has always been low
With Opus and fable and sol at dozens of dollars for a month, i don't know how you can straight-faced say that. But you do you.
How do you think startups and passion projects used to work before LLMs? The cost of labor is irrelevant when it's just your own time and already have your day job to pay the bills.
Paying for an LLM is always more expensive. If you're attempting to create a startup without knowing how to write code, you've always been fucked and still are. Every time you avoid getting your hands dirty, you incur cost. How can you already incur cost from just the code? Really bad start.
Thanks a bingo.
I run Akariq [0] which sells travel eSIMs in 190+ countries and regions in the world. It does not require an app or account. Customers like it for ease of use. Many HN users have bought eSIMs including countries like China, Japan, Australia and USA. I have overall received positive feedback.
Recently, I have a few Digital Nomads in Europe switching over from Nomad to me due to very good pricing [1]. A lot of customers have also come over from Airalo due to customer service. For example, recently major eSIM providers had a huge incident and left customers stranded for Internet. Akariq had backup resources and replacement eSIMs during those upstream telecom providers issues. I even wrote an Incident Report here [2].
Customer satisfaction remains my highest priority these days.
[0] https://akariq.com/en/
[1] https://akariq.com/en/esim/region/europe-31-areas/
[2] https://akariq.com/en/blog/akariq-backup-esim-service-interr...
Wow, is this really a side-gig?! I would have assumed this would need a team of engineers to run
Pretty basic ones, I got into AI images cause of that viral AI avatars thing that levelsio made 2-3 years back and have just been iterating on that idea(even though I think if I went into the AI text side of things, I'd have been much bigger at this point):
https://admakeai.com - Recently got this to 800 MRR , kinda trying to make it the main thing since the LTV on it is the highest. So if I could just figure out ads, this has the highest potential
https://aieasypic.com - First project that I made that made money from subs vs making money from ads, whole reason I continued to indiehack. Its kinda dying but core users still bring in 3-4k/mo , altho actual MRR is 1k/mo
https://bestphoto.ai - Made this after I got frustrated from the bad decisions I made on above, basically a tech rewrite + clone + simplification of aieasypic. Currently makes the most but at a lower margin than aieasypic. Not gonna say exact numbers, but lets say 5k+/mo
Also honestly if you have a thing that works, I'd say don't even share it. Its too easy to build a clone and start copying, which ofc was also possible a few years back but then it took actual effort and someone had to maintain it.
The only reason I'm sharing these is cause AI image generators are already like thousands in the market, so I mean if someone wants to go through the hell, I don't think its really that easy a market to succeed in anyways.
And here's my list of things that didn't work out: https://mesmer.tools/
I'm building Book DNA to help people get book recommendations from humans (mostly authors and experts so far in our early days).
-> https://bookdna.com/
We started with the website, and now we are building a full app: a private, personal way to track your reading and get personalized recommendations based on your tastes.
-> https://building.bookdna.com/
We are aiming for a soft launch in a few months :)
If you want to be an early user and give us feedback, sign up here, and I'll get you going with the early version. We are adding imports from Goodreads now, and user folders to organize books how your brain works.
-> https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeOdeqpZCS95FMRy_tE...
how does this differ from alternatives like Hardcover, Fable, etc.?
Last month I made about $1200 US from a tabletop roleplaying game I published around five years ago. This is an outlier and only because the game is about Greek mythology which is at the front of everyone's minds due to the release of the Odyssey. Most months I make $100–200 US, which is nice but not enough to let me quit my day job any time soon.
https://www.roomantic.ai/
Launched this a few months ago for free to gather user feedback and iterate, but didn’t get much traction.
Finally got burned out last week and decided to charge $10 for it, thinking I could at least justify abandoning it once my downloads went to zero. But was pleasantly surprised to see I still get 3-5 downloads a day. And these paying users are much more likely to actually provide feedback.
May rethink monetization model later, but currently happy charging a flat fee and just having people use my stuff.
https://uruky.com has over 250 monthly active accounts (that's over €1k / month revenue). No subscription, no AI products/features. Just ad-free private search that you can tweak to your liking. There's a FAQ for most questions you'll have.
I'm making about $260 monthly playing play money poker, adjusted for price level it's like $400 in the US. I sell the virtual chips I make to other people. My side project is automating this and scaling 2x.
I built a project called Resonant - it's a local speech to text tool using NVIDIA Parakeet and supports a few other languages. Originally started as an experiment to see what could I, and how far could I go building with LLMs to replace my own software stack.
I spent a lot of time on positioning and design. The thing is like 10% model 90% unique, random, obscure features I had to run into walls for days to identify how to solve. Even with AI.
Lots of respect to the leaders in this space. So I ended up open-sourcing the core.
https://github.com/tohmsc/resonant-community
https://overseer.studio - Infinite canvas for apps, browser tabs, PDFs, and more. Primarily focused on Game Masters for TTRPGs but I've heard from many that it would be an excellent general purpose digital binder.
Started last year with a problem I faced personally playing TTRPGs with newcomers. Built Overseer over a year to where it is today.
Solo iOS app that I have been working on since January: https://bhol.app - crossed 500 MRR in June. Seeing the traction and feedback from users is the best form of motivation to keep going. Now working on scaling it via UGC/social media, landing deals with local language schools, and upping the design with more Rive assets.
https://explorer.withfudge.com
It's well on the way to make $600+/month now, almost doubling since last month. I've realised given the ease at which software can be ideated and maintained, i would rather focus on having a more dataset-intensive moat.
It's a database of website section screenshots I've been hand collecting with others for almost 2 years now (it's crowdsourced via a seperate chrome extension), each section has styling metadata linked - typography usage (leading, weights, tracking, sizes,etc), font details (foundry, designer), colors and alot more.
What really helped was my positioning, instead of trying to compete with established players (mobbin, landbook, refero), decided to focus on the MCP integration; the giving LLMs design taste angle.
I've been running https://simplescraper.io for a number of years, so not exactly a side project but it started out that way.
If time allowed, I'd focus on the AI photo and video generation. Have seen friends hit $500 relatively quickly by targeting niches.
Sounds like a played out category, but if you look closer it's a bit of a potemkin village - many incumbents are not that good or haven't kept up with the latest models.
Each year it gets more crowded out there, but almost always room for better.
Building a multiplayer game platform. Built a multiplayer pong game to dog feed the platform, and it got viral. Decided to make presales for it and got a little over $700 sales so far . if you want to give it a try, play it here https://antics.gg/p/side-out-94df7d
presale here if anyone interested! https://antics.gg/sideout-presale
nokeep.ai - private, uncensored AI -- launched it cause most folks who want privacy or less censorship attempt to run models locally but that obviously doesn't work unless you invest in hardware / want speed etc.
Wow you're not lying about the uncensored part. What models does it really run? Did you do the abliteration yourself?
oss abliterated model! didnt have to do it myself since theres a lot of options
I am working on making the Dropbox launch first comment a reality: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash It gives you the Dropbox experience on any storage you want inclusive of FTP but also let you access your Dropbox storage via FTP, SFTP, S3, ...
I had an idea in 2008 to make a website that emailed your friends when you die. I built https://www.deadmansswitch.net/ in a weekend, and it's been making money since. Around $1k/mo now.
I've wondered about this before, not just telling people, but what about my code projects etc... Something like "make all my github repo's public when I die" (assuming anyone would care about them).
I heard about your website about a decade ago. That's awesome you are still maintaining it and it's generating cashflow.
Thanks! Now with LLMs it's really easy, I've added attachments, improved check-ins, a better app, lots of stuff. I really like how easy it is now to do the gruntwork of maintenance!
morbid question, but do you know if any emails have ever been sent?
Of course, lots are sent every day. I don't know if they're from deaths, but lots of messages get sent. I know people have died because the police or FBI contact me sometimes.
Once, a girl had committed suicide and used the service to send accusing emails to her friends and family two months later. That was tragic all around.
How do people find it, word of mouth?
Yeah, basically.
A meta directory of niche job boards https://jobboardsearch.com
launched around 4 years ago, crossed $100k in LTR.
Building it in public on X: @rrmdp
It was a side hustle, but a layoff has made it my new job:
https://username.md
Launched and happy to answer any questions.
I like the idea.
I am building an RSS reader and like the idea of being able to tie articles back to verified individuals who have a crypto address and contact information. Even having encoded images would be interesting. "Oh, that's the guy with the funny duck picture on everything he makes." - But it's actually a steganography identifier.
So building a DNS for people... is just having an email address enough?
So imagine you are a freelance writer and at the bottom of an article you put some unique string or pic that leads people and agents back to a home page that contains a crypto address and contact details.
One application: even here on HN if some article gets over say 100 points, how would it be possible to invite the author into the forum for an AMA type discussion. You'd check the article for some type of identifier string first.
Also, with an RSS reader, an author or feed owner could be invited to claim a direct connection with their readership and end up collecting tips from them.
I'd use the term "Atom Reader," but someone may think I'm talking about a quantum physics laboratory. At least RSS has no similes.
https://volt.fm
It started as a side project in 2001, but now it’s my main business.
Here's my own profile if anyone's interested: https://volt.fm/soheilpro
I haven't signed up, though I like the idea. But I wonder how do you monetise this?
There's a Pro plan that offers more complete stats and includes some other features.
Who are your clients?
Music nerds :)
Well, $500 isn't what it was in 2020 (the first thread).
Those making $645/month…
Why can't most of these be OSS?
Why does everything have to be a side project that needs to make money?
My best guess is because people like to eat food and sleep under a roof.
I've grossed 17,531.33 so far this calendar year. You know those cold emails you get sometimes where they want you to get contract jobs and them do the work? I've been doing that for 18 months now and I average roughly 2 hours/week throughout the year.
There are some weeks where I'm doing almost no work at all, but then there are some weeks where I'm interviewing daily and maybe have a video call with a client. I've found that the interview process to get contract jobs is MUCH shorter and simpler than getting full time jobs. They are often done by a non-technical person and are 30 minutes long. There might be another 30-minute interview, sometimes by a technical person but not always. This means that I can interview daily without it causing much disruption to my regular job.
I won't lie, it is stressful at times trying to juggle so many things, and the cognitive dissonance of lying to people is not great. I used to get really anxious about interviewing, but this experience has helped me a lot with that.
Congratulations on (probably) funneling money into North Korea.
I recently got one of those emails, interestingly leading with "I came across your profile on Hacker News".
Once I understood the proposal, I thought this would be horror job cognitive dissonance-wise. So unethical.
I also had a conspiracy theory – perhaps the "we can't pass interviews, so you do the interviews, and we do the job, win-win" is just a cover for the real play – shady anonymous orgs getting access to infrastructure and data of various western businesses, using you as a facade.
Do your contracts allow sub-contracting the work? Most of mine do, so there is nothing unethical about that kind of setup. Unless you are lying about it. But openly sub-contracting work, as long as you maintain accountability for it, is completely fair game.
Fraudulently doing so probably opens you up to a decent amount of legal risk.
From what I understand he's interviewing under the client's identity.
Yeah, if that is the situation, this is straight up fraud.
If anyone has a website or app that generates revenue, even if it's small, please share it with me.
https://socialmediascheduler.ai/
Just crossed $1.45K/mo!
Doubt so, none of the links is working on the site. It doesn't inspire trust, wouldn't spend money, yet even create an account, on a site that has no privacy policy or terms of use.
Generally the reason you have a links section in the footer is for them to be actual links, not text. I wouldn't trust this product as far as I could throw it given how many issues the site seems to have
Erreur 403 : org_internal when trying to create account with google
ok, the site was registred yesterday.
Access blocked: Growth can only be used within its organisation
.. in token expenses :-D
lol a bit more yes