Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

I really don't like talking about my side projects, so I guess they all qualify, but I'm particularly excited about one at the moment.

Right now I'm working on a dog treat business - I make a treat mix that you add water to and freeze for a meat-based frozen treat. I feel really good about the product and the packaging design (and this is the first time I've ever worked on any kind of a physical product, so it's really cool to see the boxes), and I've sold a few boxes so far. Trying out some advertising now and working on building a presence on Instagram, since that seems like a great place to reach dog people, and the product is pretty photogenic.

https://coopersdogtreats.com/

My app Twitter Archive Eraser (https://martani.github.io/Twitter-Archive-Eraser) used to be free, then I added a donation button and people, while barely donated, used to say that this is something they would have paid for!

I worked on a paid tier (learnt a tremendous amount about actually selling an app, integration with payment processors, licensing, more legal stuff than I wanted to etc.)

Almost from the get go, it started making +$3k/mo. With more changes and offering a Mac version along a Windows version, it averages around +$7k/mo of revenue consistently. I'm the only person on it and have a full time job. Barely need to make code changes and it requires minimal effort for customer support.

It's probably not what you meant, but I recently created a weekend project bot that scans facebook for apartments rental ads. Thanks to this bot, I landed an opportunity I wouldn't have catch otherwise, saving me 6,000$ a year. Assuming I will hold my new apartment for 3 years, this is a net savings of 18,000$. I haven't sold anything, but yet I created something that "generated money" for me.

My code is open source by the way, and I wrote about it here: https://snir.dev/blog/apartments-bot/

In this virus season alone I've made $8000 in sales.

You'll find various subreddits where people are buying around 5-10spools a month. Imagine how much virgin plastic is being added like that to the environment.

I've been creating filament and selling it:

https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-ho...

This activity also help recycle waste plastic.

Production cost of filament is $7.5 per 5kg and filament roll has 850 gram filament and can be sold for $20-30 per spool

It's trivial to get the quality right.

You can sell rolls on Amazon, eBay and Etsy or your own Shopify store and use Facebook ads/Google Ads to advertise your website.

That said I didn't use any ads to sell filament! Only few days ago I started Shopify store and paid $5-10 in Facebook ads. Since we accept credit card, it's not too much of a risk for buyer to buy it from us (even when are new)

I work from home so I take 5 minute break and walk to my garage and check if the filament machine successfully is running on auto pilot

Thing is filament doesn't have huge demand, neither it has very less demand. So you can dominate local demand by creating quality filament.

I focus on fulfilling local demand, I've gained customers who need large supply of filament of ABS, TPU and Nylon12.

If people do actually come to compete with me, it's a win win. More plastic recycled = less plastic entering landfill.

I wanted to learn iOS dev, so made the simplest game I could think of: a card game where you just draw a random card and win if it's between two values. Then I made another app that just transliterates your name into Japanese characters and displays that. That one made $33 / year.

Together they almost covered the Apple Developer fee :-)

Things continued like this for years, until one day Apple started getting harsher on gambling. While my game has no other players, and the "money" you win doesn't save anywhere or get you anything, it was still gambly enough that I could no longer have it in the store as an individual developer. Then the Japanese name app was also removed because it wasn't substantive enough (I don't disagree).

I don't mention them usually, because the loss didn't mean much to me and I'm still fine with developing for iOS in the future. But here you asked especially for projects that made money but that we wouldn't usually talk about.

I made a grainy and poor-quality but useful video on how to fix a specific issue for Macs which didn’t have a video anywhere else.

Spent 5 minutes to make the video and upload it.

Was making $2-3/month, which is a great ROI for 5 minutes of work.

All positive comments and upvotes because the video is useful.

Then YouTube demonetized all small publishers because they can somehow block spam, but not identify “offensive” content.

Fuck you Youtube.

I sell prints of public domain artwork on Etsy [0]. I’ve automated the print production and fulfillment, so all I need to do is set up the artwork and maintain the product listings.

It consistently brings in around £100-300 per month and if I put any time at all into marketing it could probably do a lot better.

I also maintain a directory of UX tools, resources and information [1]. It currently doesn’t bring in anything but it’s more of a repository for stuff I find interesting than a commercial venture.

[0] https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/TheDoveAndTheSeagull

[1] https://www.uxlift.org/

I used to sell extra naughty bikinis online, in addition to being a consultant for distributed real-time machine learning.

People had a hard time combining the image of a nerd in the basement with that of a flashy sales guy surrounded by models. So I usually didn't mention the bikinis to allow me to charge full nerd pricing for my coding.

This site project brought in roughly €500 monthly with almost no work, because I was renting space in a fulfillment center combined with shopify and a marketing contractor.

I have a creative writing site that lets authors write branching fiction novels together. It's stupid fun, we have Discord/Zoom writing events Sunday nights where we try to write chapters together (usually around 500 words) and read them to each other. It existed years ago and made some advertising money, and then I shut it down because of spam problems (since solved). I brought it back to live because of COVID. I'm petrified to launch the site live because it's on a 10-year-old php stack, the website design looks like it's from the late 90's, and my IP policy sucks (on submit, I own all copyrights, my current authors don't mind but it's always bugged me) and I have no other compliance things going on like coppa or privacy policies because I don't know how to do that and do I really want to hire a lawyer if I have no ambitious revenue plans? If I keep advertising turned off (my preference), my only other current revenue path is publishing books when all threads get concluded, and the writing quality, while better than most similar sites, is not really publication quality. So for now it just sits behind an apache password prompt and gets very little traffic, and that's ok for now. Although if anyone here likes the idea of writing silly creative writing stories on a private website, feel free to message me. Main story right now is a girl who is invited to mage school except she accidentally kills her boyfriend. Well, that's just one thread. In another thread he's a firemoose.

I made almost 6 figures a year on an affiliate website promoting natural health products, when they were extremely popular back in 2006.

I would stay awake some nights and jot down every product mentioned in overnight infomercials (before I knew what TiVo was). then write a review on them the next day.

Thousands of people would search for “X review” in the days after watching those infomercials and I would rank #1 because some of them were brand new products.

This was more of a one-time launch, but I made around 25k off it. Half of that went to affiliates.

Bit of background - lots of Amazon sellers use a software called tactical arbitrage that scrapes retailers to get prices and compares prices to Amazon. It comes with a couple hundred sites built in, and the ability to add new sites using custom xpaths. I made a chrome extension that lets you point and click on arbitrary sites to automatically create an xpath file that would be compatible with this software. Charged $199 for it, although I had some launch specials at $149 and above.

Still have a handful of organic sales a year, although it's not really worth the time spent in support anymore. In retrospect I should have made it $99 upfront plus $10/month or something and provided ongoing support.

It’s very small at the moment, but I built a simple way to stand up a landing page, collect payment, and send out a link.

Primarily have yoga instructors using this as a better way to collect payment for Zoom classes compared to collecting payment on Venmo or using another tool they’re not comfortable with such as Gumroad.

Only charging .6% on top of Stripe’s fees and no monthly. Only making a little money at the moment but it’s scaling and seeing interest from lots of random online instructors.

ClassUp - https://www.classup.io

I work ~4 hours a week making aircraft add-ons for X-Plane, releasing one product every 3 months, net profit ~$5k a month total.

It's fairly simple: 1) Commission Russian 3D artist to make model of aircraft -$1000 2) Commission Audio Engineer to do sound - $500 3) Tweak model to work well with simulator + animation - 12 hours 4) Paint model in Substance - 12 hours 5) Set up flight model in X-Plane's "Plane Maker" - 8 hours 6) Coding - 12 hours 7) Misc loose ends & testing - 12 hours

I don't talk about it because I don't want too much competition figuring out what an easy way this is to make money.

I got tired of reading bad READMEs and made https://www.makeareadme.com/ on a whim. Over the past few years, it has climbed up the Google search rankings. It's usually in the top three hits for "readme" now.

I serve developer-focused ads with CodeFund (and Carbon as a backup when CodeFund doesn't have an ad available). I get about $45 in revenue per month. Hosting costs are $0 because it's just a static site served from Netlify, so the only cost is the domain.

I never intended to make any money off of it, and I care much more that it's hopefully a helpful resource for some people. But it is nice to get a little bit of passive income.

The closest thing I've had to that is my side project Taaalk (https://taaalk.co) - it's a platform for online interviews.

After the success of one of our interviews on HN [1], someone contacted me and suggest that I interview a highly successful value investor. We had a great 'Taaalk' [2] and he then put me in touch with an investing friend of his in London who runs a fund. We met for lunch and he taught me all about how he invests in shares, it was very straight forward, so I started following his guidance and made 50% on my money last year [nothing magical, just solid and practical value investing advice] - meaning I could take the year off and do a masters in Psychology of Mental Health - which is (slowly) helping change my career into a direction I love.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9300017)[the link to our site wont work, to see the interview go here: https://taaalk.co/t/how-to-think-about-chess]

[2] https://taaalk.co/t/value-investing

P.S. Anyone can make their own interview, so if you have a friend you think should be interviewed - please keep Taaalk in mind :)

https://timeshift.xkozn.co/

This allows you change the start time of a Strava (Garmin, etc.) activity. Useful for WFH situations where you really just want a nice midday run or bike, but don't want to deal with the potential judgement from coworkers who follow you. Might be overthinking things, but oh well :)

My side projects are primarily for myself meaning:

- intellectually stimulating

- excuse to acquire toys (cnc, miter saw, linoblocks and inking supplies, etc)

- can be used a fun projects/learning experiences for my kids.

My project that has generated the most revenues has been selling (in very low quantities) a limited edition wordclock that I designed and build. Except for the Qlock2 all the wordclocks I’ve seen are diy or compete on cost. Mine is (imho) a high quality art piece. And I price it similarLy to Qlock2 but with a totally different aesthetic. My wordclock making started as presents for friends and family then evolved to a workshop I taught at a local maker space. Some discussion on my Show HN a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18950130

Website: finewordclocks.com

Etsy: finewordclocks.etsy.com

I bought a cnc machine for the clocks but most of my cnc work currently is making projects with the kids. Some of them have been refined into other products (Like custom engraved magic marker holders) on my Etsy site.

Lately As a side project to my side project I’ve been making wooden sneeze guard stands. These started by my neighbor who’s a dentist asking me to help him make some. Then I made a few for friends that own a local bakery. Last week I received an order for $1000 worth from an urgent care provider. Feels good to help small businesses reopen post lockdown. Even cooler if they are willing to pay me to help. It also serves as a teaching moment with my kids.

Next is to figure out how to use my maker skills to help BLM movement. I’m still trying to figure that out. Ideas welcome!

I own a swimming pool and do most of my own maintenance and water chemistry. I created https://poolforthought.com as a place to organize my knowledge. I later realized other people want the same info, and now 7 years later it's made about $20k USD. Ads and affiliate links drive site revenue. I have about 12k email signups of people who want a pool maintenance ebook I'm creating (for a price). I should finish that thing. It's money just sitting there waiting for me to capture.

I don't typically talk about my side projects, but I made a simple Montessori materials website for use while teachers/students have been stuck at home the past few months: https://montessori.tools

It has grown organically to 1,000 visits per day and ~$1,000/month. I have a couple of additional materials in the pipeline. Of course, I've already seen everything from the site shamelessly copied and posted elsewhere. That's fine; I never built it for the money (I built it for my wife, who is a teacher).

I built an Android app a few years back as a project to learn native Android coding, its been making around $300/month from sales/adsense. Its fun to read and reply to reviews every now and then. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lpellis.se...

I made a voicemail service for podcasters using WebRTC. It's a widget you add to your website. I spent about 3 weeks building it. So far I have 1 active user paying around $13 a month. Its been great, my user has been telling me how to build the product he wants.

https://www.podbites.fm

I had an affiliate marketing website when I was a kid, mostly for fun and learning with some friends, that made some money off backpack recommendations and Amazon links. We didn't feel too good about it after a while so we shut it down. I now hate SEO powered advice blogs.

More recently, I've started making adult videogames, one of which being an interactive fiction that had a lot of traction, but is now on hiatus due to Covid related reasons. One unintended effect of this, is that I learned personally how much both Apple and credit card providers have a chilling effect on freedom of nudity in entertainment - it's appalling.

Not now, but I did. Back in the 00s I blogged a lot and had AdSense on my there. I'd done a quick review of a popular route planner in the UK (back when Google Maps hadn't taken over) and thought little of it until it started making hundreds of dollars per day. So then I did a quick review of several other popular route planners in the UK..

For about 18 months, I was making $2-10k a month from people typing in "whatever route planner", reaching my blog post, then clicking straight out to the real planner on the AdSense unit. It died off after a while as the real route planners improved their SEO but it paid for my wedding and more besides, so I couldn't complain :-)

https://sendnoodz.io | Spam your friends with MMS of noodles

Strangely not because of the content, rather because there are lots of inconsistencies/imperfections in the design and it doesn't make enough to justify fixing them.

I created an opensource tool to generate performance reports based on Github pull requests (think gitprime, codeclimate, gitclear).

I've made $250 in a single year on a single consultation.

The first iteration was a service that listened to build and repository actions. I switched it up to generate static reports. It queries github at a point in time for raw PR data. Then it generates a basic PR report based on that data. It generates CSV so visualization falls on the end user :p

- https://github.com/ImpactInsights/valuestream

- https://medium.com/valuestream-by-operational-analytics-inc/...

I built a Chrome extension that checks websites for SEO, speed and security best practices:

https://www.checkbot.io/

Most of the growth has been organic but I post it in forums when it seems relevant. I haven't had much luck with ads but writing articles has been worthwhile.

I don't talk about my side projects at work hours, even if someone asks.

However, I built Pixmap for Android to learn Android dev. It makes a couple dollars a month... :)

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.winricklab...

I built FastComments as a tool for myself, but it's starting to gather bigger and bigger customers.

https://FastComments.com

My astrology charts app for android [1] brings me about 5€/month. I earned more by doing some consulting with the technology I use for this app (Pybridge [2]) than with the app itself.

My web app [3] earned only 50€ since 2016. My other projects (ex: mockrest.com [4]) don’t make me any money at all. I have to use other strategy.. :/

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flatangle....

[2] https://github.com/joaoventura/pybridge

[3] http://elements.flatangle.com/

[4] http://mockrest.com/

I built https://rootshirechess.glitch.me/ for my kids to play chess with cousins and grandparents during the epidemic. I put “buy me a coffee” on and posted a couple places about it. Made ~24$ on it ;)

I started up a botanical brewery. We make non alcoholic drinks from medicinal mushrooms and we’re about three weeks away from launching our chaga based drink. We were supposed to launch in March, but COVID threw a spanner into the works. You can check it here: https://borealbrewing.ca

Putting out a real product has been an insane amount of work, from getting the brand designed to finding somebody to actually help with production, but it’s been a fantastic learning experience. I’m really hoping that we’ll get the product out with no further delays, as it’s full of, amongst other good things, antioxidants which are great immune boosters.

I made around 2 k€ with a celebrity pics website, in the late 90s, just before the explosion of the internet bubble.

I misspelled the celeb's name and my site was the 3rd result on Altavista when other people made the same spelling error. I put a counter and saw a lot of visits, so I added some banner ads.

A few weeks later I got a nice paper check that I converted from French Francs to Belgian Francs in the bank. It was before the EUR!

It was nice to have some pocket money, but I've always been ashamed of this site. 20 years later, I'm starting to think that it was kind of cool... It's still on archive.org!

http://askjud.com — I made it when I was 15. It’s pretty terrible, but has made $30k+ over its lifetime.

I built a small library for synchronizing subtitles with video (https://github.com/smacke/ffsubsync) at a hackathon, and a couple of users appreciate it enough to sponsor me for $11 / month, which comes to $22 / month after Github matches contributions :)

Like everyone here, I get ideas for side projects that might be profitable. At some point, I started looking at the likelihood of success, the time I'd invest, and how much I'd make. The answer is almost always that I'm better off dedicating the time to my day job, or even just relaxing so I'm better at my job.

That said, I get it. You get some financial freedom, you get to explore a project that interests you for you, you get to learn something new, and this is from the perspective of someone who's got a job he's happy with.

I've probably been promoting it too much lately, especially on here.

I'll pass on this one, but just wanted to say thank you to everyone who shares a project. It really does help others to see what is possible.

Sidequestion: Does anyone have any recommendations on simple guides to SEO? I'm realizing the power of search traffic to bring in visitors to sideprojects.

My work place (startup) uses Google Spreadsheets as our weekly metrics dashboard. I'm the person who has run a ruby script to generate the data and copy them into the spreadsheet. I finally got around to building a simple API that would allow me to send it directly to the spreadsheet. Now tthe data gets updated automatically with Cron.

Its a very narrow use case, maybe others will find it useful. I'm no designer. Would love some feedback.

https://sheetsapi.co/

Yes, I have. 3000€ since the ads are there. Also from 6, 7 years ago, I was learning to code.

https://random.country/

Easy A - https://easy-a.net/

Shows the grade distributions per class and if you add in your prior coursework we can predict the workload and grades per class.

Haven’t updated it in 5 years (recently updated the data). Still pulls in slightly more than it costs to host with thousands of students adding grades a year. Probably a thousand a year.

Currently supports UIUC, UT-Austin, university of Washington and quite a few others.

I don’t really talk about it because it was built for a few friends over a weekend right before I left school. The advisors for CS at UIUC we’re always swamped so I figured I’d make a basic one with some data science. Turns out everyone liked it and participated in making it way better

I wrote a game engine to learn more about how they work and it ended up evolving into "Portal meets Doom" iOS game (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gate-escape/id1449377239)

I've talked a little about the technical details, but not much of the game itself. It makes about $40/month - not exactly motivating money. It's been very difficult to market so I have lost most motivation to acquire more users.

I dream to open source the level editor and allow community made maps, but I can't really judge the demand for such a large feature investment.

I started a podcast to talk with folks about their tech stack choices. It's at https://runninginproduction.com/.

Since October 2019 it's made $200 in the form of 1 episode having a sponsor.

As a side topic, I would be very happy to have anyone on who wants to talk about their tech stack for their side projects.

My side project at the moment is day/swing trading. I started sometime in early March when I pulled my money out from the stock market and cashed in on some capital gains. Things went to hell shortly after that but I was safe waiting in cash waiting to buy back in.

Because I was sitting on about 220k in cash I decided to look into other ways to put my money to use. I realized I could probably buy massive positions in large cap stocks and scalp small 20 to 50 cents moves that happen all the time and make about $100-$300 on each trade fairly quickly.

What has also helped kicked this off for me was 0 commissions on trades. Before I would have to pay like 7 bucks per trade and even though I can still profit it’s amazing how that small cost each time created resistance in my mind.

Since March, I’ve had $12540 in winning trades and -$4476 in losses, for a total profit of $8063.77, however, probably like 90% of that has been made in the past month alone since I started out cautiously with small trades to see how my win/loss ratio was, and in the past week alone I made a $2620 profit. I am now making bigger trades with $100k+ size positions. On top of that, I’ve already reinvested my $220k cash into long term holdings so I borrow that $100k from my broker (I only have to pay interest if I hold overnight which I never do), this gives me the best of both worlds.

To be honest it all seems too easy. If I just make about $400 dollars profit a day, which is like maybe 2 or 3 successful trades, 5 days a week, that’s $2000k a week, about $96k a year, for something that only takes an hour of my time (I only focus on the first hour the market opens)

For now, I just keep reinvesting these profits into buying more stocks and as my account builds more capital I’ll feel comfortable gradually increasing my position size for day trades to make either quicker more successful trades off of smaller spreads or more profitable ones with the same size spread. We’ll see.

I don’t talk about this because no one would believe it and all the advice I find out there is stuff like “it works until it doesn’t” or “you’ll lose it all...” etc. Fuck it. When I die put my money in the grave.

I built https://markdownbin.com/ because a friend was complaining something like this doesn't exist.

Nobody uses it and probably that's why it doesn't exist.

I made a tool to detect which user account can be safely remove from PagerDuty. It also provide simple weekly report emails. I got a few subscribers by doing nothing else that putting it on the PagerDuty marketplace.

https://www.pagerinsights.com/

I copied an app from the App Store. Their business model was free desktop application but $20 for the iOS client and I really wanted it so I made a 'clean-room' implementation with CloudKit and charged $0.99 for a one-off cross platform sale.

Bit brazen, but the idea isn't entirely unique.

Edit: P.s email me at adam@adamfallon.com if you would like a promo code to get the app for free :).

* https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nitronotes/id1502080216

I launched my project a few weeks ago. It’s called Newsy (https://www.newsy.co)

I got tired of many of my un-used domain names and this was the best way for me to make use of them without spending much time on them.

Partner and I built a service to do sales attribution and commissions, ingesting data from Shopify / WooCommerce / etc. Works great for any sort of sales organization w hierarchy, but we’ve had success with network marketing / direct sales.

Spending nights and weekends, we scaled enough that we banked about $67k on the side in the first 8 months and then took used that as seed to go full time. 3 years later we’re still at it with a decent team and a ton of fun and cool tech

I created an AWS poster, like the periodic table but for services:

https://moca.computingarchitectures.com/en/~hello-world/

it was something to do after i left AWS, and also a way to test a model for computing i wanted to build.

Unfortunately with Covid 19 few people need a poster for their office at the moment, so focusing on tooling etc using the underlying model.

I build websites and manage them for cash-flow (and have been doing this for a decade). Started with SAAS affiliate sites and moved onto a more ambitious vision of cleaning up content categories on Google that are loaded with bad advice. (So build a better site that replaces self-serving junk and amateur nut-job sites with real content)

My latest project (un-monetized) is an attempt to raise the bar in the business opportunities vertical; I aim to research and lay out (in non-promotional terms) paths to earning a living wage in the gig economy. There's a lot of bad advice pushing courses / e-books / etc with a high rate of failure. Most of these gig economy roles are fairly simple businesses to manage; the idea is if you can instill some self-employment literacy, you can even the odds for new freelancers and side hustlers.

I'm working on a publishing model which delivers legitimate advice with a decent chance of success (for the reader) and a fair return for the publisher. https://highestpayinggigs.com/

Started making a high-quality version of a niche but expensive board game in Tabletop Simulator, and the IP owner contacted me and offered a 50/50 split if I want to try and monetize it. Looks like our best option at this point is Patreon, but assuming at least one person donates then this will be the first dollar I ever make on a side project.

Started making videos on YouTube of topics that I lookup over and over or that I would like to learn more. I prefer not to monetize my videos with YouTube ads but I've already been contracted by several major software companies to make videos for them.

Definitely not passive income but I enjoy it as a different work from normal programming where I can explore stuff I am interested or even just practice talking through interview questions out loud.

It's interesting to see which videos get traction. My most viewed video (https://youtu.be/8eyfmp7dtYk) is one that I just made on a whim, like many of my videos, and has a bad like/dislike ratio but I've gotten constructive feedback on it in case I decide to redo it.

I've learned a ton from having this channel and have made about $2k from contracting a handful of videos so far this year.

I made a web-based graphing calculator (http://fooplot.com) in 2007 that runs on ad revenue and is still delivering about 5X its hosting costs. It only makes enough profit for about a few dinners a month so nothing I can live off of but hey I'll take anything more than $0. It used to make an order of magnitude more back when I had 250K MAU and that was a meaningful addition to my meager PhD salary. But times have changed and (a) people started using mobile apps to graph functions and (b) AdSense somehow decreased the CPC I was getting and I then stopped putting effort into it.

You can put arbitrary equations into the URL, e.g.

http://fooplot.com/1+sin(x)/2

I have a twitter bot, that I've monetized through the sale of T-Shirts and I'm now working on a YouTube channel. Generates enough revenue to pay the rent so that's cool.

https://twitter.com/schumannbot

For a while I wrote a bot that would scrape ebay for textbooks and send me an email when it found a textbook that I could buy and resell to a third party (chegg, amazon, whoever) and make more than $10. At one point I was buying like 5 textbooks a day, many of them I sold for $20-$30 more than I purchased them for. And I had it all automated to the point where if the all the parameters were met the code would actually buy the item for me (although most of the books were just emailed to me for me to review). I stopped doing it because it got pretty stressful for me, and became a bit of a distraction from my regular job. I was going to try to bring in my 16 year old brother to manage it, but he didn't have the hustle in him...

I run a send free text app that lets users watch ads to send sms, I rarely need to update and provide customer support and it makes 60$/month from ads+iap. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pseudozach...

And then another app that converts play store balance to 1/2 bitcoin but I actually like to talk about this one, if I can find anyone interested https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pseudozach...

Generally when I want to learn something new I'll build a new side project (or re-build an existing one) to support the learning process. This time I wanted to include my partner in the project so I built something that would require some manual moderation of content.

I built a 'hookup' website and have monetized it with a single affiliate offer/link.

It's made a few thousand in the last 18 months or so, with almost no promotion (posted something about it on reddit once).

Like someone else in this post commented, the way that the 'adult' industry is pushed out of the banking/credit card world makes it pretty tough to monetize sites of this nature.

I recently built https://grapiture.com An API for sending charts / panels to Slack.

Still have a bunch of features in the works but hoping it will make some money eventually.

I created a HTTP request scheduler that allow people to setup rule based notifications: https://ihook.us. Not making money yet, all free plan users right now :)

I'm the only dev behind qr-tools, a python library to work with QR codes, and QtQR a GUI that uses the lib and let's you create and different types of QR codes and decode QR codes easily from images, the web or your webcam. Both projects are OpenSource and mainly targeted to Ubuntu users. I haven't been actively developing them, just some maintenance. They seem to have a pretty good use base but is hard to tell with this type of projects. I've never talk about it because is not a usual conversation topic, QR codes are not use that much where I'm from and less on the desktop.

I’ve been doing a lot of eBay reselling and it’s been quite profitable despite minimal effort. Forces me away from the computer so that’s a plus. I also like shopping and spending money so it fills that need while making money.

Guess that counts as a side project? I’ve got some scripts to manage my eBay store like auto relisting to help boost the items once the fall off of the eBay algorithm. Been thinking about packaging the scripts up as a product but I don’t really want to support it.

I started selling clothes through print-on -demand platforms. Didn't earn much yet, but didn't put much effort into it either. I even got featured on the Modsly platform blog as a success story which is kind of cool :)

https://blog.modsly.com/how-i-made-my-first-sale-after-2-day...

I started Yomi.ai just two months ago. It made a few hundred dollars so far. I am trying to develop the number one resource for Japanese language learners who want to improve their reading skills.

My ideal customer is has a good command of the English language and is trying to pass the Japanese Language Proficiency Test on the level N1 or N2.

Since it's such a niche, I don't talk too much about it.

I started many unsuccessful side projects, making me almost no or no money at all. The latest one (WunderFlix) is different though. It starts making a modest amount of money. But since I never made any money with the other projects I still don't like to talk about it.

But, now that you've asked... I always wanted to have an app that can help me creating short films of my kids with my iPhone. I searched the App Store and found many, but they were all so complicated to use. I wanted simplicity. After all, I have kids, and thus no time to fiddle around with a complicated and long process to create the films. Since I could not find the app I was looking for, I decided to create it myself :-)

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wunderflix/id1484705777

[2] https://www.wunderflix.com

I started building Lanes (https://lanes.io) in 2016 as a way to learn how to code. Don't talk about it because it's way overdue for an update.

But it plods along, earning enough to cover the bills for my second project, Simplescraper (https://simplescraper.io).

With Wunderlist shut down this year it was the perfect time to relaunch Lanes 2.0 to try capture some of those task-manager migrants. But if there's a single thing building side-projects has taught me it's that if you try and chase two rabbits, you'll catch neither.

Neural net for soft porn (tasteful nudes). Android app, 3 years old:

http://driftwheeler.com

More than 800 users per day, on average. Continuously growing user base. Profit through Met-Art affiliation.

i've made $20 off of https://apps.apple.com/us/app/simple-and-sinister/id15132753... in the last 3 weeks. sales plummeted though for some reason and just stopped after release. going free for now until i release some new features that will be in-app purchase upgrades.

this is the first time i've actually made something to solve my problem though. i started using kettlebells due to covid lockdowns, etc, and thought the apps out there were way too bloated and shitty.

I always make side projects to learn new things and they periodically make me a small amount of money.

From most recent to oldest:

Https://brand-kit.net

Have not made money yet but just launched last month. Basically it is starter business branding at a very affordable price wrapped into a service.

Https://scrape.email

Launched at the beginning of the year and making around 100/month now. I used common crawl to index emails across the web monthly making it easy to find all emails for a given website.

Https://appdoctor.io

My most ambitious project from 2 years ago. Appdoctor is an app monitoring platform with automated tests, status page and a bunch of extra stuff..makes around 150/m now.

Hi, When saying a project "you'd not talk about" and then talking about it - it's kind of taking the point out of it :-) But I guess I understand what you mean. I have created https://yabs.io just for me and let other people use it for free for now. It is a copy of del.icio.us for saving bookmarks with tags and then searching them easily. I have also created https://www.gematrix.org for calculating Gematria values of words and phrases.

During corona quarantine a built a web tool to support the Scrum Retrospective Session for (distributed) Scrum Teams. I use it with my team, even though we are back in the office again: https://retrospective.scrum-tips.com/

For now, it is completely free, not even registration required. I am thinking of making a paid professional version, as I see that it is useful and used by other teams despite the lack of marketing. But still, need to work on better marketing as well as adding more features...

I created a series to help me learn about systems. I didn't tell anyone I knew I was working on this and just posted on HN (thanks for the support!) that first year. I put a paid option that I hid on a secondary page. Revenue is very small (in the hundreds) but soon I'll focus on building it into a business. Now that I talk about it with people, around 90% have encouraged me to monetize, but I am figuring out how. https://unintendedconsequenc.es/

We have been building on the side for quite some time a image enlarge/upscale service based on convolutional neural networks algorithms:

https://deep-image.ai

More details about the technology side:

https://teonite.com/blog/deep-image-thanks-to-machine-learni...

Now we’ve just launched payments - so we have to see some time about the results.

Won't be a customer for this product...we have three German Shepherds..too much work...and they will swallow them up in a microsecond.

I will, however, give you an idea for another product. Don't know if it has an audience, but it is along the lines of what you are doing.

When large dogs are small you can buy pre-made treats and they'll spend a good amount of time working on them. Past a certain age/size they'll instantly crack them into pieces and it's the end of the story.

It would be interesting to have healthy protein-based edible treats of different sizes (2 to 12 inches?) that are hard or resilient enough to keep a dog busy for a while while they grind away while providing nutritional treat.

One of the options for dogs like ours seems to be to buy cooked bones like this one:

https://www.petco.com/shop/en/petcostore/product/good-lovin-...

They will work on something like this for days. The problem is that they are not really nutritious and they will eventually fracture them and they will splinter. The dogs won't get hurt but it's always of concern having bone fragments on the floor. Also, I don't think you necessarily need something that will last weeks. If it's good for a day or a few days (depending on cost) it's probably OK.

There's are other options in the market:

https://www.petco.com/shop/en/petcostore/product/dog/dog-tre...

Read the ingredients and think about whether or not dogs evolved to eat this stuff. I don't think so. They can get sick and have intestinal problems from these kinds of treats.

Also, read some of the comments on that particular product for a view into what I am generally talking about.

Good luck.

I made Metaset (https://metaset.io) to quickly do visual analysis on data sets. Started from my own needs for a project that spit out large CSV files. Excel or Tableau were too cumbersome and I didn't bother doing pandas and matplotlib.

Later I found someone with a similar need but for Postgres databases. It's been pulling in a decent side income.

I am embarrassed by the amateur UI. There is so much I want to do around "smart" visualization, but haven't had time.

https://pikaso.me – Lets you get a clutter-free screenshot of any tweet. (Also has browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox)

I made a logo game for iOS (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-logo-game/id1473784939) and and android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.logomobile)

So far it’s made $25. All from iOS

I maintain Cayley, a knowledge graph database and built a web UI on top of it https://cayley.io

I’ve launched a Botanical Brewery, making non alcoholic tonics from medicinal mushrooms. Right now, we are 3 weeks away from launching our chaga drink. We were supposed to launch weeks ago, but COVID threw a spanner in the works. It’s my first time putting out a real product and the amount of work involved is huge - but it’s also a ton of fun. You can check it out at borealbrewing.ca

My side project, meta meme, makes around $5k a month.

Algotrading options. Some initial investment is needed in order to open margin account, but otherwise it's basically passive income.

Anymore too busy for it, but in college my roommate and I had a side-hustle selling computer monitors on Amazon.

Basically there was a company that cleared out defunct call centers and such, who would call us up to offload monitors for $5 a piece. These would sell consistently on Amazon for $40. Not much effort involved, and made a few thousand that way to supply our other hobbies.

I built https://startablog.com - we set up free blogs for people.

I also have a mobility/coaching app that I've actually done an interview or two about but it's started to take off this year - https://movewellapp.com

Skincare for men. Business was OK pre covid, but with Google Merchant screwing me with no explanation as to why Google Shopping is banned from my account, business dried up.

I don’t like talking about it with friends anymore because it sucks to talk about failing. I wish I could learn from this failure... but covid + Google Shopping really aren’t things in my control.

www.mendskin.co

https://forwardemail.net

My wife sells lasagna. It makes really good money, could potentially make more than a good job, but I'm not sure if we'd like to commit to that. Profit margins are pretty good, but it's still poor $ per effort. COVID makes it a bad time too.

Off-topic but I'm looking to launch a side project myself, and I like the inspiration in this thread. Does anyone have some advice on how to 'get out of your bubble' and find an interesting problem someone has that is worth solving?

My side project osapy.com can be used for testing APIs, webhooks,etc. It doesn't make money yet, but as an indie hacker I would assume it can take a couple of years to get the product right and make any money. Great job on getting 7k EUR!

I built https://pegao.co (to learn Django and React) an open source tool for save my temporary links and I added a donation button but honestly I'm the only active user.

https://artres.xyz and the tumblr it's connected to makes a little bit of money like $1000 total over a few years. I mainly make money off of selling PDFs or tips!

I made http://backseatbarber.com/ mostly just for humor. I get a few 10s of dollars per year in shirt sales though.

I made https://gotmemo.net thinking many people needed Asana notifications delivered on Skype. Turns out, not many. 70-80$ AAR.

Right now I have things for sale on Society6 and make an extra $200 a month. It’s not much but I don’t have to put in much effort.

Your website is fun to view. It doesn't work under my normal setting. I've to disable the dns proxy and brave shield to see the ads. Surprisingly, it's not random ads, they are coherently related to marketing service.

Where do you host this site?

cool

Built a Slack bot to get notified whenever someone schedules or cancels a Calendly event.

Received lots of feedback initially, and the project is roughly feature complete.

Should invest in marketing but haven't been doing that at all ...Does that qualify as not talking about it? :)

https://calenduck.co/

Actually Brilliant!

I have one. Id rather not talk about it

By the way this is not a project. Please don’t call it a side project you are misleading people.