What is your passive income 2019?
Time to ask again :)
Any side projects, Games, OSS.
I built an escape room! Startup Escape (https://startupescape.com), a parody of startups where you have "$1M to launch your startup" (1 hour to escape).
It's a physical game in San Francisco, but it's run day-to-day by a manager. Overall it makes about $15k/mo, and after rent/labor/etc I just make a few thousand dollars a month.
My first book was published six years ago. The title is in my profile, if you're willing to click through for the plug.
It has continued to sell well, and about two years ago I "earned out," meaning my royalties exceeded my advance, so now every six months I get a royalty check.
I've also agreed to several deals that allow my book to be translated and sold in different countries. Those deals are usually on the small side, but the only work involved is picking up a pen and signing the paperwork.
The success of that first book has allowed me to write several related books, and while the advances I've received for those don't count as passive income, my hope is that they will generate some passive income in the future, if I should be so fortunate as to earn out again.
To anyone who is thinking about writing a book, I offer this advice:
There are some cases where it makes sense to self-publish even if you can get a book deal. Niche e-books on technical topics written by people with large built-in audiences are one example.
But in general, if you can get an agent, get an agent, and if you can get a book deal, get a book deal.
Not exactly passive, but side hustle that I hope becomes main hustle: https://simplescraper.io
Tryna fill the gap that Kimono left.
Aim to post as a Show HN once I polish it a little more.
Investing in boring index funds has produced 20% returns this year. Can't imagine it will happen again next yr but who knows.
Actually I had an allocation in Apple which has had a crazy year..up 60% or so to all time highs.
I'm working on a website that calculates the unit prices on Amazon products. Hoping to help save people some money, since there are a surprising amount of times where buying in smaller quantities actually saves you money.
The website is https://unitprice.org/browse if anyone is interested! It's still very much in its infancy, but I plan on doing a "Show HN" soon! Based on the last two weeks, I have only made about $10, but that's been with very little traffic so far.
I run https://bannerjs.com which is a configurable banner announcement service for websites that currently brings in $220 MRR.
I also run https://www.junior-to-senior.com which is a career advice newsletter for programmers that currently brings in $0 MRR, mainly because I'm focusing on content and growing the audience right now and haven't looked into sponsorships or paid subscriptions yet. I'd like to get it to a point where I can run it as a publication with multiple authors.
My primary frontend blog/website (https://www.impressivewebs.com/) is mostly passive, I post maybe one article per month, usually not even that much. The blog has been active for about 10 years, so I get lots of SEO traffic, which brings in about $400-500 per month.
I also sell ebooks that are compilations of articles and tips from my newsletter (see below) on Leanpub and Amazon. (https://leanpub.com/b/javascriptdombundle)
My main newsletter (https://webtoolsweekly.com/) is now also a regular income stream (about $400-700 per month and growing), but not exactly passive. Takes regular research, writing, etc. But it’s fun to do and leads to all sorts of paid tech writing projects.
Finally, my newest newsletter (https://techproductivity.co/) is not yet making money but that’s starting to change as the subscription number has started to rise to a decent number and it’s very easy to write that one, maybe 2 hours of work per week.
I have an outgoing SMS API called Textbelt (https://textbelt.com/). Kinda like Twilio but with flat pricing, smaller SMS packages for hobbyists, no dependencies, and allows 1 free SMS per day (good for crons or alerts).
I also run QuickChart, an API for generating embeddable chart images and QR codes (https://quickchart.io/).
QuickChart is fully open source, Textbelt has an open source version. Not always passive but they don't take much time. Combined they fund my non-mortgage spending.
I’ve posted about it before, but since it’s being asked again:
It’s not “tech” and it’s refreshing to build something from scratch that’s very tangible. I want to walk away from data science and create something that allows me to open a store selling lifestyle products for men one day. To this end, I launched a men’s skincare line about 3 months ago (https://www.mendskin.co) which isn’t “successful” yet, but it’s my first experience selling physical goods and I think these things take time. Right now, I spend about 10 hours per week on Ads, customer service, and fulfillment. So, it’s kinda passive.
“Beauty products” (for lack of a better term) definitely require heavy capital, and it’s becoming hard to do everything by myself. All the individual things that need to be done aren’t hard- it’s just that there’s so much to do in order to deliver successful physical products.
But I enjoy it.
$25/month from Patreon for a very niche open source game. Not exactly passive, except that I was doing it already anyway, might as well have a Patreon for it. (https://spacenerdsinspace.com)
Game DB (https://gamedb.online/) - I take data from Steam APIs and show it in a friendly format. I am currently losing money, but hope to change that soon.
Not what you were looking for but real estate (mostly rental) has been and remains my primary passive income.
Launched this a few months ago. I've made about $14 a month. In terms of return on investment I would have been better picking up pennies in the street, but it was a fun side project. Also, haven't done any real marketing yet... All sales have been organic discoveries through Unity store.
I am working on Mascot Gaming Logo Maker (https://mascotlogomaker.com). It's a tool that allows you to create a gaming logo for your esports team.
As of now I have private beta testers using it and while it's not enough to call passive it sure pays for some video games gg.
cannabis online store. my profit share currently nets me around than CAD10k per month.
started about a year ago when a few friends pooled money together to take over a failing online cannabis store, which are not legal in Canada but are sort of outside of law enforcement interest currently so we operate pretty freely at this moment. i've always been keen to do this as i've heard how profitable it is, so when they asked me to manage all the computer stuff in exchange for a small profit share, i agreed. i had minimal experience with SEO, but learned along the way how to tweak little things here and there, like which types of promos worked, etc and managed to do a decent job in the end. it did require some work at the beginning but once most of the things were set in place, my role was reduced down to mostly designing promos and customer service, which i performed simultaneously at my full-time job which i maintained. the customer service largely involves me just engaging with customers on Discord and answering emails.
it didn't start off 100% passive, and it probably still isn't considered passive, but i don't feel that i do much work for it now and i'm still getting paid roughly CAD10k. my next step is i'm in discussion with one of the partners to start up a new shop, this time as an owner.
Currently i have mainly two different passive income streams. A side project and multifamily property investments.
My side project (https://www.teamcalapp.com) returns around $2500/month and growing. I think the main improvement to be done is doing more marketing, which is unfortunately not so passive.
Im also investing in apartment complexes. Right now i have 4 passive investments. Since I’m only a passive LLC member that income is truly passive. Those investment deliver nice regular cashflow (8-10%) and appreciation once sold. Right now I’m in the process of buying my own property together with friends (50-80units). That will then be a bit more work but still partially passive once all is setup with the property management company.
I was selling computer chips, old but still valuable for resale in my local market. Had to stop due to new restrictions on imports, namely elimination of tax floor for imports. Now everything is getting taxed, and that means my margins are gone.
It was fun while it lasted, I had about 10k USD Per year in profits , used it for beer and travel money.
I would do personal deliveries in bakeries, and only bakeries. My alarm would blare reminding me of making a delivery with the message "Chips at the bakery". I would also do shipping with snailmail, but I enjoyed the personal encounters.
Semi passive rental income - one unit. Looking to acquire more and retire in 4-5 years. =) failed at monetizing my side projects in a scalable way
$250/month this year -- I created Video Hub App as a personal project that became good enough to share with others.
Nearing 1000 purchases since its launch (1.5 years ago), earned about $3500 (just about all went to my favorite cost-effective charity, Against Malaria Foundation). Released version 2 a few weeks back and had about 100 sales this month -- perhaps over the years it will earn a lot more. Was averaging about $250/month this year.
https://videohubapp.com/
Followup question (if allowed). If your passive income involves software and you're also employed at a software company, how do you deal with the potential legal problems?
Most contracts don't allow for commercial side projects and the company owns anything you create even outside of working hours. Do people just keep quiet and not tell their employer? How risky is it? I know some people who simply don't bother telling their employer (and may or may not pay taxes, too), but I guess you can only do this up to a certain point.
Not exactly passive, but... I teach online webinars/in person tutorials on the basics of Data Science and ML with Python: https://www.data4sci.com Started beginning of the year and hoping to make it to $20k
Myself and a buddy run:
https://SQLizer.io - migrate data in CSV, JSON, XML, etc into MySQL databases.
It's doing ok, but growth is static and we've tried a lot of stuff. Feels like we're hitting the total available market for "people who want to convert to SQL".
I mean, it's worth asking, but anyone with a good niche would be smart to not post it publicly unless the benefits of publicity outweigh the risk of competition.
My wife and I make some money with a couple of cheap renting units. To make the administration work easier I started to write an application last year (https://adpro.sun.com.py/en). At first it was very Paraguay-specific so currently I'm working on the last part of internationalization which is the contract and invoice editor. From the start I integrated the ability to also administer renting units for others.
It is very useful to us but I'm not sure about product/market fit. I'm eager to learn from others who rent out what they use for administration and such a system makes sense to them. If I really go after the idea I'll also need a co-founder, please contact me if you are interested.
With 2 friends, we have built a "pokemon-go" like platform, called https://geogaming.io, to create fully customisable scavenger hunts.
We sell it mainly in B2B to companies who sell team building events and that need a touch of digital... We have other customer segments coming (zoos, theme parks, tourism offices...)
We also use the platform for individuals,like for birthdays (http://birthdays.geogaming.io) or hens/bucks parties etc.
This platform brings us ~15k a month but it's growing very very fast.
Our architecture is based on AWS lambdas so our infrastructure costs are very limited and the product is highly scalable (games have been played with thousands of players)...
We are based in Sydney.
I have a website that attracts about 100 unique visitors a day and it brings me <$100/mo via Amazon Affiliate. Getting bigger than that requires a lot more traffic, which requires doing things like SEO research and marketing work which I'm generally too lazy to learn how to do.
Roughly $1,500 a month or so with a web hosting affiliate site - https://www.whatsthehost.com/
There's decent money to be made but a ton of competition, so for newbies I'd recommend easier niches to start!
Not sure how to properly put an adjective to it, but I'm doing some side money on crypto trading.
I started with a rather small amount of money (~0.15 btc) that grew to around ~0.21 in two months before the shitcoin I was playing with went literally to shit (They are not called shitcoins for nothing) and was left with around ~0.12.
I'm testing the waters now with a more stable shitcoin.
FWIW mine is (seems to be, at least) a very stable brute force approach. That I'll make no comments about ;)
P.S.: I obviously have data to back up my claims - the transactions log of my crypto exchange account - but as well the "method" I'm employing can be inferred from there, as it's rather obvious.
Asked by your local Tax office.
I run a business automation services site (https://www.mergeyourdata.com/). Basically I build an automation for small businesses and schedule them to run. Took years of learning the ins and outs of the biggest pain point areas for businesses and the technical solutions that would solve those. The learning all pretty much took place at my regular day job and I was just able to expand on those lessons.
I do microlending through Lending Club, own a Pawn shop (which is managed day-to-day by someone else), and own a Great Clips (Sounds silly, but, again, managed by someone else).
I invest in large industrial real estate ($2-10M) with established tenants (often publicly traded companies) in the Midwest with a group of other investors. It's kind of like Fundrise [0], but with a handful of people in a 2-3 deals a year. With ~180K invested, I'm around $1750/month in positive cash flow.
0. https://fundrise.com
I run an independent, localized wedding registry platform. Couples pay a one-time activation fee. A friend and I built the site some years ago and never really changed anything. All we have to do is to reply to 1-2 support emails per month and keep Google ads running. On average it generates a profit of about 1,5k per month.
A diversified portfolio of index funds. This year return so far is ~15% (which in absolute amounts is more than my after-tax salary, even after accounting for long term capital gains), and my annualized return since when I started investing (~a decade ago) is ~10%.
I sella boutique Jekyll theme for software folks and academics which makes about $400/month. The base version is free, maybe somebody here likes it too: https://hydejack.com/
I built MerciCookie (https://www.mercicookie.com/) an API to send cookies to customers, partners...
I'm in France but we can send cookies in all Europe, US...
Not entirely passive, but I'm a Nominet registrar and buy/sell domains as my side gig. For the most part, this involves taking preorders for domains which have expired and are about to drop, then trying to catch them when they do. I also hold my own domain portfolio which currently consists of just over 200 domains. I generally have an idea for how to develop most of these, but I'm mostly just holding them until I get time to work on them.
Depending on what's dropping, my earnings from the domain side can vary drastically. It usually covers its own costs, and my best month so far (I only started in April this year) earned me around £1000
I’m making around $1,500/month of passive income. Here is what it worked for me: I created a web tool for stock technical analysis but instead trying to acquire clients by myself, I contacted some players with a solid distribution channel who lacks some tools to sell. So I offered them white label to sell inside their website, splitting the profits by 50/50. No cost for me to acquire users, sales, marketing or even support. I believe it can work with any kind of product. Pretty much the same as selling your app in a marketplace, but I would say it is easier to sell having a brand on top of it.
What are we calling "passive" these days? Is there a notion about the amount of (ongoing) sweat equity/maintnence to payout we all have in mind? The original notion seems unlikely ==> finish initial work/build and then just sit back and collect checks. Seems like few of the projects posted so far, if any, meet that high bar. Realistically there is almost always ongoing maintenance, and if it comes from a passion, probably also constant tinkering and improvement. I've definitely got one of those -- I can't let it sit long enough to ever call it fully passive :)
Have some small sites that have generated a few hundred each month from ads that continue to do well. I don't have to do anything with them. But I have started to double-down on some of these successes by offering some paid SAAS options around them. After an initial push, I hope they will mainly be passive, as well. The free sites serve as the lead generation. So I am OK with them growing organically that way. It's slow, but easy. If one shows more promise or potential than others, perhaps I will put in more feature development or marketing efforts there.
We've built Bugfender 5 years ago as an internal tool at Mobile Jazz for solving our own need of iOS and Android debugging and remote logging. After the first 2 years or struggling we've now just crossed MRR $23k USD and the business continues to grow healthy with small and big customers.
https://bugfender.com/blog/bugfender-growth-from-side-projec...
I made a twitter bot (@schumannbot) that posts the Schumann Resonance graphs from http://sosrff.tsu.ru/new/shm.jpg
It gained close to 10k followers within a year.
I started selling related T-Shirts, and make ~$60 a month. Nothing big, but it's beer money. I plan on expanding the related website and even starting a YouTube channel, but it's not exactly something I planned on monetizing.
Running the same passive project as 2017 - a day trading robot focused on Canadian (TSX) market conditions. It's been wildly successful closing positions on a nightly basis and exploiting market patterns that work at a scale that I care about. I spend almost zero maintenance time per month, less than 10 minutes per day interacting with it.
It's also proved an excellent toy for me to constantly retool and play with new languages, frameworks, and databases. Couldn't be happier.
Is anyone still making ad revenue?
While in college I started a price comparison site for textbooks (https://www.affordabook.com) that generates affiliate income.
Back in the day it generated great income and warranted full time work, but these days it still generates some solid passive income. A lot of the traffic is from SEO, but we still have a small social presence and a healthy amount of repeat visitors.
Same as last year. High-dividend stocks and ETFs. Everything else (including my rental property) is a lot less "passive" than most people think.
I've been running https://kriptode.com a bunch of services that run with Bitcoin on Lightning.
Most popular is http://sats4likes.com where you can earn/pay Bitcoin for twitter likes.
It's not exactly passive or profitable but I learned a lot.
I released the initial version of https://datamaps.world at the beginning of September. So far I earned around 200$ from subscriptions and 100$ from selling the license to my datamaps chart library.
I have a full-time job and I'm working on this project only in my spare time.
Kernl (https://kernl.us) - WordPress Plugin/Theme Updates, Git Deployment, Analytics, Load Testing, etc.
Currently around $1200/month with fairly linear growth. It's a fun project to work on and I get to make money on the side for doing it.
--Tried selling coffee online - failed- margins too low -CCA too high
--Real estate multifamily (8units) - once deferred maintenance is taken care of, will be profitable
--Looking for a pain point in my companies product marketing department that I can solve and productize
I sell/invest in Pokemon/Magic the Gathering/Yugioh Cards. It's some work to keep up to date with prices, managing the online store / in person matters. But it's a fun hobby and I've made lifetime friends as well.
I wrote a paid Chrome extension that tests websites for SEO, speed and security best practices:
https://www.checkbot.io/
It currently has 30K active users of the free version and 100s of paid users.
Github sponsorship 750$ per month
https://extracttable.com - started on Aug 26 ($1400 till date), injecting the revenue back in to it to release more services.
I'd consider my work as an Amazon 3P Seller as semi-passive.
It's been my "side hustle" for 2+ years now, with 2019 at $40K in YTD earnings. (Inclusive of all costs except my own labor, which I do not track)
AMA?
I wrote a book several years ago and in the last year or so sales have exceeded the advance, so I get that income. It is no more than about $100 a year (if that) but it is something.
Social Security + about $100 a year from an oil royalty i inherited
Retirement income + money market investment income. I've left the market, because I'm a pessimistic investor. I've sold my house and it too is in cash investments.
$80/month.
Regular Expression Pocket Reference for O'Reilly. 1st edition in 2003, 2nd edition in 2006.
$1k/month
Medium back catalog.
I moved everything I've ever written behind Medium's paywall and took out any CTAs so that I'd qualify for distribution inside their algorithm.
Have a SaaS product I built a few years back. Still churning and profitable but for a niche audience.
Wanting to pick up another passive income stream.
I can offer a way to generate passive income.
I have a software consultancy (among our clients are Fiverr, Intel and HP software) and I pay about 2000$ per month as finders fees for referring software consulting leads.
What you need to do is to ask your software developer friends if their company is looking to hire a contractor.
When I sign the contract I pay a nice monthly finder's fee.
Contact me for more details if it sounds interesting to you. My contact details in my profile..
I've released two SQL courses on DataCamp, which bring in a nice sum every quarter.
I sell about 2-4 books a month.
I post photos to pixabay.com and get Paypal donations
Start amazon affiliate site
