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

After my grandfather got Parkinson’s disease circa 2005, I developed hand tremor cancelling software for the mouse [1].

It has gone through a lot of development since then; it is my best work as a developer.

It suffers from the common flaw us engineers have of hyperfocus on the product while not caring about marketing enough. It makes enough.

I have a hard time talking about it in everyday life for some reason. It feels like a conversation that is hard for others to participate in.

Do other founders feel this way? I wish I understood it better.

[1] https://steadymouse.com

Not exactly what you're looking for, but to help populate the thread, in the mid 00s I had a big chunk of accidental income that I didn't want to talk about at the time, but can now.

I put Adsense on my blog early on and I'd make maybe $10-20 a day with no shenanigans. I wrote a post recommending a route planner I'd found (pre Google Maps). A month later my income jumped to $100-200 a day and it turned out to be due to the route planner post being #1 or #2 for the route planner's name! I assume people were clicking on my blog post, then clicking on to the real site via the ad. This state of affairs lasted for several months until the algo improved and put the real site on top for good. I can't remember the exact total but I had a good $20-40k out of it and it paid for my wedding.

I sell an excel add-in that integrates with some popular trading software. It makes life easier for traders. It has a couple thousand users paying around $10 a month. That's about as specific as I want to get.

It required a little domain specific knowledge to create, and a recognized name among trading forums to initially market. Otherwise it's super simple and I'm continually surprised that there are no real competitors.

I created an online market for a game that sold in-game items with revenue at its peak of over $300k USD per month. Initially it just used eBay affiliate links, but since I would track the sellers in my database, I reached out to the big wholesalers and encouraged them to go nearly exclusive on my market for a similar cut. It was all built over a few years and it runs mostly on autopilot, all marketing, hosting, and code built by me. Never discussed it on any forum before.

I've been working on a 3d first person creative writing RPG where you're a Tentacle Monster with a magic mechanical typewriter. You learn ritual magic based on what you write and it can export .txt files. It even has printer "support". It's called Tentacle Typer.

My goal is to make people more prolific and creative writers.

It's not released yet, but I've gotten enough wish lists that I'm confident I will make some money when I do. It's also led to some freelance/consulting work that's kept me afloat while I shamble forth.

https://twitter.com/LeapJosh/status/1469737611824713739 <- My feed is mostly my progress.

A little discouraged by some gambits that didn't yield results I wanted has me not talking about it as much as I was last year. Ah well I bet the hype energy will come back. There's a lot cool here.

I think I personally fueled the PSD2HTML craze by launching designslicer.com back in late 2006 and heavily undercut the competition by charging just $70 per 'sliced' page. I had no portfolio, just a dumb typical web2.0 era styled website and a very cheap price. I easily made $5000 with that website in the short 9 month period that it lived, then sold the domain for $1300. Also I noticed that $70 per page became the new price around all competitors after I launched, it was lovely to see.

The old version is actually still in the Wayback Machine [1]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20061214053323/http://designslic...

I staked $15k, bought season tickets for my favourite baseball team, wrote an electron app to auto-price and market those tickets under face value.

We ended up going to 6-7 games for free, sat in MUCH better seats than we ever could have afforded to, and had access to playoff tickets at face value. Further, my friends had access to great seats at reasonable prices and I avoided having to buy from resale sites (who I detest). 90% of the process was automated.

I was wondering why I had a sudden bit of traffic coming from HN this morning... for anybody interested in the dog treat business I answered some questions about in the original thread (https://coopersdogtreats.com/), I did about 150k in revenue last year and roughly broke even on that. This year I expect to do a bit better and turn a bit of a profit.

That said, I've got manufacturing and fulfillment mostly outsourced, so my day-to-day is really marketing emails, managing FB ad spend and sending product to the warehouse when I run low on inventory. Given that, it's looking like this is going to get relegated back to a side project while I find myself a real job.

While I'd obviously prefer to be making a boatload of cash, it has been really enjoyable so far, and I have learned a ton. The most painful thing has been Apple's privacy changes - before those, I was running FB ads that were effective enough to be immediately profitable from customers' first purchases. Now the cost of acquiring a customer is greater than the profit I make on the first purchase but less than the lifetime profit I make from a customer, so I can still do it profitably but it requires investing cash up front.

I built a tool for educators ~7 years ago at my previous employer. That employer shut down and I bought the tool then sold it to my current employer. This year, my employer decided to pivot and we are no longer serving software services. I now have ownership again with multiple clients paying $5k a year for the tool. I was restricted on my time spent on the tool while it belonged to my employer, but now that it's mine again, I can start working on needed improvements and seeking out more clients.

I also have a fairly large YouTube back catalogue of ~1,650 videos. While most of my videos get less than 50 views, I still generate ~$500 a year in AdSense.

I got my BlueRetro [1] project which is a universal BT controller adapter for retro console.

I'm making a pretty bad job monetizing this TBH. I originally wanted to sell the HW myself but turn out that with real job + young family with the little energy and time left I can't do more than "here's the code".

Turn out a few makers pick it up and are nice enough to give me a cut on their sales. Adding user donation I maybe made 2K out of it this year, not much but better than nothing I guess.

I wrote a retrospective about the last three year working in this if you like more detail [2]

[1] https://github.com/darthcloud/BlueRetro

[2] https://github.com/darthcloud/BlueRetro/discussions/289

Over a weekend during the height of the pandemic, I made a digital school material website that has a "donate" button on it. Totally unexpectedly, it was making $1k/mo via donations. The original hope was to just pay for the hosting costs.

Well, I've spoken about this before, and on here no less, but only really in response to posts like this. I don't do any advertising or speak about mine except in interviews, since it's usually indicative of the kind of requirements they're looking for.

I created a SaaS bootstrap for Javascript called Nodewood [1]. It actually started as just a template for me, because there's a lot of setup for each new JS web project that I kept skipping to get to the "fun" stuff, like I'd just hard-coded the user as ID #1 instead of writing user registration/login code. Since then, it's grown to also have form validation, a starter UI, teams support, subscription support with Stripe, an admin panel, a CLI tool, and I'm currently adding a deploy option via Pulumi [2].

I've sold a few licenses, but also it offers me a platform to "scratch my own itches", which then become available to the people who bought a license.

[1] - Nodewood: https://nodewood.com [2] - Pulumi: https://www.pulumi.com/

Mission Control Plus [1] and Batteries for Mac [2] make about $3k per month and need little maintenance. Thankfully Apple hasn’t Sherlocked them (yet).

[1] https://fadel.io/missioncontrolplus

[2] https://fadel.io/batteries

Circa 2006-07, I made around $4k by selling Adsense coupons. I saw people selling these on SEO forums and thought that there must be a way to get them. A little googling and I found a way to get these $50, $75, $100 adsense vouchers. These would sell sell for anywhere between $5-$20. It literally was free money till it lasted.

I had site similar to this that generated 600-700$ USD per month as passive income.

https://randomcountrygenerator.com/

I didn't touched it, sometimes for many months in a row.

I funded life over the pandemic selling bots for MMO's. Made way more than I expected. Enough it became a full time job for a while. Died down a little after people started returning to work after Covid.

But still makes a decent passive income.

I created a web app that extracts transaction data from PDF bank statements. I talk about it with friends, but often a lot of people think I'm running some sort of data hoarding scam.

Neural net for soft porn (tasteful nudes). Android app, 5 years old:

http://driftwheeler.com

More than 860 users per day, on average. Continuously growing user base. Profit through Met-Art affiliation: https://partners.metartmoney.com

Two years ago, my cofounder and I built and launched a tool that turns Google Drive folders into a wiki (https://kbee.app). It's making about $1.5K/month and growing organically on it's own...

I made Accelerator Keys, a little Mac app that gives people Alt key shortcuts in Office software on Macs.

Most people have never encountered the problem, so it’s hard to talk about this in general company.

But it’s solving a pain point for a few hundred finance/consulting folks with Macs, or tech startups buying Macs for their finance/strategy teams.

Haven’t worked on this as much since kids came, but I’d love to figure out better ways to get this in front of people who need it.

I got a question for everyone reading. How to even decide what side project to work on?

Should I keep all ideas in a spreadsheet and then choose one, or make a grading system for ideas?

I have a web app that caters to the adult live video chatting industry. It makes about 4 or 5k a month completely passively. Unfortunately I’m too embarrassed to talk about it with anyone.

In high school I made a site to help students view their AP scores early. It ballooned in popularity over the past 8 years. At it’s peak in 2020 and 2021 it was getting over 1.5 million students in 2 hours on the day of release. It was quite profitable for a side project I started in high school. Sadly I was never able to turn it into anything more than an early scores site on the day of score release, but now all AP scores come out at the same time and the site is fading away to being forgotten.

I got really into daily fantasy at the height of the boom: you make a fantasy football lineup and enter it into paid contests. For big leagues like the NFL you can potentially win millions of dollars (but there are tons and tons of players and lots of 'pros' that do it full-time).

But for the past several years, I have been only playing niche sports: specifically Canadian football (CFL). It's way smaller stakes but the competition is much easier and I've written my own analytics tools so I have a nice edge compared to NFL where there is tons and tons of high quality content and analysis. I've profited over $20k during the past three seasons.

This little thing is still doing nice lunch money (for 10+ years!) mainly on adsense, to my unending surprise.

http://ask8ball.net

I run the infrastructure (k8s+helm on GCP) for a PoS validator of a top 50 crypto project. My client is a big whale who bonded ~$15.6M at the projects all-time high. It’s about 1-2 hours of work per month and my 10% cut of the rewards nets me anywhere from $4k-$40k/mo. depending on the price. Given the fact that crypto is in the gutter now I haven’t been selling any to USD, but it’s a nice way to stack an asset with high upside potential while doing very little work.

I tried to launch a SaaS to do automated QA of email sends (check them for broken links before sending, mis-sized images, etc.) which was a big failure as the pain wasn't strong enough.

But to try and promote it I created a free automated email subject line checker which people loved -> https://sendcheckit.com

A couple years in and we've checked around 5 million subject lines for people.

There's an embed API that I originally let people use for free, but after it started being really abused I now charge a small annual fee for access. It's not enough for a full time income and I don't really talk about the site that much as it doesn't fit in the "portfolio" of my other professional interests which are mostly cybersecurity related.

There is a fun story of a guy who was making several thousand $ a month for a couple of years from a side project, a bunch of fan websites about reality TV show. Unfortunately in Russian, but Google translated version is tolerable:

https://vc.ru/life/189035-doooooom-2-s-shestyu-nulyami-kak-y...

Not sure if it fits here but I run an onlyfans account with my wife as a side project. We were already into taking arty/classy pictures and sharing them for fun, so we figured why not.

I wrote a simple UI where she can drop an imgur link, select tags specific to the pic/vid, and then it generates a list of subreddits to post to and suggests a time and a title.

I made another tool where you can drop in a bunch of pictures and select a date range and it will schedule them to onlyfans and fansly at the same times. We make 500-1.5k a month which just about covers lingerie and occasional weekends away. Could probably make more but neither of can be bothered with all the baiting tactics others use to try and keep/extort fans.

It's not something we talk to anyone about for obvious reasons.

I won't get super into the details, but... A friend and I co-founded a small startup / lifestyle business in a niche hardware / hobby market. Built a platform around it. It's now inching close to 6 figures in 6 years. Not earth shattering, by any stretch of the imagination, but it's more than paid for itself and our time investment. Especially considering that my time investment as the primary developer is somewhere around 10 hours a year for maintenance purposes.

We grow the user base slowly, organically, deliberately. Our quite reasonable cost can be a barrier to entry for some users but our particular solution to this particular problem can save people many thousands of dollars over the course of a few years.

edit/ Typos...

I make a very sizeable side income on prediction markets. Basically, through scraping, collecting, and cleaning an obscene amount of data.

I made an app last year that lets the user track virtually anything. Most notably, it is possible to track prices from any website.

The app has made me a fair amount of money, but I don't really mention it to my friends or family. The thing is, I am Norwegian, and most people here use iPhones. Since the app is only available for Android, the conversation usually ends in an -oh, anyway.

The app (AnyTracker):https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shervinkou...

I did a deep dive into history of Social Security Numbers (SSN) in the united states from available information and wrote a poorly executed static site generated from the information with google adds. Does a few hundred USD a month. http://numchk.com/

For the past year, I've been building a simulator for personal finance called ProjectionLab (projectionlab.com)

It goes pretty far beyond the standard retirement calculators, and is finally at the point where I'm seeing better than minimum wage on all the time I've invested on nights/weekends.

Perhaps this doesn't quite fit with the "not talk about them" part of your question though. Past feedback from the HN community has been a huge part of shaping the development roadmap and keeping me energized about the project.

Three years ago I started a side hustle in the golf industry to pay for my obsessive love for the game.

Never really talked about it in my software circles (until now), but it’s probably time, as we’re doing mid 7-figures/yr, growing rapidly, and have three ft employees (sales and shipping). It’s become my ft gig as well and I couldn’t be happier.

Currently I’m considering hiring another dev with a similar passion for the game, ideally someone with computer vision experience. Austin location preferred but would consider remote.

I built https://joyful.gifts a couple of years ago. Nice lunch money and was a good technical challenge.

I did it to be able to call myself a full-stack software dev. Basically, get over my imposter syndrome.

In the late '80s I created version of Augment [1]. Takeaway was a hierarchical menu that saved all of your places. So a menu of average of 7 choices, which went 7 layers deep, would address 7^7 end points, or about 823,543 items. The number of auto-bookmarks would be 7^6 (117,649). Because the bookmarks would save your place, the average number of gestures to reach any item is about half that, or 3.5 clicks.

Am now playing with that idea for a Heads up Display for AR glasses, using SwiftUI [2]

The first use case is to port a visual synth, I created in the early Naughts, which used a static template on a Wacom Tablet[3]. The interface controlled > 2000 parameters.

The question is: how to control thousands of real-time parameters with virtual touch?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31676445#31677125

[2] https://github.com/musesum/DeepMenu

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXlkzZubHnM

I'm a bit late to the game on this thread, but here goes.

For the longest time I had a solitaire app for Mac that I ran as a side-hustle. A couple of years ago I programmed solitaire from scratch for the web. Fast-forward a few years and the site starts to generate some actual traffic. I then decide to put ads on it even though I thought you couldn't really earn money on ads anymore. It didn't generate a lot of money, but enough that I wanted to keep working on the site.

Today the site is earning $10.000/month from ads. It wasn't until the site started to earn $5.000/month or so that I actually started to talk to people about it.

You can try out the site here if you want: https://online-solitaire.com/.

A guy I worked with a guy in a utility company who had, somehow or other, full control/ownership of a significant proportion of the customer meter data under his consulting company. I have absolutely no idea how he acquired it, but it paid him a six figure salary for five or ten hours work per month just patching a MySQL database. And he could basically name his price, as the company didn't have any other source of meter data for those customers.

I've built streaming videochat software in 2000s. Got a few thousand out of it, which for a student in a poor Eastern European country was great at the time.

I don’t understand the “but you’d not talk about them” part.

I created a caption competition website seventeen years ago: https://www.caption.me/

Pulls funny photos from a Flickr group. People write funny captions and vote for their favourite. Some of today's active users have been on the site for more than a decade.

I used to pay the £50 monthly prize out of my own pocket, but some generous users offered to fund the prize themselves via a whip-round.

So the small amount of money from paid link advertising on my sites (approx £45/month) now covers the hosting. In my head, that means I can justify spending my free time modernising and grow the site. I'm slowly upgrading it from PHP to http4s+ReactJS

There are some fun tech things I enjoyed inventing on the site - real-time collaborative mind-mapping to help people think of caption ideas; bots that identify bad user behaviour and create forum topics to start a private discussion with the admin team; real-time updates using websockets; a system that automatically identifies the best voters and rewards them with a quota of "super-votes" they can use to vote more than once on the best captions.

We're hoping we'll be part of future threads like this one with DiffLens (https://github.com/marketplace/difflens) for language aware diffs on GitHub :) The next step for DiffLens is potentially a VSCode extension to make it easier for developers to use

As a kid I had a YouTube to MP3 converter. The conversion was ripped from other services which weren't as careful with iframes.

It went on for a few years. Ads revenue peaked at 700£ per day, (200£-300£ being more normal) which was nice money, even if I wasted it all on a failed startup. Eventually Google banned us from AdSense removing half of the revenues and I quit the project.

Around 2006 - 2008 I was playing around with SecondLife and found the only thing that interested me there was coding objects with their LSL scripting language. I happened to fall in with a content creator (eg. a really good artist that could create cool looking things from the in world primitive object tools) that sold "campers" which were objects on which you could basically park your avatar in some kind of pose and your account would be sent a small amount of money each hour. This was useful because the discoverability of locations in the world was substantially increased by the presence of avatars. A lot of people at your place meant your place was popular. So the typical implementation of campers was that a place would build a bar with 10 or so barstools and embed a camper script in them, so people could come up, choose to camp on a stool, and get their couple of bucks a day. But these implementations were pretty lame because without any kind of activity by the real life user, avatars would timeout and just slump forward over the bar. So these places, while technically having a higher presence of people, looked like a terribly depressing place with a bunch of passed out drunks.

So this content creator I met had the idea of working a little hard on the product by creating a little scene of things (as opposed to just dropping a script in a barstool) and then also writing the code to animate the avatar in some kind of loop. So for example, she created a little patch of garden and a wheel barrow, and when someone chose to camp on it, their avatar got on all fours and appeared to be working on the garden, like weeding or whatever. Another one was a ladder that could be placed by a window and the avatar would climb up it and appear to be washing the windows. We had 5 or 6 different campers like this. For obvious reasons this product blew up. I don't remember what she sold them for but at the peak I was pulling in $100 a day and my cut was only a fraction of the total cost. This continued for at least a year before we had a falling out about another product and she dumped me from the cut.

I built PDFEncrypt (https://pdfencrypt.net) a couple years ago based on a very simple need from a client: to encrypt PDF files via a native Windows app, for free, without needing to upload files to a sketchy website or buy expensive software. I have been amazed at the number of visitors (4000/mo), emails, downloads, and donations the project has received. I released it as open source software, and I'm now working on V2 (almost done!) which is a complete rewrite based on user requests, as well as a bunch of new features I've dreamed up. This has been a very fun side project and good practice coding in C#.

I pivoted to algorithmic trading crypto a couple of years ago. Now have some really good live results nearly a year and a half long, beat the market massively with a 300% return since start of 2021. Have been working on a pitch and sent to a few angels and VCs but not heard anything back yet. Have some private clients and one trading firm and also had a call with a quant related company last week about a credit-line.

Never intended to pitch for seed or anything it's just happened naturally and as a result of the live performance.

Editing add in for Word for creative writers.

https://www.smart-edit.com/Home/Buy/

It sells around 20+ copies a month, usually to published or self-published authors of fiction. It's been selling at that level for about 8 years now. 1 in 3 sales is for the Pro version, which constantly surprises me.

I haven't updated it in a couple of years. The last substantial work was back in 2018. It never gets mentioned on writing websites anymore, but sales still trickle in.

I've moved on to other things, but it's nice to see those emails come in during the month.

A couple of years ago I built a mobile reminder app that sends your reminders via text message. I haven’t done a good job marketing / promoting it. I’ve tried a couple of times in the past, but just have not cared enough to actually learn how to market it.

It really helps me in my everyday needs.

It currents helps about 4K+ users a month. Still blows my mind.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/text-me-that/id1329223000

I built https://feedmail.org because I wasn't satisfied with the existing RSS-to-Email services available.

I figured I would really just be making it for myself but decided to make it a product and have made a few hundred dollars in the first months. It pays for the hosting costs and gives me some motivation to work on it. It's also been surprisingly stable and my monitoring is good, so if I am not actively working on it I can just walk away and forget.

Got a few hundreds euros by building a poker helping app using neural networks. Since I love poker and I wanted to sharpen my skills in ML.

It involved me working all weekends and 4 to five hours after work, and also spending nights playing poker in Poker Stars.

Basically, if I wouldn't have built the app and just played poker without using the app suggestions I would have made more money.

I am still convinced that given some hundred man year of work and a lot of money to buy GPUs, I can make some millions with it. Not sure those millions would be worth. :)

I built MoneyHabitsHQ.com for simplified personal finance.

The hardest thing about it is that talking about budgeting is really personal. People are more than willing to talk about their process but things get awkward when it gets specific.

I can’t screenshare with someone to onboard them because that would involve seeing every bank account they have. Im curious if anyone has thoughts on how to solve that problem?

I've been working on https://ayahbyayah.com an iOS app which I originally released in 2012 as a simple app for listening to the recitation of a single Ayat (verse) of the Qur'an.

It'll be the 10th year on the App Store in September, I need to spend more time on marketing instead of building.

http://mailbait.info has been controversial on HN[1]. A decade ago it started out making about $80.00 USD/Month.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3825299

Started https://mailsnag.com with a friend couple years ago. It is a test SMTP server (imagine chaos monkey for SMTP testing)

I wrote a Git server with an iCloud backend: https://easygit.app

It is making approximately $0 per month :)

People make money on side projects?! Not me...

What about side projects that have no hope of ever making money but you'd love to talk about them?

Many moons ago, I built:

A neural network that would recommend buy & sell signals on various stocks in a hand-picked index, that had an invite only daily newsletter called "Justin's Junkmail." I made some good money from putting one ad that I hand selected into each newsletter, at the footer. The entire thing ran almost on auto-pilot, other than me fussing over the wording of the auto-generated recommendations and which ad to let through for the next week. The newsletter mailing list grew organically, and without any prescience, just prior to the dotcom bust, I sold the mailing list and software that ran it for "a nice sum of money." The new owner drove the entire thing in to the ground - but that's a story for another time.

A year later I wrote a neural network to pick the winners of horse races, with a piece of software you could download, and also, again, a daily newsletter that grew organically. The newsletter contained information on predicted winners at select races, previous day's results, and how accurate the predictions have been for the past 24 hours, the past month, and for various jockey, trainer, horse and track combinations. The newsletter drove the sales of the software. I sold that entire package for "a nice sum of money" back in 2004-ish. It ran on auto-pilot pretty much, other than having to deal with refunds, and the outsourced worker I had entering all the race data manually (to get around a website scraping licensing issue) not finishing the data upload in time for the newsletter to publish.

I built a small business website that would match borrowers (business owners) with lenders (private and institutional investors, banks, equity credit), and that made "some pocket money" each month, and ran on auto-pilot, other than having to deal with the usual IT issues of a website written in VisualBASIC and running on IIS, which I eventually sold "for a nice sum of money" back in 2008 (which unfortunately was used to pay off some debts of my video game studio).

I built a clutch of mobile friendly funny videos websites, with hand selected ads, that ran on auto-pilot. Unfortunately I abandoned it due to bad advice from a business partner. I now wish I had fired my business partner (or never got involved with him) and kept working on the websites.

I currently have a country-wide (United States) information website on licensing requirements, job opportunities, training facilities, and career advice, which runs on auto-pilot other than me coming up with a dozen topics to write about that month, which is really just me trawling through two or three popular web forums on the subject to find out which questions are hot that month, and then I outsource the writing work for the articles. The website makes "lunch money at a nice boutique cafe with over-priced soup" after all expenses (several hundred dollars a month for writing and graphic design) are taken out and has been running for about six or seven years now.

I have a whole bunch of videos (1,500+), not under my personal brand, that I've created that make a few hundred dollars in ad revenue each month that I, fortunately for the viewer, do not appear in. I'm simply the voice over.

I am currently working on another idea...

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