Previously asked on: 2023 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38467691
2022 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34190421
2021 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095
2020 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167
2019 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20899863
I just thought there had to be a more intuitive way to learn music theory than the very boring and jargon-heavy alternatives.
It uses Tone.js to include little interactive pianos, guitars, and other demos.
I've done no marketing, it hit the HN front page for a day, and after that initial spike in traffic has been fairly consistent over the past 8 years.
It uses Stripe for payments and for the first few years it was only Stripe. 3 years in I decided to add PayPal support... revenue doubled overnight, mostly from international customers.
I started making it in 2016 and I’ve been slowly iterating on it over time. It has stayed minimal & lightweight, on purpose. No framework, no cruft, no obtrusive ads.
Fun fact: because it’s so lightweight, it was included in 2020 in Moya (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nu.bi.moya), a popular messaging app in South Africa that is “data-free” for users (it does reverse-billing). Now ~40% of players are South Africans!
Discussed on HN from to time, for instance:
— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42026575 (38 days ago, 19 points)
— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41971887 (43 days ago, 25 points) “Quick side-note. Thank you for freesolitaire.win. It's such a beautiful implementation of solitaire. Works so well as a PWA, I can enjoy it even without proper internet connection, it's simple, does the basics, but does it perfectly. There's nothing to add to it, but more importantly... nothing to take out.” (!)
— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34483398 (2023, 4 points)
Feedback always welcome, and happy to answer any question!
History is cool yo. And apparently lucrative - it currently makes ~$5000/mo and is slowly but surely growing through word of mouth
I built a pipeline using fabric.js, flask, and blender that lets me take my customer's customizations (fingerprints, signatures, other engravings) and place them on a ring. I ultimately generate a STL file that I send over to my casting house in LA. They 3d print the STL in wax, and then cast that wax mould with precious metals using the traditional casting process.
It's a fun side business as I get to tinker with new technologies (recently working on integrating a LLM into the ring design process). I have decent profits (enough to pay my mom and sister to help with customer support and shipping), so the workload I take on myself is relatively small.
It went from side project to my primary job in less than 6 months.
Everyone was saying that $99 was too much for “an API wrapper”, but here we are, 2 years later and with hundreds of small to enterprise companies using it :)
I've been building over the past 3 years & just recently monetized and crossed the $500/m mark through a Pro subscription. It's grown into a lovely community of people who help each other pick their best pictures for dating apps, professional photos etc.
I've seen some pretty fun novel use cases, such as (multiple!) people using it to pick out glasses, wedding invites & so on
-- https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rankpic-photo-ranking/id160299... (ios)
-- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.rankpic.ra... (android)
It’s a freemium app with a pro subscription for advanced features; our revenue is just under $1k/month.
We’re working towards ExploreHere being a passive adventure guide. As you go about your travels ExploreHere will nudge you about interesting information wherever you go; history, unique things to see, special food known only in the city you’re in, etc.
I guess I could update from my previous post in a similar thread. [2]
Long story short, my open source firmware is used by product makers and they make a voluntary contribution often base on how many unit they sell. It is also widely used by Chinese company on AliExpress.
I got one of those Chinese company to sponsor me a significant amount on GitHub sponsor since August 2022. I guess they forgot about it, still going ever since!
I still make 1000 USD a month from the various HW makers.
One new thing I made this year after 5 year of doing this hobby, is that I finally manufactured and sold one adapter base on this code myself for the OG Xbox console. [3]
Factoring all the expenses I made 7K for a batch of 300. I plan to do a 2nd batch next year, which should yield double that since I will only incur raw materials & shipping expenses.
It took me 48 hour of manual labor to assemble them and ship them. So it's doesn't make much sense TBH, but it's a good experience. Made me appreciate my desk job.
[1] https://github.com/darthcloud/BlueRetro
If you have kids, it makes a good holiday gift for the grandparents if you're stumped on what to get them.
I've since moved on from it, but my brother makes enough to work on NanaGram full-time now. It's also just been really cool to see the project grow over the years and bring happiness to thousands of grandparents all over the world.
I currently do 3 festivals a year which all pretty much fell in my lap, I’ve yet to start any sort of sales/marketing due to being busy with my day job/life and not wanting to grow too fast.
I started back in 2021 when a local company I’ve worked with to make apps came to me looking for a solution for their food/music festival that didn’t require handing out and (almost as importantly) counting all the tickets/tokens that people bought to spend at the vendors. I did a quick turn around of a couple months to get a v1 out and working in time for the event. In the next year I essentially rewrote 90% of it and added in-person payment support (previously had just supported recording in-person payments made through a CC terminal.
Each new festival has new needs but I’m starting to get fewer feature requests and less I need to build for each new client which is nice.
Scraper of job listings directly from company websites. I found my last day job by using a scraper that visits company websites in search of job listings. Now I've turned it into an app for others to use and access jobs that are posted on company websites (rather than paid employer ads on Indeed or wherever). This gives the job searcher an advantage to find jobs not listed on job search sites and show the company you have taken time/interest to visit their site.
It was built during the Reddit API shenanigans last year and is making four figures a month. 99% of the app’s feature are free with the money coming from a premium (dark mode etc) for old Reddit and donations.
Have a few high five figure/low six figure acquisition offers already but I’m afraid it’ll be turned into malware so haven’t gone through with it.
Right now my work is Apple platforms only (revenue through App Store), but I'm actively looking into ways to expand to other platforms.
As a long time photographer, my philosophy is to make tools that are useful to me first and foremost, and to build smaller scope things that compose well (UNIX philosophy). I've got some exciting new things planned for 2025.
These are all side projects right now, as my official full time occupation is Japanese language school student (I moved to Japan at the end of 2023 year after almost 15 years in SF Bay Area tech companies/startups, becoming a full time student at 34 surrounded by 21 year olds from a very different background has been an interesting experience on its own).
Since the revenue has been increasing the last few months, I incorporated to keep things organized, but for now these projects are still "side projects". It'd be cool if I could justify financially to do this full time after I finish language school in 2026.
It's not enough $$$ to be a full time role, especially considering the costs of purchasing health insurance w/o a traditional W2 employer, but it's perfectly possible to buy in for the the table max (500) and leave with between between three hundred and a thousand dollars in profit in ~8 hours of play.
(Real life, not online. "Caro's Book of Poker Tells"[1] will aid you more than fancy math, though knowing the basics of what is a good hand, what a check raise is, that sort of thing will help -- the biggest thing to remember is to play less hands, and be aggressive when you do. Fold or raise -- no calls!)
https://youtube.com/@foxev-content
I hope this helps someone :)
My knowledge is EV and renewable energy knowledge from first principles and for an open source tool.
https://openinverter.org lets you re-purpose the drivetrain from any EV, like Toyota Prius or Tesla Model S and put it into another car.
For this I offer paid support at $200/call and have about 2 of them per month.
I am trying to turn this trickle of revenue into a more predictable stream, suggestions welcome. The videos are meant to give free help and at the same time serve as lead-gen.
Last month, I released SmoothTrack 2.0 which includes basic eye tracking and camera control gestures.
I released this fairly simple ChatGPT/Claude wrapper a few months ago. Currently it’s doing about 15K/month. It’s an invisible Electron app that can be used to cheat in coding interviews / OA’s.
I created it in 2008 and have maintained and improved it over the years. I am trying to figure out how to monetize it more. I currently make around $2k a month. I just use adsense and have a paid membership feature through buymeacoffee. I get massive traffic and I'm pretty much the #1 result for anything related to best/greatest books.
It's built with Rails and Postgresql and hosted on 3 linode servers. I get around 250k page visits a day.
Who'd have thought that a CMS could still make money in 2024, but this one is around £500 a month.
It obviously doesn't pay the bills or the mortgage, but it works. All my clients are word of mouth, I do not advertise at all (a combination of costs and insanely opaque / fractured advertising models by Facebook and co...I don't have time to get a phd in your ad platform to see if any of my money is actually doing anything)
I build it originally because I was fed up with Wordpress / Squarespace / Weebly / Wix, because all of their interfaces are slow and don't work on mobile.
This CMS is fast and works on mobile.
It's also pretty cheap nowadays, as I've not been raising prices like everyone else.
It won't do super-flashy websites. It's mostly about having low-JS, good SEO, easy access to information, which can be managed by very inexperienced users (I live rurally and we have a fair few pensioners as clients, they all get along with the system very well).
There are just about a billion things I want to do with it, but it never made enough money to become my full-time job, so it mostly just sits there and does its job.
I got the idea in 2023 as I was solo traveling Florence, Italy and thought it would be much nicer to listen to stories about the monuments around me instead of having to read a guide. There is also so much more to be done: next, my plan is to create personalised itineraries based on your preferences, starting point, etc.
I tried paid marketing but found much more effective the SEO I have done on the website, and users seem to share with their friends and come back, which makes me happy.
After iterating on it for a while, customers seem very happy and now growing day by day.
No marketing so far, just being out there and posting on various channels once in a while.
I had a project to completely automate this with an AI agent but Airbnb doesn't offer a publicly available API.
$3k seems high but the costs add up and the time as well (details here https://studiozenkai.com/post/airbnb-the-good-the-bad-the-pr... ). I always have a bit of profit at the end of year and the mortgage costs are entirely paid so no complaints here
If I ever get fed up from tech projects, I can see myself getting a bigger vacation property and making this my own version of Barista FIRE
Old school landlords, paying gardeners, or other people still only accepting checks. We use plaid to connect your account, then press send, then track the printing, mailing and delivery of the check.
Only iOS App here:
Earlier in 2024 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39110194
2023 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38467691
2022 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34190421
2021 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095
2020 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167
2019 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20899863
Almost immediately I was making $1200-2000 per month. Some months can be big months (especially around Thanksgiving/Christmas) where I'm getting $75-200 a day in sales, but some months can be dogs (July and August this year were literally $0 months - the only 2 on record - I think an algorithm changed on Etsy and we got punished or something). When the sales were growing, the work was fun, when they plateaued then dipped, it made it hard to feel energized to do the work.
The first year I spent a lot of time optimizing everything on the manufacturing side. Better tool paths, less tool changes, better speeds to not break everything, better use of materials, better use of disposables. I tried optimizing my Etsy store, but I couldn't get anything to increase sales, and moving to my own Shopify was a waste of $40/mo for 6 months because driving my own paid traffic from social media (which has rules against paraphernalia) was hard, so eventually I dropped that and stuck with Etsy and tried to wholesale to dispensaries and headshops around me, but my wholesale price is too high, and I don't want to offshore my manufacturing to get my price low enough.
I had grand plans on growing the brand. I was in talk with major brands in the space for collaboration, but our wholesale price point was too high, and 1 celebrity brand said the gap was too large, the other never got back in touch after sending them our wholesale sheet.
So I think I'm just going to have a nice side biz as a niche maker of solid wood rolling trays.
https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/krane-build-relationships/id67...
It is a (rather messy) node.js codebase. Two rendering engines, including a hacked puppeteer package with stealth mode for better success rate. A big set of proxy providers under the hood. Bootstrapped.
I don't have a proper marketing site yet since I've been focused on building the app, but it's coming soon (hopefully...)
I have a website, but most sales are done over FB and customers pick up at my house. I either purchase designs on Etsy, pay a designer to create dxf file or do it myself (if it's easy). To be honest, I don't like the position I'm in with this. It makes too much to give up, but not enough to be a "real thing". Plus, I'm still trading time for dollars.
We do statistical processing and breakdown of options sweep data, and generate realtime alerts that people can use to copy trade big Wall Street traders. We also have a strategy playground you can use to test different strategies that could be used for a trading bot.
Tubbie [1] is a simple and clean Mac YouTube downloader.
Mission Control Plus [2] fixes something stupidly simple: it adds closing, minimizing and quitting apps functionality to macOS' Mission Control.
Several clients begged me to keep going because we did such a good job doing the SEO, their sites were generating a ton of great leads and we had built a way to track the leads and send out first response emails with a phone call follow-up with 2 hours of the firm getting the email. Because of the fast turn around, they were beating other firms to the punch and we unknowingly had created a significant business advantage for them.
Those 4 clients pay me for 8 hours of work a month at $65.00/hour. If you do the math, I'm clearing about 2K/month just to manage their sites, send out analytics and make content suggestions. It was a nice side hustle to have a few years back when I was laid off and was able to lean on this income until I got hired again.
ssh terminal.shop
will do 6 figures in revenue the first year - not bad for a side thing!
This started because I wanted to use FreeBSD in EC2 for Tarsnap, but I'm now getting sponsorship from Amazon for my work on FreeBSD (EC2 and release engineering) as well as a much smaller amount from a Patreon I set up a few years ago.
Here’s my reply from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15150205
I don't have a website for obvious reasons, but if you're in the biz you've no doubt heard about my tool :)
Been hovering around $1.4K MRR, only real spend is ~$15/day google ads which has yet to pay for itself, but I keep telling myself its a good excuse to learn google ads.
The ranking lets readers select a "significance threshold" and ignore all news below it.
It's making close to $1000 MRR now with all money coming from premium subscriptions: users can personalize their feed with category/country filters, block topics and get access to news summaries.
It fills out the form as a human would (daily or on whatever weekly schedule you want) and then confirms it was received. It currently supports Gravity Forms on Wordpress due to their API for confirming submissions, but a new version that supports all web forms is nearly ready.
One of the main use cases is for agencies that want to make sure clients sites are always working.
It's been going for seven years now I think? It makes about 25k in sponsorships each year, although it could be more if I actually got myself to sell a bit more.
Either way, it's been a great way for me to keep learning. Nothing beats having to summarize a thing to thousands of people to make sure you really understand it :-)
Sri and I wrote it as a way to collaborate after doing a podcast together, which made no money. Picked a topic that people seemed to be interested in. Did the whole customer dev thing, and honestly, we were unsure if it'd make any money at all. Representing the AI as a shoggoth is from that meme, and we merely thought juxtaposing it with some furry animals was funny.
But it turns out people like it. It introduces system evals without jargon, and frames how to get started with evals for AI engineers that moved into the space from other kinds of engineering. It feels pretty good when people buy it and say they like it.
Managed to raise some money from friends to work full-time on a successor that allows you to write your own workout programs with formulas.
I've generally done everything alone as an exercise in scaling utility for others with constrained time on my part.
Have used AI heavily in the last few years, which has been the greatest force multiplier of my career for sure: scraping, evaluating, summarizing, organizing, indexing, moderating, writing, ... I've coded so much alopecia related tech at this point it could probably be patented.
I can recommend giving yourselves big, sprawling projects like this and working on it a few hours every weekend. It adds up!
Not $500/month yet, but towards it, the work flow is quite simple, the infrastructure is a bit complicated, need quite amount of time to maintain.
https://gifmemes.io, haven't touched the code for years, makes between 100-300$ a month, depending on the season.
https://vocabuo.com - a side project I hope to turn into a business, so I work on it around two days a week, made around $3.5k in revenue last month but most of it went back into ads.
It's been a consistent passion project for me now over the years and I love getting feedback and suggestions from people using it. It'll never have ads (I hate them) and only data collection is optional crash reports.
Why I Built It?
I ended up getting RSI over the last year and half. Despite lifting 3x a week and physio-therapy, circumstances had me working >12-15hours 6-7days a week for a few months straight. I’d read about folks using diction but never worked well for me or was pricey software.
At the same time I started using ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor etc quite a bit. When the Whisper Large turbo model was released by OpenAI, I tried transcribing some technical terms and it got transcribed quite well. ( still makes errors, but its within tolerance of what ChatGPT et.all can understand). I mostly talk type to my Mac now.
I had an annoying use case where when trying to login to a shared work account, the 2FA code was being sent to a colleague's phone number. Now being able to receive that code in Slack solved the problem.
Customers now use it for their own customer support. End users really like SMS as a messaging platform, nobody wants to send an email or talk to a chatbot.
It uses Elixir, Fly, GCP, Stripe, and a couple carriers.
I started out with some Open Data from the Dutch governent on all open water swimpots. I thought the current site (still is) not user-friendly on mobile. I also added all the public pools.
I got some traction because I got interviewed as an example project and I reached out to news sites.
Actually my backend is a Google sheet, which I sync to MongoDB (works nice with geo). Did a write up on that: https://www.kasperkamperman.com/blog/web/import-csv-in-mongo...
Rest is all vanilla PHP, cached to HTML, Bulma css. Running on shared hosting, with Cloudflare cache in front.
I really worked on accessibility too, allowing keyboard navigation (press TAB) and making sure everything is readable and with good contrast (Bulma 2.0 fixed that).
I make about $500 with some affiliate links (waterparks with hotels, wellness) which really fit with the search intent of the user. The last thing I want is stuffing the site full with Google ads.
Jummbo takes the "umm" out of prospecting in B2B sales.
It makes it really quick to find and prospect new customers, as it googles them, researches them, and writes custom emails and call scripts that are highly targeted to each of them.
The app is in the $hundreds per month, getting a lot of interest in a niche vertical which is quite promising so a lot of extra features will be added in the new year.
We're always up for feedback on how to make it better so if you set up a trial don't be shy with any suggestions you might have :)
The main use case are fixed-in-size products that can be customize-able. So colours and materials, but also swapping one object for another, or turning one on or off (imagine rims on a car, or a bow thruster on a boat).
We tried saas’in it completely, but the onboarding is proving to be quite hands-on. So we’ve partnered with a 3d firm that does the 3d work so we can focus ok building software
While it is open source, I am trying to build a sustainable business around it. It is bootstrapped and there is no VC funding as of yet.
Currently there are several thousand monthly users and just enough paid subscriptions to be making ~$500 (AUD) per month. Promoting it so far has not been too difficult with different strategies, but the conversion rate is quite low, so i'm planning to start doing some data science type analytics to find ways to optimise that.
The >$500 is basically by offering it for free to everyone and having support to 3 small corporate customers.
I found this is a really great way to get feedback and bootstrap the roadmap of a project. Little usability / quality of life features, that I never would've worked on myself, turned out to be sizable pain points for others.
And since they're paying at least something for it, the few beta customers are a lot more committed to making the thing work.
I get to keep iterating on new models, new approaches for using gen-ai tech to write better analysis of fights and fighters, along with exploring stats and tendencies that matter.
A good example of the writeups: https://wolftickets.ai/events/ufc-310-pantoja-vs-asakura/139...
This project isn't yet allowing me to retire but I'm passionate about the AIML space and combat sports, I get to explore whatever ideas I find interesting, and get a ton of feedback and ideas from members without having to do advertising.
getbabyteeth.app
Last year a couple of copy cats showed up, but they missed the part that people actually value in the app: the visuals.
It‘s a simple webapp, wrapped in Expo, but highly polished to make it look and feel native to iOS.
Last year we added a second app, written in Swift and SwiftUI (great dev experience!): wobblyteeth.app
What still makes me wonder: most sales are made in Germany, even though there is an English translation and the American market is huge. \o/
Do you have an idea why it‘s not interesting abroad?
I built it for myself after I began using Obsidian for day to day note making. A simple idea: get reminders for tasks you create in Obsidian. People seem to like it.
previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39764919
We're selling them mainly on our custom lightweight online store. It's done with minimal JS and Node as backend, Stripe as payment provider. We have a Meta pixel to help us track our advertising conversion, but we've disabled cookies, they just felt somehow dirty... It's nice to have power over these things when running your own business. As a next step for the website I'm thinking of including a templating language in the workflow, now I'm still doing edits with search and replace, sometimes missing things... but I do enjoy the simplicity.
The actual business has two main challenges: First is discoverability. It's a pretty unique product, an adventure escape game in a magazine. It doesn't sell well in physical game shops since it doesn't look like a game. We sell well in conventions where we get to explain what the product is, but we also want some weekends for ourselves! Meta ads for our online shop are working surprisingly well though.
The second and bigger challenge is shipping. Our flat is filled with boxes, and the time I spend sorting magazines, enveloping them, printing address labels, carrying them to the post office... it's really not worth my hourly rate as an engineer (Nor my wife's, but I do it since my schedule is more flexible, and I've automated some parts of the process with a string of incredibly user hostile shell scripts). And the shipping costs are downputting to many, we're quite cornered here in Finland. We are slowly gaining some distribution partners in Europe, but we should also be looking into better shipping options, like perhaps some kind of shipping warehouse exist? Our volume is slowly getting big enough so that it might be feasible. I've only done some cursory googling on this but don't exactly know what I'm even looking for, and there's only so many hours in a day.
A lot of work, small margins (ads+printing+misc takes a big slice), but around $500 profit per month. Feels absolutely fantastic to have an actual concrete business we own!
I've made $910 in revenue in the first three weeks. Does that count?
What is it? - Apple Eco-system based voice note taking/journal. - Tried various note taking apps. Nothing stuck like Apple Notes. - Writing by hand was the best way to get clarity but seemed high friction. Talking about ideas with friends/colleagues was the second best to thought clarity. - Basically combined it. Voice -> Transcribe (whisper accuracy locally) -> Rewrite with COT LLMs. - Helped me maintain journal now ( life events, ideas, anxiety days etc ). Added some prompts to help me. ( researched what experts in the field recommend; as an example - How do I start? And what do i say if i want to gratitude journal ).
Since launch, more than 50% end up using it for meeting notes.
It formats transactions, auto-categorizes them, has custom category rules, and can automate data imports nightly.
It's called BudgetSheet ( https://www.budgetsheet.com ) and has been my side hustle for almost 5 years now.
Revenue is just over $5,000/month. Growing well. Targeting $9k MRR for 2025. Expenses are high because Plaid is expensive (last invoice was over $1,600), but still good margins and will get better with scale.
It's good software and I've put a lot into it, but the user experience really just comes down to how well Plaid supports your bank. Folks with really well supported banks love it, and folks with banks not well supported by Plaid tend to churn quickly.
I wrote a book series over iOS development, self-published, made over $120k:
--> https://bestinclassiosapp.com
I do one sponsored ad a year, which translates to over $500/month (i.e. your criteria):
--> https://www.swiftjectivec.com
And launching another app soon to follow D2/D3 collegiate scores, hoping to get that up and over $500 MRR quickly:
How much is just survivorship bias?
I have like 4-5 side hustles being worked on at any one time, but I rarely ship for various reasons.
Lots of people in this thread seem to have just gone and done it without thinking. How often does that pay off?
The money come from customisation and enterprise plugins (SSO, audit plugins, etc..). The entire product was made so you can quickly build custom file management solution by assembling a bunch of lego blocks (aka plugins)
I'm currently making $10k-15k per month; I'm one of the largest sellers on the game's main third-party marketplace (https://marketplace.tf).
Less of a side project and more of a part-time job, since it's ~4-6 hours of work per day.
In April of this year my fabrication business switched from side to primary and I traded Jenkins infra (https://cicd.life) for small manufacturing: https://bostondigitalfab.com
I’ll would prefer to never go back, but I do miss some aspects of the old job.
https://cadenceprints.com Use your strava / fitness data to create beautiful wall art
I initially aimed for an cheap monthly pricing plan and many clients, but that strategy hasn't been successful so far.
However, in the process of finding clients, I found two 'enterprise' customers. I built a custom on-premise version for them and charging $300 per month for each, which technically sums to over $500. Not sure it is what I wanted )
It's built on the automerge CRDT and sqlite running in the browser, which has been really fun to work with. I'd like to keep going, though honestly I've struggled with the marketing side (growth has been slow) and it's a pretty competitive space.
I give all clients the best rates possible because it doesn't matter as its not my primary source of income. However, business owners hate change so its hard to convince them lower fees and better products are better for them in the long run.
I make between $3500/m - $5000/m maybe 10 support emails a month.
I also build apps on the side for sytescope.com integrations.
I also run https://monitorprices.org, which is just a list of available monitors on Amazon, but provides a bit more filters. Does about $125 a month, maybe double if there’s a creator reward campaign running.
Nothing splashy or exciting really, but it gives me motivation to keep trying things.
People consult me for doing performace mods, parts sourcing. The sports bike scene is emerging in my country.
I'm planning to build a dyno from scratch, if it's a success. I'm hoping to recoup the cost from proving it as a service.
It's a board governance and minutes generation tool for fund administrators, trust companies etc. The types of firms that need to have regular meetings with directors and need those minutes formally captured.
But isn't there co-pilot for that? Yes, but no. Copilot can summarize a meeting - this is more regulatory orientated. So the agenda is set out, participants sent a pack before the meeting, and then minutes generated almost in real time to draft level of 80% accuracy. Ultimately means the process for managing and minuting a meeting is reduced from hours to minutes.
If we carry on doing well I suspect this will become more than a side project in 2025...
In the first few years it only sold a couple of copies per quarter, but then Intuit decided to discontinue support for their Quicken Home Inventory programs and users got stuck. I added the ability to import that data and then the sales started doing well. It has tapered off in the past three years but I still get some months over $500 during the year. I haven't really done any marketing, as it's just a Home Inventory program I made for myself, to keep track of stuff when we were moving to a new home.
As far as I know, Attic Manager is still the only program which can load QHI data.
As I started to make money, I was able to start hiring freelancers to help with certain aspects of the site, like the design, SEO, and some independent coding tasks. It is rewarding, but due to the pace of developments in the AI space, it feels like I need to improve the product constantly to remain competitive, which can get a bit burdensome.
I build simple speech shadowing exercises that help people train for IELTS Speaking. The project makes more than $500/month.
Available on IOS and Android.
Gets me around $250 per month. I've not done much marketing either. Started as a hobby project after Covid and continued after.
I also built an Indian Version of Neighborhood app (like Nextdoor). But I am not making any money from it. https://neighar.com
PS: I am planning to scale up and also planning to spend some money on marketing. Investors are welcome!
Wavekit https://wavekit.app/
It's an audio hosting service with high quality audio and a customizable unbranded player.
Embeds are done with iframes but we're starting to offer web components which offer some cool opportunities like interaction between components.
Most of our customers are selling some kind of audio product or service. Think plugin developers, sound designers, media composers, etc.
Currently working on a B2B integration with an API so that it would be trivial to add audio to any web app. Think chats, marketplaces, etc.
I’d really like to build on this and start a hardware company.
Basically a (limited) vector graphics editor that's trying to be very approachable, aimed at use-cases where something like Illustrator or a CAD package wouldn't be a great fit. I keep hearing about new things people use it for, which is something I truly enjoy.
It's free and ad-free, but there's also a paid version in the form of a downloadable Electron app or a subscription.
Soon, I will be adding analytics, insights, and automatic test generation features.
I have been working for a year on it, and will keep working on it for many years to come, since I am using it myself a lot anyway.
This led me to build https://tapflow.co on the side (been 3 years). It's a simple platform where tech pros-designers, devs, marketers, PMs— turn internal docs, templates and workflows into paid products. I kept it lean since most don't have time to build a full course.
The core idea: many pros have valuable knowledge sitting unused-too busy, unsure of their expertise, or find it too complicated to create full courses. I built a tool to help them quickly pack and sell what they know, creating passive income.
Some friends and early adopters have made over $20k from their products (mainly courses). One French teacher even earned over $7k on the first day with just a promo page https://tapflow.co/p/du-b2-au-c1-4ebMhTxqJi
Since launch, I haven’t done any real marketing—just personal recommendations, Product Hunt and Reddit. Now it’s stable income. The platform takes a small cut and offers a pro tier.
Why Now: How Good Timing Makes Great Products: https://www.amazon.com/Why-Now-Timing-Makes-Products/dp/B0CY...
Growth Units: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08GJVV8RJ/
www.chesscraft.ca
I started this chess variant AI sandbox 5 years ago for myself to help with a brutal commute. Still working on it now and then. I've learned so much building and releasing a commercial product with a community, on Google Play and Steam. It's great to see the flexibility of the "good enough" AI I made has still held up after 5 years.
The problem is, unlike so many examples in these threads, this business requires every available minute of my time so it’s a little more than I bargained for. Plus there is a brick and mortar location, city regulations, etc.
You gotta REALLY love the hell out of this business to do it at all, let alone as a side project.
I've done zero marketing and have a few thousand users from organic growth alone since August. It's a one-time purchase type of deal and I'm overwhelmed by positive feedback.
Secondly I love Claude and also use TypingMind but missed the memory feature from ChatGPT. I made MemoryPlugin (https://www.memoryplugin.com) that adds long-term memory to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, TypingMind, and LibreChat on desktop and mobile browsers. This got me really interested in AI memory in general, I’ve played around with fine tuning AI models with memories (results = some data learned, way more hallucinations).
Customer support and customer success are interconnected functions, especially for SaaS products. We took it upon ourselves to build a platform with HelpDesk, Knowledge Base Portals, Feature Requests, Bug Reports, Changelogs, Email Drip Campaigns, Product Tours, NPS, Testimonial Collection, Checklists, and everything a SaaS team needs to win over their customers.
Initially, my focus was on travel agencies. I then started building tools that I needed to support my customers (since I couldn't use another product to assist them—it would have been a shame to use an external product if we were marketing our solution as a customer support platform for travel agencies). Fast forward, with all the tools that we built, it was a no-brainer for me to pivot our product. I thought this would be a great fit since this niche has a better founder fit for me.
The site gained initial traction on Reddit where I shared my experience learning and building in the r/learnprogramming subreddit. That was enough momentum to get me ranking on search engines. I eventually set up affiliate relationships with several of the major online course platforms.
Although I've built a handful of apps using React, Vue, etc. this one's a classic Flask app using Jinja templating. There's just a few tiny JS scripts I wrote for basic interactivity (like updating the state of the "Save" button). Feedback is most welcome!
Solo Developed VR starfighter combat sim for Quest, PCVR, and soon the PICO4
Meta, send me a free Quest 3, please.
Would not recommend doing a game, let alone a VR game as a sideproject for anyone
My day job is Machine Learning engineer, so I really should've picked an AI sideproject facepalm
I wrote about my experience doing these last year (previous hn post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38904255) and since then it has really taken off! Not enough to live off, but certainly enough to sustain itself and fund some more projects in the future.
I never expected it to turn into anything more serious than a novelty and I've learned a tonne about running a small business as a result. I'm really looking forward to (hopefully) learning how to grow this into something bigger over 2025!
1: https://farmmarketingsolutions.com/stress-free-chicken-tract...
Project is in active development since 2 years, 10+ ppl engaged, iOS and Android apps published in the stores. We're not yet into making money but we're on the way to start with profits.
iOS - https://apps.apple.com/app/spaceshout/id6475599807 Android - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spaceshout
Tracking my food has helped me get into much better shape but the leading apps in this space IMO are all quite clunky. I wanted to built something that was fast and lets you get on with your life.
A few stand out features:
- Nutrition label scanning if I don't have the food you're looking for - Photo Logging for restaurant meals or complex meals you don't want to manually track - It's light weight & fast - Interactive widgets for things like water tracking.
Following conversations with others, I've since positioned the tool for marketing teams to run deep competitor analysis and monitoring. Two pilot customers through word of mouth expected to double next month. Invite-only building in tandem with customer feedback, I haven't even put together a landing page yet.
I'm currently designing a ranking algorithm, working name UAC (Usability, Accessibility, Conversion) score.
How much gross taxable do you need to make from your side gig to take home 500/m net from a side gig? Here, that's about 1360/m if itemising expenses, or 900€/m with the standard deduction for side income and doing your own taxes.
I’m building an Open Source (AGPLv3) email marketing platform with Elixir/Phoenix and it's only just crossed that MRR threshold - three years since the first version.
It's called OnlineOrNot: https://onlineornot.com
Coming close to 4 years of operation!
Building an MVP took two weeks, and getting the first paying customers another two.
I wrote about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42344002
It’s a B2B SaaS in out-of-home advertising. We found that buying ads outside the digital realm is hard and the only alternative are marketplaces that take away control over media owner’s inventory. So we did for those companies what Shopify did for small businesses — we gave them the tools to sell and to market.
There is a lot of competitors, but usually they have limits requiring accounts & payment if the images are too large to begin with or if you want to compress a lot of images. Batch Compress is free for unlimited use. The concept of Batch Compress is to be a batch version of Google's Squoosh tool.
Always very open to feedback or feature requests.
I had a Show HN a while back that was well-received and kicked things off (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36480687). Since launching I have changed the name and added paid accounts which have brought in enough money to cover costs and make some profit!
To describe it: “Ever wondered what happens to all our digital memories, important information, and personal messages when we're gone? That's exactly the challenge I wanted to solve. MyTestament.io lets you securely store and designate digital inheritances - from heartfelt messages to important account information - to be shared with loved ones when the time comes.”
It’s just been released, so technically it’s not yet made $500 , but the projections so far are for about that amount the first month.
It become the #3 selling one (after Shipfast and Makerkit) in under 3 month.
I know the website itself is not the most descriptive, but I do prio feature and customer requests over website/marketing. Soon the starter kit will also have multi-organization support :)
2025 is gonna be interesting since I plan to add multiple boilerplates to the same package deal. Realized I'm not a business that needs to be greedy and grow, just helping others is enough.
For $50 a month, students get two sets of problems from past math contests every week. We've added nice features like an AI helper that can check answers and answer questions about the problems. Plus, for those looking to put their skills to the test, we host both online and in-person math olympiads in the Bay Area.
Along side this I'm build a note-taking app—flowtelic that aims to help you get into flow and have an autotelic experience. It's to put into software the goals of my note-taking book where I feel other apps are missing the mark.
I have a waitlist if anyone is interested
Doesn't make enough money to be my full-time job, but enough to keep me interested over the past 3+ years.
You can order certain pills that are meant for men for like 50c a piece online from India and sell them for 10€ a piece face to face to normies. Handing out a few freebies ALWAYS leads to the guys becoming frequent future customers. Because those damn pills, while not considered addictive, make things so, so much better. And not every country already has easy, cheap and low effort ways to order them normally…
(I am talking about vitamin pills aimed at men and nothing else and I am not doing this, I heard someone tell me this story.)
All manageable without any coding (after the initial copy-paste script integration), so e.g. product managers or customer success can build and add these from the web dashboard.
WhatDinner[0]: Basically Tinder to decide what to eat
FleuntRead[1]: A new app I am working on to learn languages by learning sentences by heart
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fluentread-language-learning/i...
I should mention that the first couple products I designed did not work at all. Hardly anyone placed orders and I didn't recover my investment... at a time when I didn't have money to 'waste' (I had quit my PhD in the USA and moved to Australia, I was broke so first had to get a full-time job). But of course the experience wasn't a waste, it taught me couple things I really needed to know for this journey. Things only picked up when I discovered Kickstarter. The hit product that changed things (now sold out and discontinued) was a bolt action tactical pen priced at AUD45 (USD~30) and made of reinforced polymer instead of metal. The metal ones at the time cost 3X–7X my price, were heavy, plain-looking, sharp and slippery for tactical use as a glass-breaker. Additionally, I provide the kind of customer service I wish I could get : First, I provide lifetime guarantees on all my products (there are only two products in stock now but I had a dozen; planning more in future). Second, if there's any issue — even if your cousin sneezes on your pen and you therefore want a different one — I'll ship a free pen. The rare issue has been a package getting lost in transit, I try to fix that quickly by shipping a second package and then providing a refund for the disappointing experience. I don't ask for returns and it's a hassle anyway, so nobody has ever returned a product. Only one person asked for a refund in six years which I provided in about ten seconds. Among loads of positive feedback and sometimes multi-page emails that I'm very grateful for, customers also sometimes email me to say their pens were stolen after they showed it off to curious coworkers or something — when I hear this, I send them free replacement pens because it makes me happy to flip their memory of the incident from negative to positive.
This business model is somewhat limited, so I am considering other services.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tistory.dd...
The first version was free and very basic. After getting a lot of suggestions and feedback from the people using it, I added more features and introduced a freemium pricing model.
I built this for my personal usecase to estimate savings by prepayments done during my home loan tenure. I didn’t find this feature where you can select choice to reduce emi or tenure for each prepayment. Not making any revenue but hopefully trying to make it helpful
https://checkanyvin.com is a slightly older project that lets you run vehicle history reports cheaper than other services
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/snipcss/hbdnoadcmap...
Its a service where users can create comics using AI generated artwork. Love creating art and writing software so it's a passion project for me. Haven't done any marketing yet, its mostly organic search traffic.
LinkedIn Profile Optimizer is an AI-driven service designed to enhance your LinkedIn profile, making it more appealing to recruiters and expanding your professional network. By analyzing each section of your profile, it provides personalized recommendations to help you stand out.
Key Features: • AI-Powered Analysis: Thorough examination of your profile to identify areas for improvement.
• Tailored Content Suggestions: Customized advice for posts and updates to engage your audience.
• Optimized Headline and About Sections: Creation of compelling summaries that highlight your expertise.
• Profile Visibility Boost: Strategies to increase your profile’s reach and attractiveness to recruiters.
• CV Generation: Development of resumes tailored to specific LinkedIn job postings.
• Content Strategy Development: Formulation of plans to effectively engage your network.
By comparing your profile to industry leaders and staying updated with LinkedIn’s latest trends, LinkedIn Profile Optimizer offers actionable, prioritized recommendations to elevate your professional presence.
Zero MRR but it makes money indirectly.
We still have to add pricing and paid plans but it attracted enough freelancing client who need related custom solution.
Have just over 500 developers signed up and releasing our client library soon.
I also just launched a spin-off of it, https://www.portrayya.com which is more focused on generating a set of portraits of a single person (i.e. headshots for linkedin etc.) instead of prompting individual images.
Overall this is a very crowded space now because it's so easy to build, but there is still a learning curve around landing page design, conversion, ads etc. and potentially some niches to explore.
Making more than $500 but it is a side project.
Can't really call it a side project, though, as I'm working on it full-time.
Stable between 1000-1500 monthly, depends on the month.
Since launch, over 10,000 books have been generated on topics ranging from niche hobbies to advanced research. The system runs almost entirely on its own, requiring only occasional updates and customer support. The best part of it: as new LLM models come out, the books get better written as well, so each year it improves without much effort on my end.