Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project?

I've build BlueRetro [1] an universal Bluetooth controller adapter for nearly all pre-USB gaming console.

I made a gross income of around 3K a month last year out of Royalties on the soft for each device sold. It's Apache 2.0 software so people can do whatever they want.

I started making money when I decided to list on the GitHub README the list of manufacturers/makers that where sponsoring the project. (Only one person at that time) Soon after the others offered to give royalty as well.

I even got a Chinese company, notorious for selling "clone" of OSHW projects, to support the SW development as well via GitHub sponsor.

I've been working on it for the last four years. I entertained the idea to make and sell the hardware myself. But in the end I learned that's it's not something I'm interested to get into. What I really like is working on the software.

It naturally pivoted into a more community driven project where multiple makers are selling various variations of the HW.

I wrote a retrospective last years [2].

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

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

I run HTTP Toolkit (https://httptoolkit.com) which passed $2k a couple of years back. No longer a side project, as it's made enough money for me to work on it full time for a fair while now, but it certainly started that way, and it's still a one-man show (plus many wonderful open-source contributors).

I suspect that'll be a common theme in answers here though: if you have a side project making $2k a month, in most of the world that's enough for you to go full-time and try to take it further. If you can make $2k/month on something working only part-time, you can definitely make a lot more if you focus on it.

On your questions: HTTP Toolkit is a desktop app (plus a mobile app and other components for integrations) but it's an Electron app that effectively functions as a SaaS (with a freemium subscription model) that just happens to have a component that runs on your computer. And actually getting to $2k wasn't overnight at all - it took a couple of years of slow steady slog. A few inflection points that made a notable difference (releasing rewriting support & Android support particularly) but mostly it was a matter of "just keep pushing", trusting the trajectory would keep going, and steadily grinding upwards. It's great where it is now, but it's hard work - a solo business is not for the faint of heart!

A friend and I host a monthly dinner club for people interested in ethnic cuisine. We work with a single restaurant each month to create an 8-12 course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is served family style and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues or Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use the extra business.

So far we’ve hosted 12 dinners over the past year. Growing from out first meal with 13 friends to as many as 80 guests for this months meal. Our mailing list has over 400 people on it and we’ve sold out every event since our 4th. Sometimes we end up hosting multiple nights.

It’s not a very scalable business as it exists today. For now is just a passion project that makes a few bucks, allows us meet interesting people, and provides the opportunity to discover new foods and restaurants.

7 years ago I started a site project for forwarding logs and metrics from k8s, docker, openshift in Splunk. It is enterprise offering, and I started making money pretty quick. After 6 months I already made 40k, and quit my employer. Tight now this company generates 7 figures, and still run by me with one more person helping with accounting.

https://www.outcoldsolutions.com

Now I also started macOS development for the last 2 years, and making around 2k a month.

https://loshadki.app

I run two side projects atm but they are both becoming more and more the main job.

I am building a Zillow for Europe [1]. The real estate market in Europe is a big mess and for the past 10 years not much has happend so far in proptech because it was easy to rent/sell properties. Now things are changing and I see a lot more supply coming on the platform. So far rented out 40 apartments doing around 3k in profit a month. We focus primarily on overseas/expats right now

Another project I started with a good friend from Google is Webtastic AI [2] it's a lead gen platform that indexes large amounts of data and I am using simple ML models to clean it up and make sense out of it. It does around 1.9k a month now but we just launched 2 weeks ago so that looks promising. Thanks to google cloud we got 100k credits which makes it a bit more feasible because the startup costs are extremely high.

[1] https://homestra.com/ [2] https://webtastic.ai/

I run small outsourced IT systems for SMBs. Web scrapers, reporting, stuff like that. Baisically private bespoke SaaS.

About $10k/mo gross revenue and takes a few hours of work a week (unless there’s a downtime event that needs fixing). A lot of upfront work to build some of these systems though.

Got to $2k/mo in the first month of doing this. I don’t recommend working (as a solo operator) with clients who have budgets less than $5-10k/mo. Too much overhead for too little return in that case.

In what little spare time I have left after my day job and looking after two small kids, I put more automation in place to improve reliability for my clients and reduce my own ops time requirement.

I get leads for this by referral from people I’ve done good work for in the past. But it’s the kind of thing you could bootstrap by direct outbound sales, publishing authority-building content to the right business audience, going to conferences/trade shows, or building a referral network from other service provides.

I'm the founder of the open-source and cross-platform note-taking app https://www.get-notes.com (written in Qt C++).

I earn about $2000 a month from ads on the landing page (organic SEO), but very soon plan to add a subscription for pro features (while people could still compile it from source and get the full experience without paying, if they wish).

I started the project 8 years ago to create a slick looking note-taking app for myself on Linux. Then I open-sourced and published it, and it just took off and got popular (more than 1.2 Million downloads).

Took around 2 years to get a high rank on Google. Then it was just a matter of putting ads (which I don't like but my income relies on) and ever since it's been quite stable.

Threads like this one always baffle me. You have to think of the competitive landscape like a jungle. All of the creatures in the jungle are looking for food, and some have far more competitive advantages than you. If you find a food source that no one else has happened to stumble upon, would you scream out that you've found it? No. If someone is asking you, it's because they want to know how they can get what you have. Much like the amount of food in the jungle is limited, so is the size of any market.

Don't create competition for yourself. They can go on having no idea how lucrative your little side project is and you can go on reaping the benefits. As soon as you tell someone with more resources that your little side idea is actually turning over large sums of money, you better believe their wheels will be spinning on how to get a piece of it. It's so easy to avoid this, you just have to not run your mouth.

If you have iOS/Android development experience, you can look at the Developer sector, which is relatively niche IMO.

I've developed the iOS/iPadOS app, Proxyman for iOS [0], which gains steadily ~2k recurring revenue every month. Basically, it's an iOS app that helps you to capture and decrypt HTTP/HTTPS traffic on your phone. The app is needed if you need to inspect traffic from your app.

Because it's an iOS app, published on AppStore, you can provide a subscription pricing model: e.g. $4.99/month, $39.99/year, or lifetime $99.

I also develop the macOS version, but it's a huge market, which is out of context.

- [0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/proxyman/id1551292695

I started Hacker Newsletter [1] almost 14 years ago and sent out the 647th issue today [2] to 58k folks. It took over a year to break 1k subscribers and a few more years to get to that type of revenue. I could do a lot more with it and plan to one day, but really only focus on it a couple hours each week when I build the issue and talk to sponsors.

1: https://hackernewsletter.com 2: https://mailchi.mp/hackernewsletter/647

https://hackers.ee was started as a volunteering project to help people who got scammed on the internet. You know, all these fake investment schemes where callers play on stupidness and grid.

I've helped them to gather and do properly documented their cases, and support them during their visits to the police to make a claim. Police try to bounce as it's always a headache due to multiple countries/jurisdictions involved - VOIP provider from Finland, hosting in the Netherlands, money goes to Chinese company bank account, etc.

I had to demonstrate to them it's not something impossible, so I've provided guidance, prepare requests drafts, etc. I've dived deeply into OSINT, forensics, audit, bank compliances and procedures, infrastructure enumeration, and other cybersecurity things to solve these problems.

There were never payments required, but when it works people donated some money to keep infrastructure, as a tip or so. When it becomes 30k+ annually years ago, I've decided to make it my full-time job, with some pivot on what we're doing - now it is mostly cybersecurity services to businesses and companies. But still helping civilians to handle scam attempts every month.

I built mmm.page [1] originally for personal websites, or "internet canvases."

They're meant to be pages for very easy combinations of text, mixed media, embeds, etc. — let more people create fun/interesting places on the internet. [2]

I started working on mmm.page in Feb 2021, and launched it that May on Hacker News [3], then it hit $2k/mo last year, and has been growing steadily since. There are roughly 30,000+ users at the moment. Revenue has been trickier for this project because it's a SaaS aimed at consumers, who are more price sensitive — but the flip-side is I love working with all the people who use the platforms. Just today, someone shared this moodboard that captured exactly how I've been thinking about it mmm.page [4]. Some other fun examples here [5]. I'm planning a second launch in May. Hopefully some good news to share there.

One note: it's a website, and most people edit it on desktop, but a surprising # of users convert /after/ trying it on mobile. I also found the conversion rate increased significantly after I made the homepage itself editable — thereby demo'ing the product without a login. Just a small note.

Anyway, feel free to reply or DM on Twitter if you have questions — especially re: solo bootstrapping "fun" consumer products that are trying to also become self-sustainable.

[1] https://mmm.page

[2] https://twitter.com/xhfloz/status/1631746024120221698

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27128424

[4] https://diemichi.mmm.page/moodboard

[5] https://showcase.mmm.page

I run Buttondown (buttondown.email) full-time now, but until this past year it was a side project for me alongside my day job as an IC (later EM).

It took...around two and a half years, I think, to hit $2k/mo MRR. It was definitely not the stereotypical "launch → iterate a bit → boom, PMF" story that you often hear, which was fine because it was 'just' a side project and I didn't have to worry about running out of money or time.

I run https://pixelpeeper.com on the side.

It's a micro-SaaS for photographers who edit in Lightroom. Lets you reverse-engineer Lightroom edits from JPG files and download them as presets that you can apply on your own photos.

Took a month or two to reach $2k/mo, riding the wave of instagram's popularity in 2017-2018, plus the project went viral initially. However, the niche is ultimately too small to grow the revenue significantly. Still chugging along, almost 6 years later, though.

I built a few mobile games for iOS and Android.

I launched my first game in 2015 which took 6 months to even reach $100/month. From there it earned around $500/month for the last 7 years. It required a huge upfront investment, ongoing updates to keep relevant and a significant fraction of revenue going into advertising.

I launched a few additional games that were low quality and ended up removing them. I started another 4-5 ideas that were abandoned.

In 2021, during a few month break from my job, I produced one more game that has averaged around $2000/month revenue for the last 2 years. Also needs regular updates and promotion to stay relevant.

Overall I would only recommend this route if you’re really passionate about game dev. The overall time investment has been really high, and it isn’t truly passive income because mobile games lose users quickly when not updated often.

I run a site for people learning Japanese (https://jpdb.io) as a side project. I'm currently at exactly ~$1996/month from Patreon donations. (It's not an aggressively monetized project.)

I've been doing this for over 2 years now. You can take a look at my changelog to see most of the updates (at the beginning I did not maintain a changelog so it doesn't start exactly when I started the site): https://jpdb.io/changelog

I run Afterplay (https://afterplay.io). It's a game emulation platform where you bring your own games. It took 18 months from first line of code to 2K. It's now my full time job :)

I built Scanii [1], an unsafe/malware content detection API/SaaS, as a way to keep my coding skills sharp as I moved into engineering leadership roles. Over the years it has grown into a lovely $35k/month business while spending $0 in marketing thanks to our amazing customers.

My advice to aspiring entrepreneurs: get it out there quick, listen to your customers and be ready to act on their feedback. Finding product/market fit is a journey even if you are selling into the most well understood vertical since it's not just about what the market expects it's about what your engineering talent/capacity can delver in a reasonable amount of time.

[1] https://www.scanii.com

I'm a little early, but this month, my side project SHOULD hit $2k, all signs point that way. Back in March, I decided to get serious with my CNC, and started designing things, dozens and dozens of things. Eventually I settled on something that felt like it had potential: Rolling trays and vape holders.

I get the wood from my grandpa's mill. I use both redcedar and pine, but I'm currently experimenting with oak (much slower wood to CNC and it is much more expensive as well).

I made a couple for family and friends, they thought they looked great and said I should be selling them. So at the end of February this year, I reopened my Etsy from when the pandemic first shuttered me inside my house, and listed my vape holders first. After a week, I had a few sales, and then I added my first rolling tray. By mid march, I had already racked up 20-ish sales before I told my Facebook friends about it (which is a shitty feeling - selling to people who probably get hit up by MLMs from all the other highschool people you wish you could forget), but that secured 7 more sales, and they started to snowball after that. I'm currently just under $1000 in revenue for the month of April, and everyone on the Etsy forums are saying this is the slowest time of the year for them (Easter + Tax Season), so fingers crossed after Monday, everything just starts picking up steam.

I'm slowly building some success in Android and iOS games (most revenue comes from iOS!). I've got a paid game that is a yahtzee-inspired poker game with just a touch of cosmic horror [1] and a free-to-play word game [2].

I've been fortunate to get some featuring by Apple which has driven most of my sales. I'm hopeful the daily word game, Well Word, will start to take off because it's the best game I've made and I'm really proud of it.

I started working on Pine Tar Poker while I had a different job about 13 months ago and I've since switched to trying my hand at converting my side project into my full-time gig [3]! My short-term goal is to be able to pay my mortgage with the proceeds.

[1] https://www.pinetarpoker.com

[2] https://wellwordgame.com

[3] https://www.birdcartel.com

For https://scrapingfish.com/ it took us about 5-6 months from idea to $2k/month. It’s still not our main source of income. It was fun to build especially that it involved working with hardware.

https://getoutline.com – A team knowledge base, hit $2k MRR a couple of months after turning on paid plans, has always been steady growth since then.

A few years in and almost reached what I'd consider v1 feature complete.

Depending on your goals, have you considered freelancing?

If your purpose is cash flow, freelancing can quickly generate $2000++ with much less risk than starting a SaaS.

That’s not to say starting a SaaS is a bad idea…but if pure short-term cash production is your goal, I’d consider finding clients who trust you to pay you hourly on the side.

FWIW, I’ve started 2 SaaS companies with a collective revenue of $0, and my side freelancing currently makes more than $2k/mo.

Lastly…it’s very possible that you have lots of other goals other than cash, and if so, good luck with your SaaS! I started MoneyHabitsHQ.com and it was one of the most fun learning activities of my career, despite not producing revenue.

I built https://www.withphoton.com that helps people overlay multiple calendars in any timezone, and quickly format a message that contains your availability to save time and eliminate typos.

It's a simple keyboard-first electron app that hooks up with your Google / Outlook cal. Target market is folks who schedule meetings outside their org like founders, CSM, biz dev, sales, EAs, etc.

E.g. Do any of these times (CT) work for you?

April 13 (Thursday) * 3:30 pm - 4:00 pm

April 14 (Friday) * 2:00 pm - 2:30 pm

Started AwardFares (https://awardfares.com) back in 2018. It's a search engine for finding flights to book using your airline miles. Started as a side-project, completely bootstrapped and self-funded.

We hit $2k monthly revenue after about 1.5 years. Growth completely stopped during COVID, but is now growing very well (more than 10x that).

I make around that with each of my side projects:

- VidCap [1]

- AI Profile Pic [2]

- Mission Control Plus [3]

- Batteries [4]

- Kay [5] (makes less, currently at $600 MRR)

[1] https://vidcap.app/

[2] https://aiprofilepic.app/

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

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

[5] https://usekay.xyz/

I built a Charades-game [1] for both iOS [2] and Android [3]. Launched last year and just recently got to around 2k a month, some months like December are of course better than let's say September because of holidays like New Year etc.

It took about 10-12 months reaching those numbers, and I'd say we still have lot's of room for improvement. It's also very low maintenance, but highly scalable. What I do is basically localise the game to as many big languages as I can, and then throw some ASO on it and hold my fingers. Haven't spent any dollars at all on the marketing otherwise.

[1] https://yangmeistudios.com/games-and-apps/charades [2] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/charades-what-am-i/id159211843... [3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yangmeistu...

I launched DamnInteresting.com in 2005, and just last year it started consistently earning $2k/month. That's gross revenue, a goodly chunk of that goes out for hosting costs, research expenses, paying writers/editors, licensing fees, etc.

It's been interesting to see the changes in the audience over time. In 2005, 100% of our audience was desktop browser readers. Somewhere around 2011, mobile readers became the dominant group. Today, our biggest audience by far is podcast listeners. We'll probably need to start creating videos soon if we don't want to get left behind. And what comes next? AI-enhanced immersive binaural VR experiences? The future is weird.

I'm building Pirsch Analytics [0], a privacy-friendly web analytics tool. I think it took the two of us ~1.5 years to get to $2000 MRR. Currently we're setting just above $4000 MRR.

It started as an experiment for my personal website and I was in the same position as you're right now. We were already working on a Notion like app to take notes, but didn't make any money and probably went into the wrong direction. As my prototype seemed to work quite well, we decided to turn it into a product.

My initial goal was to do server-side analytics without the downsides of parsing access logs, but of course we now also have a "regular" JS snippet integration.

You can learn more about our journey here [1] and on our blog [2]. Let me know if you have any questions!

[0] https://pirsch.io

[1] https://pirsch.io/about-us

[2] https://pirsch.io/blog

I don't know if that counts, but I see it as a tech side project.

Last year I've built for my gf, a custom D2C (direct to client) ecommerce webapp [0] for her handmade products.

Then I started looking into PPC, tracking, social advertisement & marketing etc.. Now we are profitable avg ~8k / month only on retail.

[0] https://yuma.gr

If I got my side project to generate $2k/month it would no longer be my side project!

I run a service that lets browser extension developers easily take payments in their extensions: https://extensionpay.com

Started making $0.15 a day and has taken a couple years to make decent monthly revenue. One cool thing is that it's also helped developers make a lot of money — over $200k so far and growing!

I built prop_odds [1]. It's an API offering live (and historical) sports betting odds from different sites.

I've been working on it for about 2 months. While not quite at 2k/month yet, it's nearly there and progressing in that direction. Revenue is coming from several customers who are using the data to build Discord bots that alert them (and their own paying users) about good odds, arbitrage opportunities, etc.

[1] https://www.prop-odds.com

$0 still, and haven't launched.

But since I literally just deployed my new landing page for the Early Access, and looking to launch by the end of the month, I figure I might talk about it.

I'm working on Bernard (https://bernard.app), a link checker service for website owners. Since the job market is tight, I figured I might go all in into what I hope will become a profitable, lean, one-person business.

Hoping to reach ramen profitability within the next 12 months.

GPT Gmail and GPT Workspace, using GPT in the google docs, slides, sheets and auto responder for Gmail.

https://workspace.google.com/u/0/marketplace/app/gpt_for_gma...

https://workspace.google.com/u/0/marketplace/app/gpt_for_doc...

https://gpt.space

The best part is not even about the money but about having a lot of users, democratising GPT and saving a lot of human hours everyday!

I run an iOS app on the side thats at ~$2500 MRR. It lets you generate music playlists from a prompt, like "make me a playlist for music to listen to while coding". I launched in January and it took 2 weeks to get the first $2k in revenue.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/playlistai-playlist-maker/id16...

I made Dynobase [1], an alternative GUI for DynamoDB. Passed 2k/mo few years ago. Runs 100% automatically now, I spend ~2h/week mostly responding to customer inquiries. I could leave my full time job but I just like it (and money) too much.

[1] https://dynobase.dev

Some really interesting projects here! I've been working on my own SaaS project called CorOpera (https://www.coropera.com) for almost a year now. It's a cap table management solution for early-stage startups, helping them manage their cap table, do some bookkeeping, stay legally compliant, and potentially retain employees by offering them stock options. While not quite at the $2k/month mark yet, we're steadily approaching it.

I have an engineering background so breaking into the marketing and sales domain has been quite a journey. It's been a roller coaster of ups and downs, but I remain hopeful.

One of the things I've enjoyed most about building your own thing is just talking to other founders and learning about their experiences. While the dataset has not been large enough to make quantity compensate for quality, I've still learned quite a bit.

It's been fascinating to read about everyone's side projects, and I'm curious to know if any other founders here have faced challenges with fundraising bookkeeping or cap table in general. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

My "side project" makes ~$5K/month but I am constantly worried about it not continuing to bring that in, so I keep my day job which is WFH and very easy.

I also never share it because I am concerned about a competitor coming in.

Took me about 6 months from publishing my app to hit $2k and another 3 months to hit $5k.

Edit: to clarify, I sell a physical product, so there are added costs in terms of manufacturing, shipping, stock keeping, etc...

I made Cleavr as a desktop app first and gave it away for free. I got lots of downloads as well as lots of support requests. To keep support tickets away I put a small price tag on it. People still kept downloading and reaching out for support (not necessarily bugs but eben if they have their app issues). I then decided to go the path of a cloud SAAS app. The desktop app didn't hit $2k mostly be ause the price tag was small and I just wanted to do good and give it away. Once I went cloud, it took only about 4 months to hit $2k per month.

[1] https://cleavr.io

I have two: (it's 50% just ship something, 50% luck) but in my humble opinion few ppl are lucky enough to make it big with their first 5 or 10 projects. Just figure out how can you ship many things per year !

[0] fibretiger.co.za - Price comparison for fibre internet services in South Africa. It's an extremely fragmented market, we have about 10 fibre networks (10 that matters) and twice as many ISPs

[1] littlebigstats.com - Corrective Maintenance and Planned Maintenance for Restaurants or anything with assets and 10+ branches (KFC Kenya) is one our clients. You will be surprised how many org are trying todo PPM and CM with a whatsapp group and spreadsheet. We even implemented a version (you have to squint a little) of SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) methods so you just have to define the "rules and boundaries" for a good and efficient maintenance process. Example: any new tickets logged by branches should be assigned within 1 hour. Or no more than 20% of your corrective maintenance tickets can have a "AWAITING PARTS" status. etc.

Open source GPS tracking platform - Traccar (https://www.traccar.org/). I think picking a small B2B niche is the best way to become successful. You're not going to be super rich, but you can have a good stable lifestyle business.

Technical books.

I started writing in 2011. After a few books I was able to do look during launches but sales fell dramatically after.

Now I have a couple books doing $2k / month.

Since I do corporate training I have probably made dramatically more than this from the marketing from my books but don't really have a way to track that.

https://store.metasnake.com/

I run Bear Blog [1] an opinionated, simple, and speedy blogging platform.

It runs as a freemium SaaS and is turning a healthy profit. There area about 15k blogs running on the platform right now.

I ran it completely free for about 2 and a half years. When I added the "upgrade" with some add-ons it jumped to $2k a month in a matter of weeks.

[1] https://bearblog.dev

Related ongoing thread:

Ask HN: Side projects making less than $2k MRR, what's your project? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35571486

Not really $2K/mo but I run a SaaS for pest control businesses that brings in $100K/mo and started this business during the pandemic.

We AirBnB the spare bedroom in our basement and it brings in about $2k/month.

I am a gift card reseller. Pretty much, there are marketplaces where you can sell gift cards and cd keys for games and when a customer places an order, I make an API call to procure that item and deliver it.

Currently at 70k Euros a month. It took me about 3 years to get here. And it took a few months to get to 2k monthly revenue.. However, the first two months I was at break even and it took me about a year before I could figure out how to get this system running profitably. Currently profit margins are about 7%

We need a thread on projects making <20$ a month and what went wrong, and maybe HN's comments can right that ship.

I started building Requestly (https://requestly.io) as a side-project back in 2014 and It took me pretty much every Saturday for 7y to hit ~$2K revenue and to get few companies paying for the product. It was slightly hard to monetize chrome extension due to lack of payments APIs support in chrome ecosystem. I actually went full time in Sep'21 and was fortunate enough to get into YC(W22). Now we are a small team based in India building Requestly.

Requestly is an open-source [1] Chrome & Firefox extension [2] that I started to help me in faster web development by capturing & modifying network requests directly in the browser without using any external tools. It eventually replaced Charles & Fiddler for many companies but now we are building a desktop version[3] too.

On a side note, Side Projects are a long-term game but the good part is you can do multiple along with your job and pick the one getting more traction. For example - I did many other side projects but continued with Requestly for 2 reasons - I was using it myself almost everyday and It was gaining organic traction.

Good luck in finding the project of your calling.

[1]: https://github.com/requestly/requestly

[2]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/requestly-redirect...

[3]: https://requestly.io/desktop

Built https://remoteleaf.com to help remote job seekers.

We hand-pick remote jobs from all over the internet and send you the personalised list of remote jobs that are fit for you.

It took 2 years to reach $2k revenue and I lost interest in this project due to a lot of manual work. With the advancements in AI, I'm planning to focus on it again.

I made an online course over a 6 month period and then did a little over $40k in revenue the first year. It’s slowed down quite a bit now. Haven’t decided if I’ll do it again or not. It was quite a bit of work, and having a full time job and young family, not sure the money is worth it.

https://www.monoclesecurity.com

High performance AI video streaming server and clients for a variety of platforms.

Took several years before the product was in an acceptable state to begin selling, it's been about 10 years since I began.

My friend and I built https://apitude.co/ around 4 years ago as a side project. It consists of a group of REST APIs like this: https://apitude.co/en/docs/services/renapo-mx/

The site did: - $200 a month the first year. - $900 a month the second year. - $2K a month the third year. - $5K a month the third year. (We started working full time). - $9K a month this year.

Even when it was only a side project it demanded a lot of work, but we love the space so it was ok.

I've built a software called Mino that creates a frontend for managing enterprise accesspoint deployments in student housings. Super niche. It allows the students to set up their own WiFi and it offers a backend system for the janitors that typically do the support out in the field.

I charge around between $20-30k everytime a new setup is created and for each customer I charge around $650 per month for the SLA. Additional development is offered at $155 per hour. Currently I have three different installations that net me around $2100 per month in addition to extra features here and there.

It took around 2-3 years before I hit $2k.

I've been building Zigpoll [1] over the past 4-5 years as a solo project. It's a micro survey platform (Saas) that can live on any website and can be triggered at key moments during your customer journey. I found a niche in post-purchase surveys for Shopify which helped get me over the 2K mark and build a meaningful customer feedback loop I could iterate on to find a tighter product market fit (very meta for a survey platform I know). This took about three years to hit and it helped greatly to be on an app store since it's a full service marketing channel which 1. is my weakest skillset and 2. you want all the leverage you can get if it's a part time project.

The post purchase survey angle is growing steadily but the platform was built to be flexible so I'm looking for other use-cases to focus on what competitors don't currently service for a phase 2.

Also recently it's been a great way to experiment with OpenAI and see what all the buzz is about. So far the ChatGPT API has been very impressive at spotting trends in user-provided data to share with our customers. Honestly this feature alone makes me consider focusing on it full time; but it would be a bit of a leap financially given current circumstances.

TLDR: I recommend building something, keeping your head on a swivel, getting feedback (being on an app store or marketplace makes this easier) and adjusting as rapidly as possible if you want to get paid and have a shot at bootstrapping bigger.

[1] https://www.zigpoll.com

I've been working on https://webtoapp.design since December 2019. I cracked $2k/month after around 2 years.

Could've probably done it quicker if I did more things that don't scale (as people often say). Should've focused less on SEO and more on outreach or other growth channels.

I've since got my CS degree and I'm working on it full time now :)

I built and run UXWizz (https://uxwizz.com), the revenue varies, but averages around $2k per month in a year.

It is not a service, but has one-time payments, so there is no stable MRR figure. It was initially sold through CodeCanyon, here's a graph with my earnings there: https://i.snipboard.io/7lubPE.jpg

Being a one-man-team, I tried to keep operation as simple as possible and automate the processes that could be automated.

I created a SaaS CRM/DMS for manufactured housing retailers ("mobile home" dealerships.) Monthly gross is about $4,000. Expenses other than my own time are $400 per month for the server. So about $3,600 a month net.

The MH industry contracted drastically after the 2008/2009 financial crisis, and the handful of dealership software companies still in the industry went under. So I basically have the market to myself right now. The total market is not very big, though - maybe 1,500 independent manufactured housing "street dealerships" in the USA at this point.

I have 15-ish paying customers right now. I'd love to be able to spend all my time on growing the business, but I've been too afraid to quit the other freelance dev work I do. Also, I unwisely took on a big contract that I haven't been able to finish in a timely manner, which is dragging me down. I wish I'd spent that time growing the MH SaaS instead.

I run Ekofi Nova (https://nova.ekofi.capital). We are building & validating your dream SaaS product, as an MVP.

Plans are: $1500/mo, $2000/mo, $2500/mo. The difference is the effort - we're more into the highest priced projects. Currently have 2 customers.

We currently make about $3K per month with https://www.hiyodel.com - ChatGPT-powered copywriting for Shopify stores. The Shopify ecosystem is a toughie and it's been a difficult road so far, but it's great having the "passive" income!

We are also launching our product now. It will be available for trial on a free introductory. I don't think about monetization. Just want to make a useful product. I have created many different websites for myself. But I was always apprehensive that my sites could be hacked at any moment, and data and money from projects could be stolen. Therefore, I decided to assemble a team of experienced enthusiastic engineers and develop a scanner that protects against site destruction, theft of personal information, and implementation of data that changes the database and its content. Hope this will be helpful.

We built pepchecker.com (Saas) as a weekend side project back in 2019 and have been slowly adding functionality over the course of a few years. It's now profitable and growing pretty rapidly. If we had put more effort into it, I think we could have crossed the $2k mrr threshold in a year.

I made exactly $2 (two) dollars on my expense tracking app this month

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/logs-pure-expense-tracker/id64...

I run Loopz Gift Cards (https://www.loopz.io). First line of code in 2012, pivoted in 2016, launched in 2019 and took about a year and half to get to $2k/month. At $18k atm. Switched to full-time a year ago.

Yield farming crypto currency, make well over $2k per month. Some farms pay 50 to 70% interest

I am building Polotno SDK (https://polotno.com/). It a mix of SaaS and paid javascript library and react components. It is a design editor that you can integrate into your web app. From the first paying customer it took around 1 year to get 2000 MRR. And I spent around 9 months on making first version before the first paying customer.

It took me a very long time to find the idea of SDK. Previously I was thinking only about B2C cases. B2C market is already VERY crowded with Canva and million of its competitors. But B2B market was almost empty when I started.

* Wide Angle Analytics https://wideangle.co – to go beyond simple web analytics alternatives to Google Analytics (paid); SaaS; web with mobile-friendly dashboards

* Not Robot https://notrobot.eu – online CAPTCHA; beta live; GA coming soon :) (free); SaaS;

We support open start-ups https://wideangle.co/open, but we are not publishing our numbers :)

I have build Psono, an open source password manager. The company was founded about 2.5 years ago (during the high times of COVID) and it was generating $4k on average directly from start. One should mention that I developed the product for a couple of years before I started the company and already had customers alined before I founded the company. I was running it then for 1.5 years as a side project and then beginning of this year decided to quit my cozy WFH, well paid, not stressfull day job to work full time on it (with recession and mass layoffs in the news).

I built Newsy. It's a tool that automatically generates content-aggregators. I focus on people who have domain names that are unused.

https://www.newsy.co

Quite a long time ago, I had some success with finding things that were custom made and making tools to better model/simulate what the end product would look like. So, for example, some place that sells custom pendants/necklaces with a name on it. A front-end that lets people enter the name and produces a photo-realistic rendering of the necklace can drive sales they wouldn't otherwise get. I got past $1k/mo in revenue, but then had to put it aside for reasons unrelated to the work.

I'm at about $700/mth but I don't see why I can't make it to $2k monthly. It's a Slackbot [1,2] that assists user story refinement for Jira. If you're a SWE that uses agile methodology this may be interesting to you.

[1] https://slack.com/apps/A01EL1SR7V4-groomba [2] https://groomba.ai

Payment processing [1]

Website builder / development [2]

Both are side and I'm currently ramping them both up now that they are self sustaining and I can focus on hiring sales agents and app devs.

[1] https://clearpayments.ca or US https://clearmerchantsol.com

[2] https://sytescope.com

learnpython.org

Generates ~10k/month. Plus, teaches a bunch of people how to code for free :)

I built https://kpopping.com, a platform for international fans of Korean music. It's been six grueling years (what they say about b2c is completely true) but these days we bounce around from $3k-5k in monthly revenue.

I estimate we have another two-three years before we are finished... +_+

I run https://pricetable.io on a part-time/side-project basis. We are currently hovering around $6k/mo.

I think it took us a couple of years to break the $2k/mo threshold.

Doing about 5k/mo passive income on my addon for a popular children's game. Took about 4years to get here though, COVID was massive for the genre. Only costs are time and file hosting, which comes out at about $50/mo.

I run a bookmarking site https://backtoit.io I haven't gotten to 2k yet but getting very close.

Sorry for spamming my blog but maybe you'll find it useful. https://pawelurbanek.com/anonymous-slack-bot-income this post describes my journey to total 50k profit from my bootstrapped side-project. TLDR it took 5 years. Current MRR is at ~3k USD.

You Exec started as a side project, ARR at $2.2m now — but decreasing

I don't recommend starting a profit-oriented side project. Money comes with it's hussle. It will eventually take the fun part of the process.

My entire life is side projects

I am trading micro contracts. And been able to make money